In message , Doctor Drivel
writes
Tim Lamb wrote:
In message , Doctor Drivel
writes
wrote:
On Friday, October 19, 2012 11:33:25 PM UTC+1, SteveW wrote:
On 19/10/2012 13:40, wrote:

Easy for him to say - in a country with around 7 acres of land per
person that might *just* be possible. The UK has under 1 acre per
person...

It actually says 1 acre per house, not per person. Anyway, we're
thinking of moving to Ireland at some stage!

I was actually making some crude assumptions that we couldn't afford
to use more than say 10% of land for fuel and combining it with a
guess of 2 to 3 persons in a house, on average...

Your assumption was very crude.

The overall agricultural subsidy is over £5 billion per year. This
is £5 billion to an industry whose total turnover is only £15
billion per annum. Unbelievable. This implies huge inefficiency in
the agricultural industry, about 40% on the £15 billion figure.
Applied to the acres agriculture absorbs, and approximately 16
million acres are uneconomic. Apply real economics to farming and
you theoretically free up 16 million acres, which is near 27% of the
total UK land mass. This is land that certainly could be put to
better use for the population of the UK like for fuel.

Well lets try some sums (others may care to refine this).

16million acres? According to John Nix (imperial college at Wye) the
total UK arable crops area for 2000 was 45million acres.

Winter oil seed rape is likely to give the best fuel production at
around 362l/ton. Yield is around 1.4 tons/acre and for crop husbandry
reasons is grown 1 year in 4.

So we could produce 45,000,000 x 1.4 x 362 / 4 x 1000 tons of fuel.

Or 5.7 million tons.

UK road fuel use for 2009 was 35 million tons.....

Yep. Best forget fuel and build homes and leisure facilities on the
land. Then homes will be affordable.

I believe a rough approximation of housing cost is 1/3rd site, 1/3rd
build and 1/3rd profit for the builder.

Currently, housing associations can buy land which would not otherwise
get planning consent (exception 32?) at a small multiple of the value as
farmland.

--
Tim Lamb