Please note, I have now vacated the temporary office space which I used to store all the archive material and am now based at my office at home
CURRENT ISSUE
TURF PRO AND SERVICE DEALER
Two great magazines now together
DECEMBER 2012 / JANUARY 2013
FEATURES :
DUTCH MASTERS: Imants and Vredo
SERVICING: Getting the best out of your equipment
BTME HARROGATE, Preview of turfcare show ALL TERRAIN VEHICLES: What's new? December / January issue of Turf Pro/Service Dealer is being published w/c 17 December
WETNESS - AND WANTON WASTEFULNESS Plenty to ponder in our priorities
First the good news, William Hill are currently offering 100/1 that a hosepipe will be imposed in the UK during 2013.
It has always been a ‘given’ that the weather influences our fortunes to a much greater extent than the economy - and this year has proven that once again.
For those in the grass care business, hosepipe bans in April soon gave way to a deluge that then hardly stopped all year. In the event, we were just a few millimetres short of the wettest-ever year on record as Big Ben rang in the New Year. Given that the first three months were very dry, the amount of rain in 9 months meant that notionallly the record had been smashed.
But on the farming side, it was a grim picture. The NFU put the cost of the bad weather on agriculture at around £1.3 billion, but if you add in the consequential loss on ancillary items such the cancellation and disruption of shows like the CLA event, East of England and Great Yorkshire shows, then the figure will be much higher.
But that was not the worst of it. Those behind the technological advancement of modern farming, sophisticated machinery, soil management and precision farming, all designed to maximise the yield from our precious land-bank, will then have been dismayed and disheartened to learn that ‘around half of the food we produce is thrown away’. Whether the report, Global Food, Waste Not, Want Not by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers is accurate or not, the fact is that we in the Western world have become too complacent about food.
IMechE claims that ‘of the four million tonnes of food produced each year, 30% to 50% never reaches the human stomach’ The aim of scientists and others, as highlighted in the recent Foresight Report, has been to increase food production in order to feed an extra 3 billion people by the end of the century - but not at the expense of such wanton wastefulness
Maybe Sir Bob Geldof and others might now consider a re-write of Feed the World which focuses on conservation rather than consumption
