Peter Bleksley

A cow takes grass (inedible to humans) and produces: - Meat (complete protein + fats) - Milk (complete nutrition) - Leather (clothing, tools) - Tallow (cooking fat, soap, candles) - Bones (tools, broth, fertilizer) - Organs (nutrient-dense food) - Manure (fertiliser) This is complete resource utilisation from a plant humans cannot eat. You cannot replicate this with any technology. The cow is performing chemical transformations we cannot industrialise. Grass → complete human nutrition is alchemy. The cow is worth more than any machine humans have invented. It runs on rain and grass. Produces multiple products. Builds soil while operating. Sequesters carbon. Reproduces itself. And we're told to eliminate them for environmental reasons. While flying in almonds from California and soy from Brazil. The stupidity is breathtaking.

This month the Energy Secretary approved his third large solar farm in a fortnight, one of them on prime farmland across Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire that his own inspectors told him to refuse. They walked the site. They said no. He signed it anyway. So here's the grand plan. Take some of the best food-growing soil in England, ground that has fed people for a thousand years, and bury it under glass panels shipped in from China to catch the famous Lincolnshire sunshine. In a country where the sun knocks off mid-afternoon for half the winter and turns up for roughly eleven per cent of the year, we are concreting over arable land to harvest photons that mostly aren't there. A British solar field spends most of its life doing an impression of a very expensive greenhouse with the plants missing. The panels tilt hopefully at a grey sky. The soil beneath them, some of the finest in the country, sits in the dark for forty years quietly learning to be a car park. And it doesn't come back. Not in your lifetime. They are making a permanent decision about a temporary energy fashion, on ground you cannot un-glass, against the written advice of the men they pay to give it, in the same fortnight the same government swears food security keeps it awake at night. Sunniest idea they've had all year.