Gordon Couger writes

Going thorough them carefully all I could find that could apply to the UK
was done some were else. The UK doesn't seem to do a damn thing for the UK.

To be honest irrigation is very much a minority use and confined to a
bunch of potato producers and a few specialist vegetable growers.
Furthermore the main problem seems to be crop loss caused by heavy
rainfall after irrigating, which is highly site-specific. The highly
variable climate and topography in the UK also makes general statements
of precipitation and transpiration pretty useless. It really is rather
common to find farms a mile apart with rainfall differing by 10" and
soiltypes can vary erratically from heavy clay to sand to gravel in a
single acre of land.

What do the fellows that you have hired to do agricultural research do
anyway.

The universities basically no longer do any. A few have farms but this
is used for income (not any more) and research into plant and animal
physiology and to assist their vet schools.

The government used to have a whole string (perhaps 20) experimental
husbandry farms that did do very useful work. These have been either
sold off or merged with the local university (see above).

There are a few (like two?) independent crop research organisations. As
you know I belong to ARC. They do stonkingly useful work for a modest
fee, but unsurprisingly do not hand it out for free (ie the results are
confidential). If they did they would loose many farmer members (who
would get it for nothing).

Then we have the HGCA (and a dairy one the MDC). These contract work to
be done using a levy on all sales of grain (or milk). They produce quite
useful work, but never freely publish the full paper or experimental
details. They are mindblowingly inefficient, costing much more than ARC
to produce 1/100th of the number of results inadequately reported to
their contributors (and sometimes downright misleading).

--
Oz
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