Non-Food Crops and the Impact on the Countryside

Non-food crops for industry and energy: But what about the impacts on the countryside?

This research investigates the economic and environmental implications of non-food crops on the quality of the English countryside with a special focus on the East Midlands region.

The Institute for Sustainable Development in Business recently conducted a research study on the impact of non-food crops on the quality of the countryside in the East Midlands. The research was needed because a bundle of government policies introduced over the last 5 years have called for large increases in non-food crop production to increase the use of renewable energy in partial fulfillment of the UK's Kyoto obligations, as well as to encourage the manufacture of biodegradable materials and promote rural economic development. Although the overall aim of the policy programme is to deliver environmental objectives, groups like the Countryside Agency are concerned that non-food crops are being grown in increasingly larger tracts using greater quantities of fertilizers and pesticides, with potential negative effects on biodiversity, soil fertility, and the aesthetic quality of the countryside.

Although government policy is the primary driver behind an expanding non-food crops sub-sector, free market demand for certain crops also makes a contribution. Clothing made from natural fibres is becoming increasingly popular among consumers, and subsequently garment manufacturers and fashion design companies. This demand is one reason for the observable increases in plantings of linseed-flax in the UK, since the crop's long inner fibres are well suited to the manufacture of high quality clothing textiles. There is also substantial free market demand for oilseed rape in the East Midlands since different parts and varieties of that crop can be used alternately as animal feed, lubricants for industry, oils for human consumption, or the manufacture of bio-diesel. In today's economy the versatility of the crop is quite valuable to farmers. But are these crops being grown in an unsustainable way through extensive mono-cropping and input-intensive management methods? And if so, what are the consequences for the countryside in terms of biodiversity and soil quality?

The Institute's research gauged these kinds of countryside impacts by considering data from the June Agricultural Census, various government policies supporting the expansion of the non-food crops sub-sector, as well as a number of case studies of non-food crop growers and researchers. These data sources were chosen to understand the extensity plantings, the demand for crops, and the intensity of impact, respectively.

One case study in planting intensity looked at a group of researchers at De Montfort University in Leicester studying industrial applications for bast fibres, the fibrous outer core of plants like flax, hemp, and nettle. The technical characteristics of these plants have commercially-promising uses in industry, yet the way they are grown to meet industrial specifications has been a potential concern. When used in textiles linseed-flax is planted at a higher seed density in order to partially shade plants so each grows long and spindly with greater length between the leaves, yielding longer bast fibres suited to mechanical weaving. Short bast fibres can also be useful, for example, in the manufacture of bio-composites, which are similar but in many ways superior to the fibreglass composites used in car-bodies. The advantages of this novel material are that it is more biodegradable than its predecessor, but also that it creates fewer dangerously sharp edges when it breaks, meaning both factory workers and vehicle occupants are safer.

Somewhat surprisingly the case study suggested that fibrous crops often require fewer pesticide applications than many food crops because the techniques used in their production need not acquiesce to consumer standards for blemish-free produce or regulatory standards to ensure consumer health and hygiene. However when this particular piece of evidence was balanced with the evidence from the larger study, including two other case studies and reviews of crop-specific management methods, the conclusion was reached that fibrous crops have on the whole similar impacts on biodiversity and soil fertility as intensively-managed food crops. That is, what farmers grow seems to be less important than how they grow it. Since unsustainable management techniques can be equally applied to non-food or conventional crops, it is the responsibility of the grower to comply with existing environmental management practices whatever their planting decision.

This new understanding of the impact of the non-food crops sub-sector is helping deliver the Strategy for Sustainable Farming and Food which seeks to promote sustainable economic development in rural areas of the East Midlands. The strategy aims to encourage the adaptation of underused rural assets to new higher value added uses, such as old agricultural buildings to conference space. It also promotes new production decisions among the farming community, for example a shift to potentially higher value added non-food crops for the industrial markets discussed here.

Thanks to the ISDB's research certain parts of the strategy can now be carried out with more confidence knowing that non-food crops do indeed have implications for soil fertility, biodiversity, and the aesthetic quality of the landscape, but that these impacts can at least in the interim be managed largely through the existing set of policy and regulatory tools used to manage the impacts of conventional food crops.