Driving along Mill Road towards The Cut there is a large field of maize that has been growing all summer. It is now half way through autumn and the maize has still not been harvested. I thought that was strange until I heard a programme yesterday about the growth of UK maize production for biogas production using anaerobic digesters.
This may sound like a good idea but the increase in this cultivation has a lot of negative aspects. Instead of using some of the best food growing land to produce food for human consumption, thousands of hectares now grow maize to feed into bio digesters. Maize is not suited to UK growing conditions, requires a great deal of fertiliser and pesticides to grow well here and contributes to soil erosion (ask Mr Google and George Monbiot). So when you come across fields of maize that is still standing proud in mid October ask yourself whether this is the best use of that precious farmland.
gfreedmanblog 
I have thought for sometime (certainly long before the referendum) that we ought to concentrate more on food security. We are not only losing productive farmland to feed bio-digesters – a lot is being concreted over for housing. Like the CPRE I believe in using brownfield sites first.
Pretty sure this will be cut, chopped and used as winter feed for the Wootton’s big herd of fattening beef cattle. They grew similar amounts last year on a different field. Agree that it is very late to leave it growing, but if you look carefully, there are no corn cobs showing because it was planted in the dry spell in late spring, and not being watered regularly the plants never developed properly. Sure it will still be used as a ‘whole crop’ feed and probably mixed with other low quality cereal grains to make up a total nutritious fattening feed. There are no biodigesters in this vicinity (yet!) so would not be worthwhile moving it the 30 odd miles to the nearest.