Having spent the previous week in the USA, the end of last week was spent with a tractor manufacturer in northern Germany, in a field comprising some enviable deep alluvial silt. With virtually zero stones, the flat, well-drained land lent itself to growing carrots, potatoes and other root vegetables.
Apart from where we were. The edges of the site had been fenced off for an HS2-style construction project to build an enormous data centre. Reportedly purchased by Microsoft, some of Europe's most fertile and accessible farmland was disappearing under concrete to provide ever more cloud storage capacity.
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In the distance, we could see one of the Krupp Bagger bucket-wheel excavators used听in the Rheinisches Braunkohlerevier coalfield. These machines, assembled in the 1970s, are some of the largest earthmovers ever created, with the sole purpose of removing overburden and brown lignite coal in strip mines, extracting coal generally regarded as the lowest-quality and most polluting in Europe, with a low calorific value.
Germany had planned to close these mines, but their operational life has been extended in light of the war in Ukraine and the rising cost of energy.
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There was an irony that was not lost in the removal of high-quality farmland to extract coal to burn for electricity production, to supply power to a data centre, which is also removing farmland from production.
The difficult balance between energy security and economic capacity seems, once again, to ignore the value of food security. I can completely understand why ongoing lignite mining is a necessary evil to keep the lights on, but building a data centre on greenfield farmland?
