So glad we’ve now got farming sorted out then

This isn’t what Baroness Batters - formerly head of the National Farmers’ Union - means to say but it is what she does say:

Batters said: “One of the long-term and growing challenges to farming is that land is often more profitable for anything else, other than producing food.”

Excellent, it’s good that we’ve got that sorted out then.

The essence of increasing productivity, of increasing the wealth of the Kingdom and its people, is that assets get moved from lower valued uses to higher. That’s the entire and whole aim and point of the game. Whatever that asset is - capital, labour, land, a piece of metal or sheet of glass. Move it, or change the use of it, from where it produces less value to where it produces more.

So, if farmland produces less value than any other use of the land then move farmland from being used for farming to any other use. The logic here is clear, simple and correct.

For example, land for farming on is what, £10,000 a hectare these days? The same land for housebuilding is £1 million and up? So, build houses and make the society £990,000 per hectare built upon richer.

Baroness Batters has just insisted that we should stop farming and use the land for something, anything, else. How excellent it is that one of these sorts of inquiries has a complete answer so early in the process.

Tim Worstall