pwa wrote: ↑25 Jan 2023, 6:08am
And I agree with you about solar. There must be great potential on large roof spaces. But sticking it in a field is effectively killing the field for agriculture, and it will adversely impact wildlife at the same time. As any gardener knows, you get less potential for life in shady places. I have a friend and former colleague who now puts solar in fields and is quite evangelical about it. I have told him it is the right technology in the wrong place, but the job feeds his family so he is inclined to turn a deaf ear to me. I like him anyway, and nobody is perfect.
It would be interesting to see some calculations comparing the various values associated with "a field" when used for agriculture of various kinds versus using it for renewable energy generation of various kinds.
Many fields and moorlands around Fforest Brechfa are used for a few sheep and perhaps even fewer beef cattle. Neither seem to produce very much at all, going by the income levels of hill farmers. When asked, those farmers tend to answer that the field or moorland is of a low quality that won't support any agriculture other than sheep at low densities. Is this the case, though? What determines the possible usages of such land; can it be improved?
Perhaps one way to improve such land is to let it lie fallow for some years, with a scattering of windmills and/or solar panels but also enough space between them to let in sufficient light to enable bio-diversity to increase?
Those calculations I mentioned - including monetary, bio-diversity and production rates, at the very least - might enable various equations to be produced showing the trade-offs and returns of various usages of such land. I have an intuition (no more) that doing anything other than sheep farming would produce all kinds of better returns, including a greater bio-diversity, in time.
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Perhaps there are already such "studies" of other "wasted" land, such as that supporting the shooting of tame pheasants and a bit of deer-wounding? I do hear rumours of the transformation of much of the so-called "poor" land on large Scottish estates that's increasing the bio-diversity enormously, for example.
Cugel
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”.
John Maynard Keynes