Colchester farmer Peter Fairs admits being heartbroken by plans for a new stretch of the A12, between Kelvedon and Marks Tey. He says the loss of land will have a major impact on his business.

MANY of us will now have travelled along the superb new A14.

Others will be considering the merits and costs of the HS2 rail link.

Most of us will be pleased to see our country’s travel networks improved.

Shamefully, until now, I did not fully comprehend the effects on the adjoining landowners, the householders or the farmers.

It is only when the changes impact directly on an individual or business that the heartbreaking effects begin to hit you.

After we sowed our crops alongside the A12 last September, they established superbly and, by November, looked really well.

Then the devastating news arrived.

The road between Kelvedon and Marks Tey is not going to be widened - it is to take a new route about 200 metres south of the existing road.

It was a shock to discover that we will lose ten per cent of our total cropped area and although there will be some compensation this year, there will be nothing after this.

We do not own the land so there is no compensation for its loss to the business and that reduction in land area will not be sufficient for us to reduce our labour or machinery costs.

That means an increase of around ten per cent per acre on our overhead or “fixed” costs on the remaining area of our farm.

Although it may be a few years before the road itself is built, the authorities will be digging survey holes and long, quite deep trenches in their archaeological investigations.

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Even where these trenches are beyond the extent of the road, the soil profile will be ruined and expensive land drains destroyed.

A few weeks ago the popular team at Countryfile were explaining to viewers how much of the ancient forest and “delicate” ecosystems are going to be destroyed by the building of the new HS2 rail link.

They spent almost the entire programme telling us about threatened plants or unusual insects but they never once mentioned how much food production would be lost.

On our own little section of A12 for this year (and forever) we shall lose 92 hectares of wheat, 18 hectares of oilseed rape and 24 hectares of borage.

In consumer terms that’s 1.4 million loaves of bread, 57,600 half-litre bottles of vegetable cooking oil, 6,272 jars of borage honey and 282 million evening primrose oil tablets.

Surely the equivalent amount of these products being lost along the total length of HS2 was worth a mention on one of our nation’s most prestigious countryside programmes.

The figures are mindboggling.

No doubt huge sums of money will be spent on tree planting and restoring wildlife habitat.

Nothing can bring back the productive farm land.

The present obsession with regarding land as being suitable for anything other than food production will come back to haunt our nation within a few decades.

A minister with charge over the environment promises to plant 85.2 square miles of trees in the next five years.

The Prime Minister’s own father wants half of Britain to become a national park and other highly educated experts suggest we should use the land as a sponge to soak up flood water.

Someone called King Canute tried holding back the water in a similar stunt many centuries ago and failed.

When the sponge is full the water will take its natural course and head for lower ground.

The crass stupidity of not keeping our rivers dredged and clear of those beavers and their logs will lead to more and more flooding, whether or not there is global warming.

We may benefit by having more water voles and otters but is that really sufficient compensation for the 3,500 square miles of Amazon rain forest being lost each year to help provide organic food for health conscious academics?

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