Letters: making sense of the nitrates expert group

DEAR EDITOR,

It didn’t make sense initially when I saw the proposal from the Nitrates Expert Group to ban organic fertiliser on winter cereals.

As a cereal grower, I know that the reason for spreading such material is primarily to improve the soil’s fertility by feeding earthworms to increase the population.

Spreading in the springtime, where ground conditions allow, causes a major hazard.

Any nutrients in the material come available too late in the season for any malting barley crops, pushing up protein content, causing potential failure at harvest.

So, it becomes an effective ban on organic fertiliser on most cereal farms.

This will continue the decline in incomes in this sector and the subsequent decline in acreage nationally.

Grain can be, and is, very easily imported. However, straw is a different matter.

This is where our expert group have shown themselves to be very smart, because a reduction in straw will mean an increase in slurry, making anaerobic digester plants more economical.

Cheaper electricity for all the electric cars in the future.

See, I told you these were very smart people in the nitrates group.

Aren’t we so lucky as a nation to have them. I nearly missed the logic of it all.