Peak Food Author John Gossop in Yorkshire Post • 02.28.09
Today the Yorkshire Post printed the article below about Peak Food author, John Gossop.

But he considers global warming and farming’s reliance on non-renewable energy to be the greatest problems yet, and has written a book and several articles to illustrate how severe their combined impact may be.
Farmers and academics have turned to Mr Gossop’s book Famine in the West and Peakfood website for his views on how the industry will look in the future.
Now his theories are likely to reach an even wider audience after he was nominated for the Climate Change category in the inaugural Yorkshire Post Environment Awards.
The award category recognises those who show innovative, imaginative and strategic thinking in tackling or adapting to climate change.
Mr Gossop, of Swinefleet, near Goole, said: “With climate change, one of the worries is it is going to make production less reliable.
“The other thing is farming itself and the food production system is dependent on the fuels that are causing the greenhouse gas problem. We are going to have to come up with a better way of using solar energy.”
Mr Gossop believes the industry could help protect the environment by embracing changes to the conventional system of farming.
Current farming practices for these crops involve using a combine harvester to separate the seed from the stem in the field.
The seed is dried using fossil energy so that it can be stored safely in bulk, while the straw is either chopped and incorporated into the soil or baled and transported for animal bedding.
Mr Gossop said: “The present system has revolved around cheap fossil fuels but, some time in the future, if fuel becomes more expensive and scarce then food itself will become more expensive and scarce.
“We need to have a farming system that makes use of the whole crop in a sustainable way. We are so wasteful in everything that we do. If we are going to continue to support a world population using so much fossil fuels, the system must change.
“I would take the crop to a biorefinery or a processing plant which extracts all the energy from the food.
“There is as much energy in the straw as there is in the seed; by collecting the straw as well and possibly turning that into cellulosic ethanol, we would be producing enough energy to ensure the farming is self-sufficient.
“In the past we have not had to worry that we are wasting so much energy, but the system that we are proposing is about trying to get around that.
“We want to fuel farming from its own resources – as it always was.”
For more information about the Yorkshire Post Environment Awards see www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/environmentawards






