Oil Firing

This topic has been done before.

Any back of a napkin calculations show; given the efficiency of a steam loco, the weight of batteries required more or less outweigh the payload.

And running under 25kV at 300 amps results in 10,000 hp of electrical energy giving less than 1000hp sustained at the rails.

 

How much arable land is lying fallow in the UK? According to Government figures, the total croppable land area is 6.1 million hectares and, of that, a total of 4.1 million hectares was used to cultivate crops,
that's about 2/3rds.

 

Define "fallow" if it just means "not growing crops", then there's a lot of sports pitches, nature resrves, floodplains, pasture etc etc in that figure

 

I would imagine that "total cropable area" is unlikely to include the areas you mention, by and large, any ore than it would include house gardens, the New Forest, North Yorkshire Moors, Bodmin Moor etc.

 

Are you sure?

I haven’t studied the figures, but local authorities have local plans that define what the purpose of all the land in their area is. So I’d strongly suspect that land being used as eg a park, or golf course, or nature reserve, is not being counted in the figure for croppable land. And by the same token the 2million hectare discrepancy in the figures given by @Steve represents land that isn’t being farmed, presumably for reasons of not being economically viable to do so, but which could be farmed without a formal change in use through the planning system. Whereas you couldn’t farm your local park or golf course even if you wanted to.

Tom

 

I've two questions about that figure:
1. How much of that land is subject to set aside or equivalent arrangements
2. What is the correlation between "croppable" and the grade of land?

It might also then be interesting to see what if any of that land is in use for solar power.

 

https://www.gov.uk/government/stati...ral-land-use-in-united-kingdom-at-1-june-2025

Looks like it's even wierder.
"The utilised agricultural area is made up of all arable and horticultural crops, uncropped arable land including bare fallow and arable land used for environmental benefit, land used for outdoor pigs, temporary and permanent grassland and common rough grazing (Figure 1)."
So dartmoor, new forrest, pastures and floodplains could all be in there.

 

So in essence, it looks to be a very narrow survey for technical agricultural reasons rather than any wider view of land use

 

If you want an insight into the use of arable land, I'd suggest watching a few of Harry Metcalf's "Harry's Farm" YouTube videos.

The short of it is that the government are increasingly pushing farmers into turning land over for "rewilding" and similar schemes (on 'environmental' grounds) rather than for food production.
Something which Harry understandably struggles to get his head around, considering being a farmer is supposed to be about food production.

 

Then he needs to get his thinking hat on. Farming hasn't just been about that for some time.

Industrial farming has beem destroying soil fertility, flood resilience, natural predators for the last few hundred years, and those chickens are coming home to roost. (I ignore matters such as conservation and public access to land for the time being).

If you want food now, and in 100 years, things have to change.

 

Although I mentioned fallow in my post, the figures quoted were for ‘croppable area’ according to the government.

 

I don't disagree with this point, but realistically the timespan is post-WWII, in the UK at least. The period between 1750 and 1850 saw a massive increase in soil fertility through the use of better crop rotation patterns, coupled with efficiencies from land utilisation after the enclosure acts. In the latter part of the 19th Century there is obviously a greater use of chemical fertilizers, but the mechanisation of farming doesn't properly start until after WWI, and without that it's difficult to 'industrialise' farming in any meaningful way.

 

Would that be the same Harry Metcalf who also has an interesting collection of expensive motor cars that feature on his YT channel "Harry's Garage"?

 

Yes it is.
He's a farmer who founded Evo (car) magazine back in the 90s.

 

I wouldn't have called it croppable land!