Talk:Agriculture in the United Kingdom/GA1

GA Review

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I recommend removal from GAN as failed (no prejudice against a second or third opinion). It is largely based on an outdated source, although there are plenty of available modern sources. This alone requires rewriting that cannot be accomplished within one review-fix cycle. It is poorly structured, and does not cover substantial subtopics. Style needs a second or third pair of eyes; right now the text is filled with unnecessary dictionary definitions and statements of the obvious.

General comments:

• Sourcing: is the 1949 Watson and Moore still reliable today in all cited instances (that is, as statements of present-day environment and practices)? Use modern sources, especially in matters of farming practices (it's Agriculture, not History of agriculture).
• Sourcing: use printed sources instead of Overton's web presentation. It's not a matter of reliability of this particular writer, but of the level of sources employed. Surely an academic book will present the same subject in more depth and with better arguments that simply have no place in a TV show.
• Definitions: the text contains many definitions, down to dictionary-level (e.g. "Reaping is the process of harvesting a crop..."). They can be replaced with simple blue links, cannot they?
• Statements of the obvious: too many phrases like "Infectious diseases present a serious risk to farmers and can wipe out a crop, herd or flock", "Seeds may be sown in spring, summer or autumn." etc.
• Article structure is unbalanced, indicating poor planning and insufficient sourcing. There are very long sections ("Pests") and very short one ("Manure"), leading to a question: why? More about it below.
• Missing topics: I expected to see at least summary-style introductions to "Agricultural Science in the UK" and "Innovations in Agriculture" (apart from existing organic foods), "Farmers' cooperatives" (if they exist), "Relationships between Farmers, Agro Coops (if they exist) and the Food Industry" (who has more weight in negotiating prices "at the farm gate").

Hair-plucking:

• "total area on agricultural holdings is about 17,500,000 hectares of which 6,200,000 hectares are croppable" - what's in the 11,300,000 "up-croppable"?
• "the country is so heavily populated" - oh really? (at the very least, remove "so heavily" - WP:WEASEL
• The table headings in "Economics": mutton, lamb and pigs aren't "crops". Perhaps, "commodities"?
• "the soil has been heavily glaciated" - link?
• same sentence: "redistributed the resulting matter" - resulting from what, precisely? Glaciers don't create any new matter (in any sense of the word), they just shift pre-existing soils and rocks.
• "Nitrites are also soluble, and the soil has no power to hold them, so rain rapidly carries them away" - is it good or bad?
• "covered pipes have been used in more modern times" - the source is dated 1949, perhaps "modern" meant "interwar period"?
• Sub-section on manure, nitrogen etc. - too short to be worth separate subsection. Too general in the context of British agriculture; phrases like "artificial potash fertilisers were not used until deposits of potash salts were discovered in Germany in 1861" are not necessary in this article. And, quite likely, not reliable at all: 1949 source describes (at best) 1949 practices. I'm sure that present-day fertilizer technology has changed since the post-war years.
• "Larger-scale attempts to reclaim land have been in hand since the Stuart era, particularly between 1760 and 1860 and particularly in the Fen district" - is it The Fens or the Fens in general? The phrase makes an impression that the process had ended somewhere in the Victorian times, but, given that the reference is to a 1949 book, perhaps there were significant change in the last 50 years?
• Weeds and pests: the tables appear unnecessarily large compared to "crops". Undue weight? Another concern, they don't rank pests by the degree of threat. So it appears that relatively benign pidgeons are (at least) just as bad as the unnamed Phytophthora. If you're determined to keep lists of pests, then fungal diseases need a better representation.
• "Between 1750 and 1850, the English population nearly trebled, from an estimated 5.7 million to an estimated 16.6 million, and all these people had to be fed from the domestic food supply." - incorrect. No one had to feed them. A look at statistics [1] shows that imports of basic foodstuffs soared before 1850. And even before then, a colonial empire with the world's largest merchant fleet could get their rations from overseas, could it not? See the preceding page of the cited book.
• Organic farming: "there are definite benefits in terms of conservation and wildlife" - it makes sense to add another line explaining why it is beneficial.
• "biofuels are quite bulky for their energy yield" - incorrect. Not the biofuels, but the raw harvested crops processed into biofuels.
• "therefore supplement their finances through non-farming activities. This is called diversification." - incorrect: diversification does not necessarily mean "diversifying into something completely different". A simple change in crops can be called diversification too.
• "Barriers to entry": "land with vacant possession" - is just "land", which is vacant and thus put for sale? Or is it a specific legal status of land?
• Perhaps it makes sense to explain why the land prices soar, while at the same time farming doesn't pay well to farmers. An asset that doesn't pay off should not be overvalued, shouldn't it?
• One thing that worried me reading the economy-related paragraphs: "farmers, farmers, farmers...". Just how much of the total crop come from farmers, and how large is an average farm? alternatively, how much of the market is controlled by medium and big businesses? Could it be that, while small farmers are whining about poor incomes, the industrial-size farms fare much better? We know the numbers of these old farmers, but they aren't the only players in the market, are they?

Reviewer: East of Borschov 07:24, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

2nd Opinion

There are faults with the article so it should be put on hold and the issues worked through with the nominator. Jezhotwells (talk) 08:26, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

Response

I was expecting an objective assessment of the article against the criteria at WP:WIAGA. It's rather perplexing to object to basic definitions and statements of the obvious, and I'd recommend a brushup on standard editing guidelines such as WP:OBVIOUS and WP:PERFECT:- the article should be a standalone treatment of the subject from first principles, written in such a way that an intelligent but uninformed foreign teenager can make sense of it. Bluelinks are for further reading on a subject, not for replacing the basic information the article should give.

Watson and Moore is a good source because it does explain things from first principles. Modern academic sources tend to be more focused.

Overton is a recognised academic writing for the BBC, which would be a perfectly acceptable source at FAC, never mind GAN (which is below A-class).

It's highly unusual to recommend that an article be failed out of hand unless one of the quick-fail criteria is met. The review we have looks like a subjective and, I'm afraid, rather ignorant decision to fail the article followed by a laundry list of self-justification.

In order to reduce potential conflict I will disengage, withdraw the nomination and take it to WP:PR for a second opinion instead.—S Marshall T/C 17:48, 2 August 2010 (UTC)