As a rule of thumb, for each species in a mature hedge you can estimate around 100 years age. I'm sorry so many hedges were lost in producing those bright yellow fields of oil seed rape. O.K., we all have to eat, but biodiversity and habitat matter too. And I do know rape is a wonderful crop every part of which is used - vegetable oil, oil cake and fodder - and grows well in temperate climates.
American farmer - "Do you know? I can get into my car at sunrise and drive all day and still not get to the other side of my farm by sunset!" British farmer - " I had a car like that!".
The UK are an island surrounded by water with a weather system affected accordingly - it is the reason the british weather is so unpredictable. We have a number of lakes - particularly in the lake district! Similarly there are a lot of rivers.
I live in the Lake District and a number of the lakes are man made reservoirs which feed different areas of the country. Thirlmere is a reservoir that supplies water to the greater Manchester area.
The farmland in Lincolnshire he is showing on here is part of the largest high quality arable land in the UK, and it is the farmland that looks most like US farmland. The nature of the UKs Geography means that you get pockets of arable land in different parts of the country, but in general the best land is to the south and east, so most crops are grown there, while to the north and west there is more focus on livestock. Sheep are farmed on the hills, land which is of no use for anything else. Most of our National Parks are actually full of sheep farms. Most of our water is collected in artificial lakes (reservoirs), there are lots of streams and rivers.
We don’t store our crops on the farm. We tend to tip the crop in a clean shed and sell it immediately to the corn merchants who will send trucks to collect it almost straight away. There are some silos on uk farms who are used to store animal feed rather than crops
I grew up on a shooting estate/ arable/ agriculture farm in Lincolnshire. I’ve never heard it called canola we called it oil seed rape. Also dry stone walls are only in certain areas hedges are the normal field enclosures (fun fact dry stone wallers was the most paid job in the U.K.). Silos are around the U.K. but we used massive drying sheds then a bucket loader would fill the trucks when they arrived.
Same, I’m on the Notts/Lincs border and all my mates lived on farms and I mostly lived next to farms, and it was always sheds but I have seen silos. And very much hedgerows, again these have a regional style but less so these days
The name for rapeseed comes from the Latin word rapum meaning turnip. Turnip, rutabaga (swede), cabbage, Brussels sprouts, and mustard are related to rapeseed. Rapeseed belongs to the genus Brassica. Brassica oilseed varieties are some of the oldest plants cultivated by humanity, with documentation of its use in India 4,000 years ago, Canola was bred from rapeseed cultivars of B. napus and B. rapa at the University of Manitoba, Canada, by Keith Downey and Baldur R. Stefansson in the early 1970s, having much less erucic acid. Canola was originally a trademark name of the Rapeseed Association of Canada, and the name was a condensation of "Can" from Canada and "OLA " meaning "Oil, low acid", but is now a generic term for edible varieties of rapeseed oil in North America and Australasia. The change in name serves to distinguish it from natural rapeseed oil, which has much higher toxic erucic acid content.
@@EaterOfBaconSandwiches I know that was a joke but it actually rains much rarely than the rest of the world thinks, all this crap about it always rains in Scotland is total bollocks. I haven't seen rain in weeks, months even.
The biggest difference I could see by looking at farming in the US is you dont have hedgerows they are very important as they shelter and feed a large amount of insects,birds and small mammals which is very importent ..
The US has way more detached houses than the UK (where they are quite rare), and also our houses are much smaller, which is why we use less land for housing
It does always amaze me that lamb is a niche meat in the US rather than a staple. Although here it is very much more popular in Indian cuisine where people don’t eat beef or pork. And despite the prevalence of ‘fish and chips’ fish is far less common than you’d expect it to be for an island nation. I think we export many times more than we eat ourselves, for some reason.
We use...... silos. Regarding the bushel: We used to use an imperial weight called a 'hundred weight' which strangely was 112lbs and half hundred weight sacks which were 56lbs or 1 bushel.
@@WanderersForever88 furthest is Lichfield at 84 miles , but yes I've seen the 70.mile one as well , but officially it's 84 miles at Lichfield , but 90% I reckon are 70 miles or less
@@glastonbury4304 interesting, because according the the ordnance survey folks it's a farm just outside Coton in the Elms in Derbyshire en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coton_in_the_Elms (Article gives the exact grid reference) Edit: a quick Google suggests it is anywhere between 73-80 miles from Lichfield to the nearest beach which maybe the difference.
@@WanderersForever88 yeah I saw that as well, however Lichfield has an official plaque in the town square saying 84 miles, then when I research it I find it to be true, not sure how Coton got the acolade , but it's not official 🤷...funny old thing Google at times
I suppose in the UK we just send the grain straight to where it is to be processed, the mill or industrial bakery. That is where you will see the silos.
Here in the UK, we tend to store grain in specialized barns with concrete sides. The grain is then heaped on the floor and loaded onto lorries with a telehandler or wheel loader, silos and hopper-bottom bins do exist but most farms have no of them.
I live in kent the garden of England , known for its hop farms and orchards , I love seeing the patch work fields of the farms, all the different colours beautiful 💚
You also see a lot more drystone walls in palces like Derbyshire and Wales, where there's rocky terrain and a lot of rubble left over from the ice age grinding off the mountains and dumping debris. So like you said they did in New England farmers and shepherds gathered up the stones on their land and put it to use. Near the south of England you see more thick hedgerows and fences rather than stone walls, but there's still a few.
Great Britain has one of the most diverse weather system. If I remember rightly we have up to five different weather systems above us and you can truly see all four seasons in a day.
"Apaches" which was a public service film about kids playing on a farm, all of whom died horribly was shown to us ten year olds at school. Gave most of us nightmares.
I live in the UK, between the English lake district national park (about 910 sq mile) and the Irish Sea. Although known as the Lake District and containing 16 or so large bodies of water, and many smaller ones, there is only 1 lake, bassenthwaite, the rest are meres or waters.
The reason property here in the UK is so expensive, contrary to popular belief is not because land is scarce. As you pointed out, it's not. The reason is because housing builders buy the land, and the rights to build on it. But then only build a very small number of the houses they could. This keeps the pieces high. A recent report said that the big 2 builders here, Persimmon and Barrett's have enough land with planning permission granted, to keep themselves in business at current rates of construction, for the next 80-100 years. And that's why people struggle.
and only a small amount of the houses they build are actually affordable, a large portion are overpriced so that richer property owners buy and then rent them. the only reason _some_ of the houses are affordable is because they need it for planning permission. a recent housing development that was approved in my closest city only had 30% affordable housing. where i live theres a huge problem with young local people becoming homeless or being forced to live with family, i know of several villages where almost no one lives there, they're all holiday homes or B&Bs owned by rich Londoners
Theres also many apartment blocks that are owned by foreign companies that wont rent them out, an increase in the amount of divorcees, and a rising population to add into the mix. Along with the fact that, if they are forced to rush the houses, it results in some rather shaky building. All the affordable housing in my area is former military family housing, and it's not great quality. Apparently multiple families had to be moved out within weeks of the houses being built due to safety concerns. Then, when areas are redeveloping, they often take affordable houses and make them not affordable. People are kicked out of their houses and then their houses are "updated" (they often look ugly... theres no character. Even old Victorian terraced housing looks nice and has character, coz people paint their houses and they put things in the windows), and the new houses are too expensive for them.
@@midwestamericans3806 They haven't really monopolised it. Most construction companies don't want to build the houses they could, because if they flooded the market, the price of house's will drop. So they tend to hold on to land waiting for the house prices to go up, then build a few.
It's more complex than that. We have very strict planning regulations, so developers are driven to make as much profit as they can from the limited land available for development. And when they do build, they usually cram as many homes as they can into the space; hence the UK has some of the smallest homes in Europe.
We don't need so many silos because it is rare here to feed cattle on grain. Grassfed beef tastes better, costs less to produce and is better for the environment (properly used pasture actually removes carbon and helps to reverse climate change). Our grain is generally used to feed humans and is turned into food quite rapidly after harvest.
Take a look at some clips of Captain Leroy from the show Sharpe. Sharpe is a British show about the Napoleonic wars and Leroy is an American who sided with Britain during the revolution. He says some interesting things
If you want to look into the water supply issues I'd suggest looking into the drowning of capel celyn, where a village was flooded to create a reservoir, they knew they wouldn't get planning permission so went straight to parliament. The reservoir wasn't to supply local people with water,
There are a few silos in England, but most farms have always used rectangular barns to store crops. When it comes to moving the crops off the farm a loader tractor with a big bucket will shovel the crop into a lorry rather than some elaborate auger system.
@@FusionDisnep257 the biggest bottled water producers are actually all French! Volvic dominates. The second largest is Derbyshire (Nestles water bottling plant is there and also Buxtons and a few others) then Scotland, then the Welsh Borders..Malvern water etc.
@@martynnotman3467 Don't touch Volvic! Its not true mineral water. Not filtered in the ground long enough. Told this by my environmental engineering lecturer at university 20 years ago. Buxtons your best bet especially straight from the well while its still warm. Good for tea!
Most of our fresh water comes from rainfall and subsequently ground water. Where i live in Norfolk for example we get all our water from the water table. We store out grain in barns, in massive mounds. As a kid we were specifically told not to climb them as you can sink into them and suffocate in it. However in a lot of cases the wheats cuts straight into a lorry which is then sent straight to a flour mill. As for dry stone walls, they're primarily in the north, and used for animal pastures. Otherwise its hedges combined with drainage ditches.
There are a couple of good farming tv shows on at the moment - one called 'Our Yorkshire Farm' (channel 5, follows a family of I believe 9 (7 kids, a mum and dad) working on one of the remotest farms in England. Then Jeremy Clarkson has also got an Amazon show now about his farm which he's just started to manage himself (previously pretty much just rented the land out to a farmer) Might be good ones to check out if you're ever fully interested in actual farm life in England
Yes but it's called "New England" because it was settled by the English, who would've brought their building techniques with them, including the art of dry stone walling. That's why so much of the New England area resembles the British Isles, including the style of some of its churches.
I know it's not the same in every state, California is just awful, the cattle were just penned up in a foot of mud , I lived there for 6 months and bloody hell they treat their livestock horribly
The main difference maker in agriculture between the UK and the US is average temperature. Our southernmost point is just north of any part of the contiguous United States and London is at the same latitude as the southern end of Hudson Bay! That means that you only have to get about 750 feet above sea level before you reach the tree line and, in Scotland that drops to around 450 feet! That leaves lots of our available land only good for sheep and beef cattle (if only we were allowed to have deer farms too).
There is no ‘British’ farmland…farming laws in England and Scotland are different. Britain isn’t a single nation, it’s a landmass containing 3 sovereign nations. Not being pedantic but eg: GM crops are illegal in Scotland but legal in England. No such thing as British law you see
Lawrence (no I don’t know him, he’s younger than me, he does mention his age in a video) is from my hometown of Grimsby North East Lincolnshire , there are lots of fields of rapeseed here in fact there’s one field of rapeseed not far from the housing estate (you see the housing estate in one of his videos when he returns to Grimsby two years ago) he use to live on. Lincolnshire is flat during WW2 there were lots of bomber bases that’s why Lincolnshire was known as Bomber County most of the bases were returned to agriculture, some became industrial estates, others housing estates, one is the largest antique centre in the country and some became air museums, race tracks ie Silverstone, one became a car factory Lotus and others became airports Humberside International Airport, Biggin Hill International Airport and Manston or civilian airfields Wickenby. Barns are used for wheat etc as well as silos though silos in Britain are mainly used for food and drink production. Dry stone walls are found in Derbyshire and Yorkshire.
The Lotus factory is in Hethel, Norfolk. The company started life in Hornsey, North London in converted stables, then moved to a new purpose built factory at Hethel when it expanded. They were never in Lincolnshire. Silverstone racing circuit is in Northamptonshire.
In the UK we have strict rules about “urban sprawl’. This means that each settlement is kept distinct from others, with “green belt” land between them - which is very difficult for developers to build on. Most new homes are built on previously used “brownfield” land, or “infill” land within the existing settlement boundaries.
Except now green belt land is being built on all the time (money talks) and the UK high courts are full of cases where the public is trying to stop green belt building. In my area on a regular basis a piece of green belt is built on and in exchange a new piece of green belt is assigned. Basically the green belt is being abused - nothing new for this government though is it?
@@wilmaknickersfit True in some cases but generally it’s still very difficult and costly for developers. I worked as a land buyer for a housebuilder and we would almost always avoid it.
In the UK, field shapes were mostly created during the enclosures in the 18th to 19th centuries - a period referred to as the golden age of farming in textbooks. Before that, one village would have usually 3 huge fields split into strips managed by individuals. The enclosures turned it into modern fields, allowing farmers to experiment with new methods without needing everyone in the village to agree, creating a boom. However the process of enclosures just allocated claimants an amount of land similar to what they had before, so they had to prove they had a claim and even then they might get stuck with land that was unsuitable for agriculture. There was a lot of corruption, with rich people using the process to grab all the best land and unsupported commoners losing out. Anyways, that was when the shapes of fields in the UK was decided, and most have stayed pretty much the same since then.
Are you, when you say "England," specifically talking about England or do you mean the United Kingdom? Whilst Lost in the Pond's Lawrence Brown is obviously being specific, noting the geographical image used early in the video, I note the map was both England and Wales.
I get so confused sometimes, are we talking about GB or UK or England? No wonder people that don't live here get confused when we are selves arent specific. Very weird listening to facts or statistics and then hear them saying it applies to the UK and then they mention GB in the same sentence. Those are different land masses.
@@axiana I take the OP's point about some people not being clear about England vs the UK, but as far as GB and the UK are concerned, I don't think it's all that confusing. Maybe you'll take issue but though I do realise that there's the geographical term for the contiguous land mass, Great Britain, I still feel that in common parlance, most in the UK use the term GB in a different way whenever they do use it. Namely as a synonym for the whole sovereign state of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Put it this way, I hear plenty of times people whether professional presenters on TV to common folk at work and every type of person in between, saying things like _We in Great Britain/Britain..._ and if I were to pull them up and ask them, _Well what about Northern Ireland or The Isle of Wight?_ They would likely look at me quizzically and say something like, _I was including them._ Maybe you have a different experience, or maybe you spend your life correcting people all the time and tutting whenever you hear it, either way you do you! But I just think it's not all that important...when is it really necessary to refer to the geographical land mass of Great Britain anyway? Unless you're a geologist or botanist I don't think it's ever something to be too concerned about.
@@carlhartwell7978 This is not my experience. I get the feeling we do not live in the same part of the UK which would explain why our experiences would differ, but thanks for your patronising response regardless.
@@axiana It was only supposed to be (potentially) partronising if it was also your experience, since it isn't, you have no need to feel patronised! I thought I was careful to leave room for that, sorry you were offended anyway. I am surprised you don't hear GB and UK used interchangeably though! For a start there's the team GB in the Olympics, I don't watch The Great British Bake-Off, but I doubt they'd exclude Northern Irish contestants, and I assume it airs there (I'd be happy to be corrected though), then recently a new T.V channel called GB news... just saying...these things didn't spring up out of nowhere as far as I have known (I'm 42), I've often heard the terms as synonymous, not just in person but in the media generally. GB News is a somewhat good example, it's caught a fair amount of flack for reasons we don't need to go into, but I've not heard any complaints that the name is in any way 'incorrect' despite Andrew Neil stating that the channel would be - _"a fresh approach to news in Britain, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland"_
We do have quite a lot of water, most of our water comes from the pennines, the lake district or North Wales. But there are also lots of large lochs like Loch lomond in Scotland.
I once flew from Las Vegas to Toronto on my way back home to the UK. About half way, not sure which state I could see Mile after mile of rectangular fields, dead straight lines. In the rainier hilly central, northern part of England are many reservoirs or lakes used to supply water to the built up areas nearer the coast.
There used to a Government policy that meant Britain had to be able to produce enough food to feed the population (with rationing obviously) in case of war or disaster. That policy was a direct result of World War 2 when Britain came so close to starving.
@@midwestamericans3806 That policy changed in the late 70's I think. But that is one of the reasons such a large percentage of land is historically set aside
@@chrisdavies9821 policies changed in the ‘70’s with entry into the EU, but the emphasis remained on bulk food production with the common agricultural policy until the late ‘80’s and early ‘90’s for much the same reason. One thing Thatcher, Kohl and Mitterrand had in common was memories of the war and the hungry years just after it.
@@ballagh I didn't mention the years after the war because then you have to get into the whole end of lend lease, double summer time, bankrupt country unable to afford imports etc. It seemed to much for a youtube comment.
There are wheatfields some 5 minutes from my home. But have to go down a bumpy lane, with severe potholes, then navigate through a turnstile, stop the look right, then left and right again before crossing the railroad tracks. Then the vast expanse of Wheat in Southwestern Essex
Forgive if someone said it before, but Loch Ness in Scotland has the same amount of fresh water as the whole of England, Scotland has more than 90% of Britain's fresh water supply
We have silos in the UK, but they are usually only 2 stories high. Because farms are smaller they don't need to store so much grain at once. Also I suspect it gets sent for processing more regularly. There's a flour mill near me and that does have some seriously massive silos out side.
We do have lakes and rivers aplenty. Also we have the Pennines which run lengthways down England and in Scotland and Wales small mountains. We have things called barns to hold our grain and Hay and straw. Barns are usually tall box shaped constructions
Where I live in Scotland there’s lots of farm land surrounding the area most of it hidden in the hills but if you look around there’s like 6 different farms within 5 minutes from where I live there’s a sheep farm, cow farm, fruit farms and lots of random fields of oil seed rape or any other crop. There’s also a couple of really nice farm shop’s. A big disadvantage of this are tons of tractors on the roads, multiple country roads and waking up to the “lovely” scent of manure in other words, cow poop, sheep poop and pig poop.
Does anyone else think it sounds like Laurence (or Lawrence) from Lost In The Pond sounds like he's putting on or has an Alan Partridge-esque inflection with his voice? Lmao cracks me up, never heard an Englishman sound like that except from Steve Coogan playing the role of Alan Partridge
For starters the UK doesn't do GM foods. Since WW2 the Green Belt Act was passed in which only specially permitted buildings are allowed to be built in this particular area. This was brought about to protect our agricultural land so that the UK could feed itself if we were ever cut off to be starved out by any enemy who wishes to go to war with us. It also protects our unique countryside!
Greenfield sites are not for Industrial/residential building only so-called brownfield sites. Erosion of the general consensus is being slowly bypassed because new housing is needed. Population of UK 68+million. We don't have GM soy (and we don't want it). Present safeguards could be overlooked if new regs are brought in to attract new overseas trade agreements cos of Brexit (unintended consequences). The Soil Association issues certificate to growers whose land has been pesticide/chemical free for 5 years, otherwise it's not organic.
@@benjaminmorgan8282 If you've ever had mutton properly cooked you wouldn't say that. It's a richer, almost stronger flavour, but it does need more careful cooking. If you can cook it properly though, mutton, and hogget, taste different, but just as good as lamb. Personally, while I do adore lamb, I actually like mutton (properly cooked!) more.
We do have some mutton and it is super expensive compared with lamb, and super difficult to source. As Dave says, for some meals it tastes much better than lamb and for that reason it has started appearing on up market restaurant menus. I use it to make mutton pies, I make two dozen at a time and they last less than a week, mostly given away to friends who seem keen to have them.
Storage is an interesting question. Don't know much about the subject, but I've seen a few barns with tons and tons of grain just dumped on the floor. Like 20ft+ high piles of grain. I'm pretty sure farms don't store their harvest for very long, so it wouldn't be long until someone would pick it up No idea if that's typical though
One of the places to explore In the UK Is area known has the Black Country/ it’s one of the first areas The Black Country is an area of the West Midlands county,[2] in the United Kingdom covering most of the Metropolitan Boroughs of Dudley, Sandwell, and only some minor parts of Walsall and Wolverhampton. Dudley and Tipton are generally considered to be the centre.[3] It became industrialised during its role as one of the birth places of the Industrial Revolution across the English Midlands with coal mines, coking, iron foundries, glass factories, brickworks and steel mills, producing a high level of air pollution. That information from Wikipedia 😂. If you’ve heard of a tv show called Peaky Blinders The first few seasons it was filmed there. There’s a lot of to explore in uk that’s not so we’ll known has much has London, Liverpool , Edinburgh etc. I guess there’s loads of places in USA that would be great to visit even the less know towns and cities etc
Lol on the water question. I don’t think we have anything as large as the lakes you guys have at all but it rains A HELL OF A LOT here lol so I think that’s where we get our water from? Maybe? I dunno. I didn’t really do school lol
Also, the way we treat animals is very different. AFAIK, the UK mainly has free range and don't really have any of the "mega dairy's" like the US does.
Just been to Kielder Forest at the weekend, Europe's biggest man-made dam and Englands largest forest, and pretty much the reason why the North (especially the north east) generally doesn't get hosepipe bans during the summer. Wouldn't recommend swimming in a lot of the rivers here, and I especially wouldn't drink either. You might get some that are safe, but I don't think many would be
During the 70's and 80's I worked for a shipping company that carried grain from the Great Lakes, Duluth, Wolf Bay, Thunder Bay and also Norfolk, Va. Steel products out from Europe to Chicago and then clean out the ship and travel up through Sault Ste Marie to Lake Superior. Load grain for Europe. We used to take grain to make strong bread flour to Siloth in Cumbria UK as well as European ports. Better for bread making than British grown flour. Great times in the Lakes - Loved them. Travelled the US coast from NY to Portland Or over the years and loved it. Virginia, New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Everglades, Galveston, Panama, San Fran, Portland, Seattle. Keep up the videos - I enjoy them. PS - Only the south east of England has permeable (chalk) substructure. The rest is Dolomite and Granite and non-permeable. Hence the lakes of Wales, the Lake District in NW England and all the Lochs of Scotland. We have no shortage of water, not because it rains too much but because we don't lose it. It's in the lakes and reservoirs. In the SE of England it's in the aquifers and TBH I wouldn't bath a dog in it although it's well fit for consumption.
British water is generally similar. The further North Lakes and reservoirs In the south ground water and aquifers. London sits on an enormous aquifer is supplied by rainfall on surrounding hills. We are however running out. We are not seen as particularly self sufficient with water. 20-25 years we will start having problems.
Unfortunately some of Lawrence’s statistics have been mixed up, for example conflating English statistics for those of the UK. Some 73% of England is enclosed farmland but the figure falls to 56% of the UK as a whole, largely because of Scotland, where the terrain means much of the land such as mountains and hills are not cultivated. We do have silos to keep grain but they’re not as evident outside the east of England where most arable farming is concentrated.
Most of our water is ground water, but we do have reservoirs, lakes and mountain water. You can generally taste the difference as you travel around, because of the difference in the water table regionally. So I get very fresh tasting water here in the Highlands of Scotland, but I remember it being much harder around Salisbury plane area. Also, a lot of our wheat production is for the beer industry.
I live in Norfolk England and I am surrounded by farm land and they grow everything from potatoes, to Wheat to Rapeseed, to sugar beats. Then we also have sprinkled among them farms that grow Flowers, Up the road from me I have a farm that sells tulips, Iris's, roses, daffodils. Then we have the farms that deal in live stock, but nearly every person I know who have gardens including my own which is huge we grow a lot of stuff our selves, I have a huge Poly Tunnel and inside grow every thing from tomatoes cucumbers green beans my own potatoes, to peppers onions and carrots and this year I have grown garlic, I also grow herbs a lot of different herbs. and then I have another green house that I grow fruit blackberries are grown wild around where I live in fact in most places and we go out 3 times a year and go pick them blanch them then freeze them, I grow gooseberries raspberries, strawberries, I have two plum trees two apple trees and 1 pear tree. Also most villages and small towns in the country have farm shops and they sell what they grow. You can not beat them for fresh produce.
Between the World Wars Britain relied upon a system called Imperial Preference. Basically, we sold manufactured goods to our Empire, in return for which we imported Canadian wheat, New Zealand dairy products, Indian cotton and tea, Australian wool, fruit from South Africa and bananas and sugar from the West Indies. This was why the U-boats war was a matter of life and death -we have never been able to feed and clothe ourselves since the Industrial Revolution. Many of those old trade links have weakened, but we still import food from all over the world and rely on our invisible exports, banking, insurance and financial services to pay for them.
London gets its water from the Thames just upstream of the city, & from groundwater, even though it's full of limescale & tastes bad. Liverpool imports its water from Wales, which is why it's some of the best. Most other cities in England have reservoirs in the hills.
Sheep were very important, back in the day. The British economy was built on it in the Medieval days, the Speaker in the House of Lords, sits on a wool sack (bale of wool) to remind them where our money came from. Many longwool breed of sheep, have died out. Still love our sheep, though.
The the geographic location of the UK means we face a constant barrage of Atlantic depressions that pick up energy and moisture from seas warmed by the Gulf Stream. We have lots of rain and it falls all year round, even in the summer. If we go a couple of weeks without rain it would be worthy of a front page headline. Places in the North and West, like Cumbria (The "Lake District") are very wet and at times so vividly green it hurts you eyes. The South East has the least rain, but it has the most people and lots of arable agriculture so it tends to run out at times. Like everywhere else we are experiencing the impacts of climate change in the form of more frequent and potent storms, floods and heat-waves. In terms of farming the stats hide some interesting quirks. For example we might have 70% of our land turned over to agriculture but quite a lot of that land is really marginal, like High Fell pasture in Cumbria. You can't grow anything on it and cows would die of exposure, so that's where the sheep come in. In the US, you most probably wouldn't even consider using this type of land to add to your 50% as you still have so much more productive land that's still not being used. Also, we have much different agricultural practices. I think US cows spend more time in barns eating corn, whereas UK cows spend more time out in pasture eating grass. Beef is much more expensive in the UK and for most used to be a luxury, adding to the cultural significance of the "Sunday Roast". Sheep were of huge significance to the emergence of England as an economic power in the Middle Ages through the "Wool Trade". As the meat - more mutton than lamb - was a bi-product of wool production it was relatively cheap and the working classes could afford it and over the centuries a lot of traditional regional dishes are based on it such as Lancashire Hot Pot. As the value of wool declined with the supremacy of first cotton then man-made fibres, Lamb is now more expensive than beef!
Hi I live in the UK we do have water resorviors which collect rain water some are man made, thier is one instance where a village in a valley was evacuated and flooded there have been instances where we have suffered drought in the summer and the resorvior has dried up and revealed the remains of the old village. I have seen black and white photos of the village the houses look like they are from 1800,s
The polo shirts are very common, they came from tennis players If I recall correctly then it became pretty common.. I wear one as my uniform working on a factory.
our zoning restrictions are pretty strict, so even our modern suburbs are pretty tightly packed compared to the US, there's often a hard line between the town and the farms rather than a sort of dwindling of buildings until it is all fields like in the US. converting agricultural land in the UK to anything else is pretty difficult. Also, in both countries, agricultural land can include forests, hunting estates and that sort of thing.
Fun facts: 1: most of our fresh water is from the mountains. 2: one of the main reasons that there is so little land used by buildings and business is because a lot of the land, (for example the Scottish Highlands), is mountainous and is either too tall or small to build things on especially buildings and factories or just doesn't meet the requirements for big buildings. 3: alot of our great or great great grandparents were the ones who could've built the stone walls splitting the fields in the uk and northern Ireland. Especially the ones on the Mourne mountains in northern Ireland.
In some cases field boundaries survive from the Iron Age. There was a TV programme on aerial archaeology some time ago that showed the Roman road (now the A1) south of York cutting in a straight line through the countryside. In some cases, the field boundaries on each side of the road aligned - they had been maintained on their pre-Roman forms after the road cut through them.
"Where the skies are not cloudy, all dayee..." Which is a bit if a dig at the British Isles, where they are. Indeed, here in sunny Manchester we are now in our 5th day of sunshine and temperatures between 21C and 25C, and the government are issuing "extreme temperature alerts." (Blydi attention junkies, as if we hadn't noticed it's hot).
The UK has a lot of water sources. Not only do we have plenty of lakes and rivers, but we also have highland water (mountain) and a whole lot more. All of it is shared, being taken from the rainiest parts of the UK to the places where they may not see enough rain for months.
Scotland has over 30,000 freshwater lochs, Ranging from small lochans to the like of Loch Ness and Loch Lomond according to Google. They hold vast amounts of water as they're not only big in size but also in depth and the views of the lochs are spectacular! Hope you get to visit one day to see or yourself
Quite a few comments on whether the UK can "feed itself" or is reliant on food imports. The net balance between import and export of commodities classed as "food" doesn't determine whether a nation can feed itself, which is a calorie equation. We import tea. Whilst it would be a huge psychological blow to be cut off from our tea supply, its a low calorie item and its loss wouldn't lead to starvation. Same could be said for salad stuff from Spain. Farming is a business and a UK farmer will grow what he can make the most money on, whether for domestic consumption or export. Growing strawberries might generate a nice margin, but not many calories. You could change that to spuds which would be maybe less cash, but more calories. We also currently throw away between 7 and 9 million tons of food every year. With maximum effort and rationing we most probably could provide the population with enough calories to prevent starvation, but it would get really boring very quickly.
Interesting fact: Many field boundaries in England date back to the Neolithic period. (Around 5,000 BCE)
And some lakes are still around from the Ice Age....10,000 ago....
The clearest and most extensive example is inshore of the Worms Head in the Mumbles. Incredible.
@@davidhoward2487Don’t be an arse all your life - take a day off.
As a rule of thumb, for each species in a mature hedge you can estimate around 100 years age. I'm sorry so many hedges were lost in producing those bright yellow fields of oil seed rape. O.K., we all have to eat, but biodiversity and habitat matter too. And I do know rape is a wonderful crop every part of which is used - vegetable oil, oil cake and fodder - and grows well in temperate climates.
@@ruadhagainagaidheal9398 Why so rude?
In the UK we store our lakes in the sky, were just efficient like that.
😂👍
😂😂😂
You mean we store "in the cloud" !!
LOL loved this answer
Ok till we had 2 dry summers then it's global warming ,not that they haven't built any more reservoirs !
American farmer - "Do you know? I can get into my car at sunrise and drive all day and still not get to the other side of my farm by sunset!"
British farmer - " I had a car like that!".
More like 'You following my tractor?'
🤣
LOL
Brilliant!!
The UK are an island surrounded by water with a weather system affected accordingly - it is the reason the british weather is so unpredictable. We have a number of lakes - particularly in the lake district! Similarly there are a lot of rivers.
I went on a boat ride across lake Windermere (one of the largest lakes in England) last week when I was on holiday in the Lake District
Lots of rivers but lakes are mostly found up north mostly in Scotland and Lake District
Yep, all that rain has to go somewhere!
I live in the Lake District and a number of the lakes are man made reservoirs which feed different areas of the country. Thirlmere is a reservoir that supplies water to the greater Manchester area.
We have so many lakes an entire district is dedicated to them XD
We have lots and lots of reservoirs, and the reason behind the shapes of the fields is that they go back over a thousand years.
We have lakes too e.g. the Lake District.
Not enough anymore as they havnt built any more since going private and the population has increased somewhat!
The farmland in Lincolnshire he is showing on here is part of the largest high quality arable land in the UK, and it is the farmland that looks most like US farmland. The nature of the UKs Geography means that you get pockets of arable land in different parts of the country, but in general the best land is to the south and east, so most crops are grown there, while to the north and west there is more focus on livestock. Sheep are farmed on the hills, land which is of no use for anything else. Most of our National Parks are actually full of sheep farms.
Most of our water is collected in artificial lakes (reservoirs), there are lots of streams and rivers.
Lincolnshire supreme sausages are the biz too
And canals
We don’t store our crops on the farm. We tend to tip the crop in a clean shed and sell it immediately to the corn merchants who will send trucks to collect it almost straight away. There are some silos on uk farms who are used to store animal feed rather than crops
I grew up on a shooting estate/ arable/ agriculture farm in Lincolnshire. I’ve never heard it called canola we called it oil seed rape. Also dry stone walls are only in certain areas hedges are the normal field enclosures (fun fact dry stone wallers was the most paid job in the U.K.). Silos are around the U.K. but we used massive drying sheds then a bucket loader would fill the trucks when they arrived.
Same, I’m on the Notts/Lincs border and all my mates lived on farms and I mostly lived next to farms, and it was always sheds but I have seen silos. And very much hedgerows, again these have a regional style but less so these days
Proud Yorkshireman - it was specifically stated in the video that in Britain it’s rape, while in the US it’s canola! 🤔
@TheRenaissanceman65 and Ass instead of Arse
The name for rapeseed comes from the Latin word rapum meaning turnip. Turnip, rutabaga (swede), cabbage, Brussels sprouts, and mustard are related to rapeseed. Rapeseed belongs to the genus Brassica. Brassica oilseed varieties are some of the oldest plants cultivated by humanity, with documentation of its use in India 4,000 years ago,
Canola was bred from rapeseed cultivars of B. napus and B. rapa at the University of Manitoba, Canada, by Keith Downey and Baldur R. Stefansson in the early 1970s, having much less erucic acid. Canola was originally a trademark name of the Rapeseed Association of Canada, and the name was a condensation of "Can" from Canada and "OLA " meaning "Oil, low acid", but is now a generic term for edible varieties of rapeseed oil in North America and Australasia. The change in name serves to distinguish it from natural rapeseed oil, which has much higher toxic erucic acid content.
I noticed in a recent documentary showing chris Packham going for walk the commentator referred to a field of Rape Seed as Flower Seed!!
Scotland has over 30,000 lochs/lakes, all different sizes from very small to super large.
@@EaterOfBaconSandwiches I know that was a joke but it actually rains much rarely than the rest of the world thinks, all this crap about it always rains in Scotland is total bollocks. I haven't seen rain in weeks, months even.
@@garymcatear822 it'll come once the snow thaws :)
The biggest difference I could see by looking at farming in the US is you dont have hedgerows they are very important as they shelter and feed a large amount of insects,birds and small mammals which is very importent ..
The US has way more detached houses than the UK (where they are quite rare), and also our houses are much smaller, which is why we use less land for housing
It does always amaze me that lamb is a niche meat in the US rather than a staple. Although here it is very much more popular in Indian cuisine where people don’t eat beef or pork. And despite the prevalence of ‘fish and chips’ fish is far less common than you’d expect it to be for an island nation. I think we export many times more than we eat ourselves, for some reason.
Needs a whoosh sound effect as the riding crop gag [07:22] goes straight over Ethan's innocent head. 😇 😆
He really lives up to the title of "Innocent" American lol
We use...... silos. Regarding the bushel: We used to use an imperial weight called a 'hundred weight' which strangely was 112lbs and half hundred weight sacks which were 56lbs or 1 bushel.
However, in olden times a British bushel was 8 imperial gallons. Measuring volume not weight.
The bushel is a measure of volume, not weight. A bushel of oats is 32 pounds, barley 48 pounds, rye 56 pounds and wheat 60 pounds.
Most people just tip it in the shed though.
And what are those weights in real weight?
@@alexg1778 yes but in the States and Canada grain is priced by the bushel even though they may be talking about hundreds of tons.
An interesting fact to do with water in the U.K is that no place in the U.K is further than 90 miles from the sea
Really I didn’t know that
Where I live it’s literally only a 5 minute walk from my front door to the beach
@@Rosebud_XD sames. What county you in?
Closes one to me is 18 miles which is about 30 minute drive.
@@Danny_kay I'm a 5 minute drive . If that.
84 miles and most 70 miles
The most telling thing about UK agriculture is that 3/4 of the land was wooded before we started farming.
As well as making wooden ships & iron.
Watch Jeremy Clarksons farm on Amazon, you will get a really good idea of UK day to day farming, and its funny as hell !
At 7:20 The reference to "riding crop in Soho" is is reference to sadomasochism in a sex district of London!
To clarify further, a riding crop is Jockeys use on horses, horse whip.
You learn something every day.😲
Anywhere in the UK Is within a few Hours drive of the coast.
And where I live it’s only a 5 minute walk
Never further than 70 miles in fact.
@@WanderersForever88 furthest is Lichfield at 84 miles , but yes I've seen the 70.mile one as well , but officially it's 84 miles at Lichfield , but 90% I reckon are 70 miles or less
@@glastonbury4304 interesting, because according the the ordnance survey folks it's a farm just outside Coton in the Elms in Derbyshire
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coton_in_the_Elms
(Article gives the exact grid reference)
Edit: a quick Google suggests it is anywhere between 73-80 miles from Lichfield to the nearest beach which maybe the difference.
@@WanderersForever88 yeah I saw that as well, however Lichfield has an official plaque in the town square saying 84 miles, then when I research it I find it to be true, not sure how Coton got the acolade , but it's not official 🤷...funny old thing Google at times
I suppose in the UK we just send the grain straight to where it is to be processed, the mill or industrial bakery. That is where you will see the silos.
Here in the UK, we tend to store grain in specialized barns with concrete sides. The grain is then heaped on the floor and loaded onto lorries with a telehandler or wheel loader, silos and hopper-bottom bins do exist but most farms have no of them.
Grain is basically stored in large barns. It's tipped onto the floor and scooped so it reaches up to the roof.
I live in kent the garden of England , known for its hop farms and orchards , I love seeing the patch work fields of the farms, all the different colours beautiful 💚
The UK has farms. The US has factories!
You also see a lot more drystone walls in palces like Derbyshire and Wales, where there's rocky terrain and a lot of rubble left over from the ice age grinding off the mountains and dumping debris. So like you said they did in New England farmers and shepherds gathered up the stones on their land and put it to use.
Near the south of England you see more thick hedgerows and fences rather than stone walls, but there's still a few.
Great Britain has one of the most diverse weather system. If I remember rightly we have up to five different weather systems above us and you can truly see all four seasons in a day.
also the uk does not have mega dairys or feed lots and the rules on keeping animals are vastly differant
we definitely have silos in the UK as I went to school in the country and we had to watch safety videos about not playing in them
Really? I loved playing in them as a kid, obviously empty abandoned ones. Full ones you can drown in.
They're just less widespread.
Omg, yes. In was convinced I would meet my horrible grainy death drowning in a silo.
Also a silo is classed as an enclosed space therefore they can kill.
"Apaches" which was a public service film about kids playing on a farm, all of whom died horribly was shown to us ten year olds at school. Gave most of us nightmares.
I live in the UK, between the English lake district national park (about 910 sq mile) and the Irish Sea. Although known as the Lake District and containing 16 or so large bodies of water, and many smaller ones, there is only 1 lake, bassenthwaite, the rest are meres or waters.
The biggest lake in Yorkshire is Horsea Mere.
Several of the Lake District lakes ,such as Haweswater, are actually reservoirs.
The reason property here in the UK is so expensive, contrary to popular belief is not because land is scarce. As you pointed out, it's not.
The reason is because housing builders buy the land, and the rights to build on it. But then only build a very small number of the houses they could. This keeps the pieces high.
A recent report said that the big 2 builders here, Persimmon and Barrett's have enough land with planning permission granted, to keep themselves in business at current rates of construction, for the next 80-100 years.
And that's why people struggle.
So pretty much they have monopolized the property there then?
and only a small amount of the houses they build are actually affordable, a large portion are overpriced so that richer property owners buy and then rent them. the only reason _some_ of the houses are affordable is because they need it for planning permission. a recent housing development that was approved in my closest city only had 30% affordable housing. where i live theres a huge problem with young local people becoming homeless or being forced to live with family, i know of several villages where almost no one lives there, they're all holiday homes or B&Bs owned by rich Londoners
Theres also many apartment blocks that are owned by foreign companies that wont rent them out, an increase in the amount of divorcees, and a rising population to add into the mix. Along with the fact that, if they are forced to rush the houses, it results in some rather shaky building.
All the affordable housing in my area is former military family housing, and it's not great quality. Apparently multiple families had to be moved out within weeks of the houses being built due to safety concerns.
Then, when areas are redeveloping, they often take affordable houses and make them not affordable. People are kicked out of their houses and then their houses are "updated" (they often look ugly... theres no character. Even old Victorian terraced housing looks nice and has character, coz people paint their houses and they put things in the windows), and the new houses are too expensive for them.
@@midwestamericans3806 They haven't really monopolised it. Most construction companies don't want to build the houses they could, because if they flooded the market, the price of house's will drop. So they tend to hold on to land waiting for the house prices to go up, then build a few.
It's more complex than that. We have very strict planning regulations, so developers are driven to make as much profit as they can from the limited land available for development. And when they do build, they usually cram as many homes as they can into the space; hence the UK has some of the smallest homes in Europe.
We don't need so many silos because it is rare here to feed cattle on grain. Grassfed beef tastes better, costs less to produce and is better for the environment (properly used pasture actually removes carbon and helps to reverse climate change). Our grain is generally used to feed humans and is turned into food quite rapidly after harvest.
Take a look at some clips of Captain Leroy from the show Sharpe. Sharpe is a British show about the Napoleonic wars and Leroy is an American who sided with Britain during the revolution. He says some interesting things
Slaves, cotton and molasses melted down for gold guineas.
If you want to look into the water supply issues I'd suggest looking into the drowning of capel celyn, where a village was flooded to create a reservoir, they knew they wouldn't get planning permission so went straight to parliament. The reservoir wasn't to supply local people with water,
Did the same with Rutland Water
goo.gl/maps/SsEyWUWkM3BhB7jW6
There are a few silos in England, but most farms have always used rectangular barns to store crops. When it comes to moving the crops off the farm a loader tractor with a big bucket will shovel the crop into a lorry rather than some elaborate auger system.
A lot of the United Kingdom's water (bottled) comes from the Scottish Highlands, as it is much cleaner via its natural filtering.
A huge amount is from England too. Derbyshire produces vast amounts of bottles water.
@CHRISTIAN KNIGHT Bottled water (Highland Spring and such)
@@FusionDisnep257 the biggest bottled water producers are actually all French! Volvic dominates. The second largest is Derbyshire (Nestles water bottling plant is there and also Buxtons and a few others) then Scotland, then the Welsh Borders..Malvern water etc.
@@martynnotman3467 Don't touch Volvic! Its not true mineral water. Not filtered in the ground long enough. Told this by my environmental engineering lecturer at university 20 years ago. Buxtons your best bet especially straight from the well while its still warm. Good for tea!
Most of our fresh water comes from rainfall and subsequently ground water. Where i live in Norfolk for example we get all our water from the water table.
We store out grain in barns, in massive mounds. As a kid we were specifically told not to climb them as you can sink into them and suffocate in it. However in a lot of cases the wheats cuts straight into a lorry which is then sent straight to a flour mill.
As for dry stone walls, they're primarily in the north, and used for animal pastures. Otherwise its hedges combined with drainage ditches.
There are a couple of good farming tv shows on at the moment - one called 'Our Yorkshire Farm' (channel 5, follows a family of I believe 9 (7 kids, a mum and dad) working on one of the remotest farms in England.
Then Jeremy Clarkson has also got an Amazon show now about his farm which he's just started to manage himself (previously pretty much just rented the land out to a farmer) Might be good ones to check out if you're ever fully interested in actual farm life in England
Yes but it's called "New England" because it was settled by the English, who would've brought their building techniques with them, including the art of dry stone walling. That's why so much of the New England area resembles the British Isles, including the style of some of its churches.
I know it's not the same in every state, California is just awful, the cattle were just penned up in a foot of mud , I lived there for 6 months and bloody hell they treat their livestock horribly
The main difference maker in agriculture between the UK and the US is average temperature. Our southernmost point is just north of any part of the contiguous United States and London is at the same latitude as the southern end of Hudson Bay!
That means that you only have to get about 750 feet above sea level before you reach the tree line and, in Scotland that drops to around 450 feet! That leaves lots of our available land only good for sheep and beef cattle (if only we were allowed to have deer farms too).
There is no ‘British’ farmland…farming laws in England and Scotland are different. Britain isn’t a single nation, it’s a landmass containing 3 sovereign nations. Not being pedantic but eg: GM crops are illegal in Scotland but legal in England. No such thing as British law you see
Lawrence (no I don’t know him, he’s younger than me, he does mention his age in a video) is from my hometown of Grimsby North East Lincolnshire , there are lots of fields of rapeseed here in fact there’s one field of rapeseed not far from the housing estate (you see the housing estate in one of his videos when he returns to Grimsby two years ago) he use to live on. Lincolnshire is flat during WW2 there were lots of bomber bases that’s why Lincolnshire was known as Bomber County most of the bases were returned to agriculture, some became industrial estates, others housing estates, one is the largest antique centre in the country and some became air museums, race tracks ie Silverstone, one became a car factory Lotus and others became airports Humberside International Airport, Biggin Hill International Airport and Manston or civilian airfields Wickenby. Barns are used for wheat etc as well as silos though silos in Britain are mainly used for food and drink production. Dry stone walls are found in Derbyshire and Yorkshire.
I'm from near Grimsby :)
The Lotus factory is in Hethel, Norfolk. The company started life in Hornsey, North London in converted stables, then moved to a new purpose built factory at Hethel when it expanded. They were never in Lincolnshire. Silverstone racing circuit is in Northamptonshire.
In the UK we have strict rules about “urban sprawl’. This means that each settlement is kept distinct from others, with “green belt” land between them - which is very difficult for developers to build on. Most new homes are built on previously used “brownfield” land, or “infill” land within the existing settlement boundaries.
Except now green belt land is being built on all the time (money talks) and the UK high courts are full of cases where the public is trying to stop green belt building. In my area on a regular basis a piece of green belt is built on and in exchange a new piece of green belt is assigned. Basically the green belt is being abused - nothing new for this government though is it?
@@wilmaknickersfit True in some cases but generally it’s still very difficult and costly for developers. I worked as a land buyer for a housebuilder and we would almost always avoid it.
In the UK, field shapes were mostly created during the enclosures in the 18th to 19th centuries - a period referred to as the golden age of farming in textbooks. Before that, one village would have usually 3 huge fields split into strips managed by individuals. The enclosures turned it into modern fields, allowing farmers to experiment with new methods without needing everyone in the village to agree, creating a boom. However the process of enclosures just allocated claimants an amount of land similar to what they had before, so they had to prove they had a claim and even then they might get stuck with land that was unsuitable for agriculture. There was a lot of corruption, with rich people using the process to grab all the best land and unsupported commoners losing out. Anyways, that was when the shapes of fields in the UK was decided, and most have stayed pretty much the same since then.
Many farming practices are not similar. In the USA farming is a large industry and there are less controls on animal welfare.
Are you, when you say "England," specifically talking about England or do you mean the United Kingdom? Whilst Lost in the Pond's Lawrence Brown is obviously being specific, noting the geographical image used early in the video, I note the map was both England and Wales.
Welsh Hill Farm lamb - best there is.
I get so confused sometimes, are we talking about GB or UK or England? No wonder people that don't live here get confused when we are selves arent specific. Very weird listening to facts or statistics and then hear them saying it applies to the UK and then they mention GB in the same sentence. Those are different land masses.
@@axiana I take the OP's point about some people not being clear about England vs the UK, but as far as GB and the UK are concerned, I don't think it's all that confusing.
Maybe you'll take issue but though I do realise that there's the geographical term for the contiguous land mass, Great Britain, I still feel that in common parlance, most in the UK use the term GB in a different way whenever they do use it. Namely as a synonym for the whole sovereign state of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Put it this way, I hear plenty of times people whether professional presenters on TV to common folk at work and every type of person in between, saying things like _We in Great Britain/Britain..._ and if I were to pull them up and ask them, _Well what about Northern Ireland or The Isle of Wight?_ They would likely look at me quizzically and say something like, _I was including them._
Maybe you have a different experience, or maybe you spend your life correcting people all the time and tutting whenever you hear it, either way you do you! But I just think it's not all that important...when is it really necessary to refer to the geographical land mass of Great Britain anyway? Unless you're a geologist or botanist I don't think it's ever something to be too concerned about.
@@carlhartwell7978 This is not my experience. I get the feeling we do not live in the same part of the UK which would explain why our experiences would differ, but thanks for your patronising response regardless.
@@axiana It was only supposed to be (potentially) partronising if it was also your experience, since it isn't, you have no need to feel patronised! I thought I was careful to leave room for that, sorry you were offended anyway.
I am surprised you don't hear GB and UK used interchangeably though! For a start there's the team GB in the Olympics, I don't watch The Great British Bake-Off, but I doubt they'd exclude Northern Irish contestants, and I assume it airs there (I'd be happy to be corrected though), then recently a new T.V channel called GB news... just saying...these things didn't spring up out of nowhere as far as I have known (I'm 42), I've often heard the terms as synonymous, not just in person but in the media generally.
GB News is a somewhat good example, it's caught a fair amount of flack for reasons we don't need to go into, but I've not heard any complaints that the name is in any way 'incorrect' despite Andrew Neil stating that the channel would be -
_"a fresh approach to news in Britain, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland"_
Love the way you convert from one archaic unit of measurement; the bushel, to another archaic unit of measurement, the pound.
We do have quite a lot of water, most of our water comes from the pennines, the lake district or North Wales. But there are also lots of large lochs like Loch lomond in Scotland.
I once flew from Las Vegas to Toronto on my way back home to the UK. About half way, not sure which state I could see Mile after mile of rectangular fields, dead straight lines. In the rainier hilly central, northern part of England are many reservoirs or lakes used to supply water to the built up areas nearer the coast.
There used to a Government policy that meant Britain had to be able to produce enough food to feed the population (with rationing obviously) in case of war or disaster. That policy was a direct result of World War 2 when Britain came so close to starving.
Thanks for sharing! Totally makes sense
@@midwestamericans3806 That policy changed in the late 70's I think. But that is one of the reasons such a large percentage of land is historically set aside
@@chrisdavies9821 policies changed in the ‘70’s with entry into the EU, but the emphasis remained on bulk food production with the common agricultural policy until the late ‘80’s and early ‘90’s for much the same reason. One thing Thatcher, Kohl and Mitterrand had in common was memories of the war and the hungry years just after it.
@@ballagh I didn't mention the years after the war because then you have to get into the whole end of lend lease, double summer time, bankrupt country unable to afford imports etc. It seemed to much for a youtube comment.
Nothing nicer than roast lamb, mint sauce, Yorkshire puddings and lots of gravy!
Haggis, Neeps, and Tatties
Slow cooked too
There are wheatfields some 5 minutes from my home. But have to go down a bumpy lane, with severe potholes, then navigate through a turnstile, stop the look right, then left and right again before crossing the railroad tracks. Then the vast expanse of Wheat in Southwestern Essex
Forgive if someone said it before, but Loch Ness in Scotland has the same amount of fresh water as the whole of England, Scotland has more than 90% of Britain's fresh water supply
We have silos in the UK, but they are usually only 2 stories high. Because farms are smaller they don't need to store so much grain at once. Also I suspect it gets sent for processing more regularly. There's a flour mill near me and that does have some seriously massive silos out side.
We have lots of lakes and rivers especially in Scotland
There is only 1 lake in Scotland 😁👍
We do have lakes and rivers aplenty. Also we have the Pennines which run lengthways down England and in Scotland and Wales small mountains.
We have things called barns to hold our grain and Hay and straw. Barns are usually tall box shaped constructions
Where I live in Scotland there’s lots of farm land surrounding the area most of it hidden in the hills but if you look around there’s like 6 different farms within 5 minutes from where I live there’s a sheep farm, cow farm, fruit farms and lots of random fields of oil seed rape or any other crop. There’s also a couple of really nice farm shop’s. A big disadvantage of this are tons of tractors on the roads, multiple country roads and waking up to the “lovely” scent of manure in other words, cow poop, sheep poop and pig poop.
😄😄LMAO
Does anyone else think it sounds like Laurence (or Lawrence) from Lost In The Pond sounds like he's putting on or has an Alan Partridge-esque inflection with his voice? Lmao cracks me up, never heard an Englishman sound like that except from Steve Coogan playing the role of Alan Partridge
For starters the UK doesn't do GM foods.
Since WW2 the Green Belt Act was passed in which only specially permitted buildings are allowed to be built in this particular area. This was brought about to protect our agricultural land so that the UK could feed itself if we were ever cut off to be starved out by any enemy who wishes to go to war with us. It also protects our unique countryside!
Greenfield sites are not for Industrial/residential building only so-called brownfield sites. Erosion of the general consensus is being slowly bypassed because new housing is needed. Population of UK 68+million. We don't have GM soy (and we don't want it). Present safeguards could be overlooked if new regs are brought in to attract new overseas trade agreements cos of Brexit (unintended consequences). The Soil Association issues certificate to growers whose land has been pesticide/chemical free for 5 years, otherwise it's not organic.
Size wise the UK is about the size of Florida with a population of around 60 odd million
Some very odd, but it's closer to 70 million now.
Well yes, but also no because the UK contains more hills and mountains than florida, so the amount of acreage is larger.
Woah
A fun fact for you regarding lakes, Loch Ness in Scotland has more water in it than all of the freshwater lakes and rivers in England combined.
Lough Neagh is much bigger, but too shallow to hide a monster in!
We dont really have mutton much anymore. Coz the cotton industry's success got rid of the need to raise sheep to adulthood. We do have lamb tho.
Lamb tastes better anyways 😂
@@benjaminmorgan8282 yeah.
@@benjaminmorgan8282 If you've ever had mutton properly cooked you wouldn't say that. It's a richer, almost stronger flavour, but it does need more careful cooking. If you can cook it properly though, mutton, and hogget, taste different, but just as good as lamb. Personally, while I do adore lamb, I actually like mutton (properly cooked!) more.
We do have some mutton and it is super expensive compared with lamb, and super difficult to source. As Dave says, for some meals it tastes much better than lamb and for that reason it has started appearing on up market restaurant menus. I use it to make mutton pies, I make two dozen at a time and they last less than a week, mostly given away to friends who seem keen to have them.
The UK has a lot of farm land but it still isn’t enough to feed the nation, the UK has relied on food imports for many years now, even before WW2.
Because most of its used to grow crops for animal feed ,
Storage is an interesting question. Don't know much about the subject, but I've seen a few barns with tons and tons of grain just dumped on the floor. Like 20ft+ high piles of grain. I'm pretty sure farms don't store their harvest for very long, so it wouldn't be long until someone would pick it up
No idea if that's typical though
I live in north Yorkshire and it feels like all the potatoes are grown here, makes biking a bike scary during potato harvest.
Sugar beet are no fun either. Ride safe. From Norfolk.
One of the places to explore In the UK
Is area known has the Black Country/ it’s one of the first areas The Black Country is an area of the West Midlands county,[2] in the United Kingdom covering most of the Metropolitan Boroughs of Dudley, Sandwell, and only some minor parts of Walsall and Wolverhampton. Dudley and Tipton are generally considered to be the centre.[3] It became industrialised during its role as one of the birth places of the Industrial Revolution across the English Midlands with coal mines, coking, iron foundries, glass factories, brickworks and steel mills, producing a high level of air pollution.
That information from Wikipedia 😂.
If you’ve heard of a tv show called Peaky Blinders
The first few seasons it was filmed there.
There’s a lot of to explore in uk that’s not so we’ll known has much has London, Liverpool , Edinburgh etc.
I guess there’s loads of places in USA that would be great to visit even the less know towns and cities etc
Lol on the water question. I don’t think we have anything as large as the lakes you guys have at all but it rains A HELL OF A LOT here lol so I think that’s where we get our water from? Maybe? I dunno. I didn’t really do school lol
over production of corn is probably why your food is stuffed with hfcs.
it’s simply a cheaper sugar substitute… and capitalism demands cheap.
Also, the way we treat animals is very different. AFAIK, the UK mainly has free range and don't really have any of the "mega dairy's" like the US does.
Just been to Kielder Forest at the weekend, Europe's biggest man-made dam and Englands largest forest, and pretty much the reason why the North (especially the north east) generally doesn't get hosepipe bans during the summer.
Wouldn't recommend swimming in a lot of the rivers here, and I especially wouldn't drink either. You might get some that are safe, but I don't think many would be
During the 70's and 80's I worked for a shipping company that carried grain from the Great Lakes, Duluth, Wolf Bay, Thunder Bay and also Norfolk, Va. Steel products out from Europe to Chicago and then clean out the ship and travel up through Sault Ste Marie to Lake Superior. Load grain for Europe. We used to take grain to make strong bread flour to Siloth in Cumbria UK as well as European ports. Better for bread making than British grown flour. Great times in the Lakes - Loved them. Travelled the US coast from NY to Portland Or over the years and loved it. Virginia, New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Everglades, Galveston, Panama, San Fran, Portland, Seattle. Keep up the videos - I enjoy them.
PS - Only the south east of England has permeable (chalk) substructure. The rest is Dolomite and Granite and non-permeable. Hence the lakes of Wales, the Lake District in NW England and all the Lochs of Scotland. We have no shortage of water, not because it rains too much but because we don't lose it. It's in the lakes and reservoirs. In the SE of England it's in the aquifers and TBH I wouldn't bath a dog in it although it's well fit for consumption.
Dude, a funny British really funny series that I haven't seen is Gimme Gimme Gimme. It's so funny I almost peed myself
British water is generally similar.
The further North Lakes and reservoirs
In the south ground water and aquifers.
London sits on an enormous aquifer is supplied by rainfall on surrounding hills.
We are however running out. We are not seen as particularly self sufficient with water. 20-25 years we will start having problems.
Aye and we know how England deal with water shortages. There is only one answer, drown some more Welsh villages.
Unfortunately some of Lawrence’s statistics have been mixed up, for example conflating English statistics for those of the UK. Some 73% of England is enclosed farmland but the figure falls to 56% of the UK as a whole, largely because of Scotland, where the terrain means much of the land such as mountains and hills are not cultivated. We do have silos to keep grain but they’re not as evident outside the east of England where most arable farming is concentrated.
Yes, the UK has a lot of lakes, rivers and streams...and it rains - a lot!
Most of our water is ground water, but we do have reservoirs, lakes and mountain water.
You can generally taste the difference as you travel around, because of the difference in the water table regionally. So I get very fresh tasting water here in the Highlands of Scotland, but I remember it being much harder around Salisbury plane area.
Also, a lot of our wheat production is for the beer industry.
I live in Norfolk England and I am surrounded by farm land and they grow everything from potatoes, to Wheat to Rapeseed, to sugar beats. Then we also have sprinkled among them farms that grow Flowers, Up the road from me I have a farm that sells tulips, Iris's, roses, daffodils. Then we have the farms that deal in live stock, but nearly every person I know who have gardens including my own which is huge we grow a lot of stuff our selves, I have a huge Poly Tunnel and inside grow every thing from tomatoes cucumbers green beans my own potatoes, to peppers onions and carrots and this year I have grown garlic, I also grow herbs a lot of different herbs. and then I have another green house that I grow fruit blackberries are grown wild around where I live in fact in most places and we go out 3 times a year and go pick them blanch them then freeze them, I grow gooseberries raspberries, strawberries, I have two plum trees two apple trees and 1 pear tree. Also most villages and small towns in the country have farm shops and they sell what they grow. You can not beat them for fresh produce.
We do have siloes, but we have fewer of them & they are often inside barns.
Between the World Wars Britain relied upon a system called Imperial Preference. Basically, we sold manufactured goods to our Empire, in return for which we imported Canadian wheat, New Zealand dairy products, Indian cotton and tea, Australian wool, fruit from South Africa and bananas and sugar from the West Indies. This was why the U-boats war was a matter of life and death -we have never been able to feed and clothe ourselves since the Industrial Revolution. Many of those old trade links have weakened, but we still import food from all over the world and rely on our invisible exports, banking, insurance and financial services to pay for them.
Color? It's spelt colour in the UK, if anyone didn't know.
American spelling helps a lot when playing Scrabble, or any word game. Sometimes you even get both spellings in one game.😄😄😄
London gets its water from the Thames just upstream of the city, & from groundwater, even though it's full of limescale & tastes bad. Liverpool imports its water from Wales, which is why it's some of the best. Most other cities in England have reservoirs in the hills.
There are some farms with silos but not many. Mostly, wheat goes directly to the mill. Flourmills, in the UK, have large grain silos.
Sheep were very important, back in the day. The British economy was built on it in the Medieval days, the Speaker in the House of Lords, sits on a wool sack (bale of wool) to remind them where our money came from. Many longwool breed of sheep, have died out. Still love our sheep, though.
Love the Herdwicks, hardy sheep of the fells and dales in the north
The the geographic location of the UK means we face a constant barrage of Atlantic depressions that pick up energy and moisture from seas warmed by the Gulf Stream. We have lots of rain and it falls all year round, even in the summer. If we go a couple of weeks without rain it would be worthy of a front page headline. Places in the North and West, like Cumbria (The "Lake District") are very wet and at times so vividly green it hurts you eyes. The South East has the least rain, but it has the most people and lots of arable agriculture so it tends to run out at times. Like everywhere else we are experiencing the impacts of climate change in the form of more frequent and potent storms, floods and heat-waves. In terms of farming the stats hide some interesting quirks. For example we might have 70% of our land turned over to agriculture but quite a lot of that land is really marginal, like High Fell pasture in Cumbria. You can't grow anything on it and cows would die of exposure, so that's where the sheep come in. In the US, you most probably wouldn't even consider using this type of land to add to your 50% as you still have so much more productive land that's still not being used. Also, we have much different agricultural practices. I think US cows spend more time in barns eating corn, whereas UK cows spend more time out in pasture eating grass. Beef is much more expensive in the UK and for most used to be a luxury, adding to the cultural significance of the "Sunday Roast". Sheep were of huge significance to the emergence of England as an economic power in the Middle Ages through the "Wool Trade". As the meat - more mutton than lamb - was a bi-product of wool production it was relatively cheap and the working classes could afford it and over the centuries a lot of traditional regional dishes are based on it such as Lancashire Hot Pot. As the value of wool declined with the supremacy of first cotton then man-made fibres, Lamb is now more expensive than beef!
We have reservoirs for drinking water, and a good supply of rain to keep them stocked.
Check out windermere, Cumbria in general actually, mountains, fields, lakes, caves and still a lot of business and big towns
great video. Just if you didnt know, Britain is not just England. There is Wales and Scotland too. Alot of the countryside is in these places
The Pennines, a range of hills in the north of England has many reservoirs supplying the industrial cities.
In Britain we have an area called the lake district lol we have lakes and loches but not as large as yours!
Hi I live in the UK we do have water resorviors which collect rain water some are man made, thier is one instance where a village in a valley was evacuated and flooded there have been instances where we have suffered drought in the summer and the resorvior has dried up and revealed the remains of the old village. I have seen black and white photos of the village the houses look like they are from 1800,s
The polo shirts are very common, they came from tennis players If I recall correctly then it became pretty common.. I wear one as my uniform working on a factory.
our zoning restrictions are pretty strict, so even our modern suburbs are pretty tightly packed compared to the US, there's often a hard line between the town and the farms rather than a sort of dwindling of buildings until it is all fields like in the US. converting agricultural land in the UK to anything else is pretty difficult. Also, in both countries, agricultural land can include forests, hunting estates and that sort of thing.
Fun facts:
1: most of our fresh water is from the mountains.
2: one of the main reasons that there is so little land used by buildings and business is because a lot of the land, (for example the Scottish Highlands), is mountainous and is either too tall or small to build things on especially buildings and factories or just doesn't meet the requirements for big buildings.
3: alot of our great or great great grandparents were the ones who could've built the stone walls splitting the fields in the uk and northern Ireland. Especially the ones on the Mourne mountains in northern Ireland.
In some cases field boundaries survive from the Iron Age. There was a TV programme on aerial archaeology some time ago that showed the Roman road (now the A1) south of York cutting in a straight line through the countryside. In some cases, the field boundaries on each side of the road aligned - they had been maintained on their pre-Roman forms after the road cut through them.
"Where the skies are not cloudy, all dayee..." Which is a bit if a dig at the British Isles, where they are. Indeed, here in sunny Manchester we are now in our 5th day of sunshine and temperatures between 21C and 25C, and the government are issuing "extreme temperature alerts." (Blydi attention junkies, as if we hadn't noticed it's hot).
it rains here all the time, so yes we do have many lakes and rivers, in my village we have 8 lakes and three rivers
The UK has a lot of water sources. Not only do we have plenty of lakes and rivers, but we also have highland water (mountain) and a whole lot more. All of it is shared, being taken from the rainiest parts of the UK to the places where they may not see enough rain for months.
alot of farmers will just put grains in a grain shed, a heap on the floor in a shed. i imagine the bigger the farm gets the more likly to get silos
Scotland has over 30,000 freshwater lochs, Ranging from small lochans to the like of Loch Ness and Loch Lomond according to Google. They hold vast amounts of water as they're not only big in size but also in depth and the views of the lochs are spectacular! Hope you get to visit one day to see or yourself
Let's not forget, the sheep is a multipurpose animal, not something just for lamb chops. Wool... And in Yorkshire, a major leisure industry. (Joke)
And a regular bride/mistress in Wales
Quite a few comments on whether the UK can "feed itself" or is reliant on food imports. The net balance between import and export of commodities classed as "food" doesn't determine whether a nation can feed itself, which is a calorie equation. We import tea. Whilst it would be a huge psychological blow to be cut off from our tea supply, its a low calorie item and its loss wouldn't lead to starvation. Same could be said for salad stuff from Spain. Farming is a business and a UK farmer will grow what he can make the most money on, whether for domestic consumption or export. Growing strawberries might generate a nice margin, but not many calories. You could change that to spuds which would be maybe less cash, but more calories. We also currently throw away between 7 and 9 million tons of food every year. With maximum effort and rationing we most probably could provide the population with enough calories to prevent starvation, but it would get really boring very quickly.