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Food miles?


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Not to mention the cheese,bread and butter :wink:

 

Shop bought barms made by a family run bakery called JG Fletcher in Wigan, cheese made by cows and from the UK (Preston), and butter (well marg) made by Dairy Crest in Shropshire :P

 

Them miles are totting up :wink:

 

Just joking Dizzy but no doubt the companies you mention use imported ingredients in their produce, its hard for them not to.

 

I get most annoyed at farm shops where they sell virtually nothing they grew themselves, just cashing in on the local food movement.

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Seems the food industry are adapting - some of the largest green houses in Europe are now being built in the UK, OK, forced all year round produce, but British. Q is, will they be producing for export, whilst we are still importing same from abroad or can we actually strive for self sufficiency? :?

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Seems the food industry are adapting - some of the largest green houses in Europe are now being built in the UK, OK, forced all year round produce, but British. Q is, will they be producing for export, whilst we are still importing same from abroad or can we actually strive for self sufficiency? :?

 

No point just growing the stuff here when we need to import the energy to heat the greenhouses, the raw materials and chemicals for the fertilizer, the labour to tend and harvest the crops, and the fuel to distribute the end products.

 

That's not self-sufficiency!

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Turkey is said to be self sufficient I believe... how are they doing ?

 

Back to our veggies and fruit.... if we try and grow them normally for long enough over here wont they start to evolve and adapt to their surroundings like other 'things' have.

 

Have I just found the answer :D

 

I have bought a little indoor vegie window box today... what shall I try growing in it first. Suggestions please but pleae don't say an apple tree :lol:

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Turkey is said to be self sufficient I believe... how are they doing ?

 

They'd be in even deeper trouble financially without the vast sums of overseas money coming into their tourist economy - so, no they're nowhere near self sufficient.

 

Back to our veggies and fruit.... if we try and grow them normally for long enough over here wont they start to evolve and adapt to their surroundings like other 'things' have.

 

We'll never be able to grow peppers or tomatos outdoors in winter over here. Evolution and adaptation are processes of tiny changes over millenia, and the result is often something very different from the starting point. Tender crops would be wiped out completely by the first frost to hit them, they'd never get a chance to change.

 

Genetic engineering might be able to help extend the growing season of certain crops a bit, but any fruit or veg with a high water content is simply going to freeze solid and spoil if it's outside in a UK winter.

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It is if we aspire for self sufficiency in all things - energy, fuel etc etc. :wink:

 

So where are we going to get our reserves of iron ore, aluminium ore, oil for fuel and plastics (the North Sea is close to being tapped out), the rare metals used in electronics, potash for fertilizers, hardwood for furniture, softwood for construction, cotton for textiles, pigments for dyestuffs, copper for wiring and plumbing, and any of the million different things for which have always traded overseas.

 

"Self-sufficiency in all things" hasn't been possible since the days of the unclothed savage.

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Turkey is said to be self sufficient I believe... how are they doing ?

 

They'd be in even deeper trouble financially without the vast sums of overseas money coming into their tourist economy - so, no they're nowhere near self sufficient.

 

Well I'd class that as a very good starting point for self sufficiency.

 

Utilise the resources YOU have to gain income... re invest that income to make more people want to visit and gain more income...

 

Their resources are the sun, beautiful beaches, stunning views and amazing mountain backdrops and apparently attention to detail, cheap prices, excellent service and being able to build big stunning beach side 5* hotels in 4 months :wink::D

 

It's fast becoming the place to go apparently and seems to be suddenly beating many other countries as a holiday destination so they must be doing something right despite being rather near to troubles areas :?

 

Where does Turkey get it's water, gas, elec and oil from ?

 

Me, well I'll be off to a wet field somewhere as usual no doubt but we will at least be sort of self sufficient and in the hands of mother nature :lol:

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Not all caravan owners are greedy Peter, you can borrow ours if you dare to slum it for a while :wink::D Great when it's sunny but no fun at all when the weather is c**p :? No foreign holidays or luxury for us as we have a dog.

 

I think the reason most people go abroad is not because of the cost of the hotels/cottages over here but mainly to do with the uncertanty of the weather, the facilities on offer and the beaches, yes some are nice but many are not.

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I purposely used the word "strive" or "aspire" for self sufficiency; and economic and strategic security considerations tend to alter the viability of many source options, whether it's shale gas, synthetic oil (produced by the Germans in WW2); hydro electric or tidal energy that we have in spades; and even mining for coal and other ores. What is fairly obvious, is that in a volatile world of climate changes and depleted resources, any sensible option would reduce our reliance on imports. :roll:

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Why strive for something which is never going to be anywhere near attainable?

 

We have absolutely NO exploitable reserves of bauxite, copper ore, potash or rare metal ores. We can't grow cotton at all, can't grow anywhere near enough oil seed rape for our fuel needs, we can't even grow enough food on this crowded island to feed a population of 60 million.

 

If self-sufficiency were even vaguely possible then over 70,000 sailors wouldn't have needed to die on the Atlantic convoys.

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Accepted to a point - BUT if we don't plan and prepare for the future we'll have no options when the brown stuff hits the fan. Oxfam are now saying food prices will more than double over the next 20 years; part of the cause of the Arab Spring was rising food prices. We've got farmers being being paid by the EU to keep fields fallow - now how daft is that? So we havn't even started to utilise the resources we have. :roll:

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Oxfam are now saying food prices will more than double over the next 20 years;

 

Have you bothered working out what is the annual inflation rate which causes prices to double in 20 years? Or have you just been taken in by a headline again?

 

It's almost exactly 3.5% - hardly rampant inflation!

 

Prices do generally double about every 20 years. That's normal!

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Call me a cynic but OXFAM does have an ulterior motive for bigging up famine scares (the clue is in the name :wink: ). Apparently Indian farmers are complaining about the low prices given for their crops because of THE BUMPER HARVEST!!!! Basic economics really, supply and demand :wink::wink:

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:shock: How on earth can someone head a charity which relies on donations whilst at the same time showing such greed in their own huge salary.

 

If they took just a third of that which is still a huge salary imagine how many lives the remaining $200,000 could save. Grrrrrrrr :evil::evil:

 

That has really annoyed me.

 

So when people donate their ?2 (or whatever) a month to Oxfam how much of the ?2 actually goes to help the people who need it and how much goes in staff wages or other directions ?

 

Same with many charities I guess though :?

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There was an item on the news tonight, where farms in the S/East are suffering from drought, meanwhile in the North it's been p-ing down. So, why can't we transfer water for irrigation from one end of the Country to the other? Over to you Inky, to tell us it can't be done! :wink:

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For non-drinking water for the purposes of irrigation, it can. You could use the canal network.

 

Pump water in where there is a surplus and extract it back out where there is a shortage. As long as you don't produce a flow of more than one or two miles per hour on the canals then you won't cause too much of a problem for the boats or the fish.

 

Cheaper and easily, though for the individual farms in the dry areas to drill their own bore-holes and extract water themselves.

 

The farms in the dry areas would still have to gear up with all the irrigation equipment though. Probably the big, mobile, overhead irrigators on wheels like you see in France and the mid-west US. It's the lack of the means of spreading the water over the land rather than lack of water itself that it the problem for the farmers claiming drought damage.

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