Representation by George Bremner
- Date submitted
- 27 February 2023
- Submitted by
- Members of the public/businesses
The lack of food security for the UK should be a strong consideration when any proposal such as this is presented. The land would be lost to agriculture for ever. The destruction and devastation to the countryside and rural landscape, which is essential to Britain’s character and valuable to so many, would be total and permanent. Recent events have highlighted how vulnerable we are in not being able to produce enough food to sustain ourselves. What more is needed to show how important farming and food production is? With more and more farmland being lost every year for construction of houses, roads, railways etc. the level of vulnerability is growing. The site is already a solar farm. The crops grown on the farmland in its current use are already capturing solar energy to convert CO2 from the atmosphere and water from rainfall, into thousands of tonnes of grain. The crops when harvested leave captured carbon in the soil in the form of roots and crop residue which help maintain the myriad of organisms which make up the soil flora and fauna. This has been going on for hundreds, in fact, thousands of years with very little encouragement from us and in a way that is so unassuming and benign that it is, at best, taken for granted but usually completely ignored. For example the Mallard Pass environmental impact assessment, treats the cropped are as if it were a barren desert at a time when scientists around the world, and DEFRA here at home are just realising how important healthy soil microbiology is to human health, and how it can be enhanced. It is illogical to cover the ground in glass and steel panels which do a poor imitation of what plants have always done; which is capture the sun's energy. Solar panels to produce electricity have their place; in areas of the world where there’s no productive farmland but high levels of sunshine, on roof tops of new and existing developments; domestic and commercial, along the side of railway lines and roads including central reservations and on brownfield sites etc. All of which have no way of producing food . Essendine and the surrounding areas are not known for having high levels of sunshine year round. Although the planning guidelines are, I’m sure, well intentioned, it seems that ruthless exploitation is possible and this proposal surely amounts to nothing but a massive land grab. These are irreversible changes to rural Britain. The principal of solar power brings Britain closer to its green energy targets but the relatively tiny output of a scheme like this doesn’t justify devastating a thousand hectares of countryside.