North East a maize Mecca in a decade?

THE warming effects of climate change could turn North East England into a successful maize-growing region in little over 10 years, according to the predictions of an industry expert speaking at the Great North Meet.

Richard Garland, a rural practice surveyor at consultancy George F. White, said there were ‘major opportunities’ for farmers in northern England as the climate changes, especially since agricultural land in the north would be less at risk from flooding than other parts of the country.

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Richard Garland

He said: “Maize is something most farmers in the region struggle to grow successfully, generally because the land’s thermal capacity isn’t there.

“By the time we hit 2020, however, you will find the average farm in the region will be on the threshold temperature to successfully grow maize.

“There’s real opportunity here to reassess our agricultural systems to take them forward.”

Prof Stuart Lane, executive director of the Institute of Hazard and Risk Research at Durham University, warned that Government steps taken to lessen the impact of climate change could be more damaging to farmland than climate change itself.

He said it was essential the interests of the farming industry – one of the only sectors to come into direct contact with the effects of climate change daily — were taken on board in future Government climate change strategies.

He said: “The problem with Government policy is they have this imagination of rural Britain as fields with no people or property – land that in their opinion, no longer has the value it did in policies of the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s.

“We’ve urbanised flood plains and are now having to mitigate that by doing things in rural areas.

“It is going to require careful thinking about the things we grow, how we grow them, and how we think about the land.”

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