"Oz" wrote in message
...
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).

That's a God dammed short sighted attitude by all involved. The idea of
building on the work of others has proved its self in every feild there is.
We have the same kind of check offs but the work is published to the public.
We also have several private research centers that publish all their work.

The more I learn about the EU and UK the more baffled I am by the way they
do things. You sit on an island and twice in the last century your food
supply was nearly cut off by the Germans and you don't consider agriculture
important to support a minimal research effort. In this country baring a
volcanic eruption that distorts the climate for 2 or 3 years or a drought of
biblical magnitude we have no problems with food security and we put a petty
high value on agriculture research and cut the farmer a lot more slack than
he really disserves.

Gordon