Trust farmers to make the right choices on solar projects | Letters

Farmers have long experience in balancing the needs of food and energy production, says Stuart Roberts. Plus letters from Mark Sullivan, Duncan Forbes and Peter Campion

The new environment secretary, Ranil Jayawardena, appears to believe that farmers and local communities are unable to make the right choices about which land should be used to produce food and which to produce energy (Ministers hope to ban solar projects from most English farms, 10 October).

This is not a new problem for farmers. In the 19th century, my predecessors chose to produce energy on one-third of my farm and food on two-thirds. Without the oats grown on a large part of the farm, we could not have fed the horses enough energy to allow them to help us to produce human food on the rest of the farm.