By Ewan Pate, farming editor

SHOULD BRITAIN still be farmed? “Yes,” was the answer but it came not from someone with a vested interest but in a blistering performance from a young American firebrand. Alex Avery is a member of the independent Hudson Institute based near Washington DC.

He took the global view and a simple hypothesis.

“Growing more food per acre leaves more room for nature,” he stated, as he addressed the Oxford Farming Conference.

Global food demand will, he reckons, double or even possibly treble by 2050.

Although population growth will stabilise, increased consumption and affluence will make more demands on agriculture.

“Rich people have smaller families but growing affluence has a big effect.

“Not only is more food eaten, much of it meat, but there is more demand for clothes which means more demand for cotton.

“Richer people keep pets which need to be fed. All of this makes a difference,” he said.

As an example, Mr Avery estimated that 500 million Chinese males each drinking one more beer each week boosted demand by an astonishing 3.25 billion gallons, needing an extra million tonnes of malting grain.

“There are only two ways to meet the demand for more food—bigger yields or extra land,” he said.

Praising the technology which had driven the increase in yields, he pointed out that if 1960’s standards were still the norm an additional 15 million square miles of arable land would be needed.

This would equate to something like the area of North and South America combined.

Dismissing this as an impossibility, he described modern farming as “a high-yield conservation system.”

Any farming system has an obvious and inevitable effect on biodiversity, so the more areas left untouched the better, in his view.

This led Mr Avery on to a scorching attack on what he called “the myth of organic farming.”

This level of criticism is rarely heard on this side of the Atlantic.

He regarded EU targets of 10% to 20% of organic production as totally unreasonable.

What’s more, on a world scale, agriculture uses eight billion tonnes of synthetic fertiliser. This would need the manure from eight billion cattle compared to the present bovine population of 1.2 billion.

“Where are you going to park them all?” he asked.

Mr Avery cited research in Denmark which showed a 47% drop in agricultural production if a fully organic system was adopted.

“Why,” he asked, “do activists call for more energy-efficient automobiles, but less efficient farming?”

Referring to the American Mid-West he showed how modern farming had not only halted the soil erosion of the 1930’s but reversed it by actually building organic matter.

“This has only been possible by minimum tillage which in itself has only worked because of the availability of herbicides and synthetic fertilisers,” he said.

“In the US we are losing only 6% of the soil through erosion that we did through the worst years of the Dustbowl.”

If all this wasn’t enough to induce apoplexy amongst farmers who favour the organic option he later launched an attack on their marketing methods.

“They have tried to prove greater nutritional benefits by 70 years of experiments. To date there is no evidence of these benefits. It is nothing more than black marketing which relies on disparaging the competitors.”

It was powerful stuff but returning to his theme he concluded simply, “Britain must be farmed if we are to feed people from less land.

“Otherwise, you will be turning your backs on your responsibilities and exporting your farm problems to more vulnerable parts of the world.”