‘Set-aside’ is land taken out of intensive cereal production and left fallow or unseeded for an agreed period of time. The two key benefits of this policy were to reduce the size of the ‘food mountains’ created by excessive crop production and to give arable land a chance to recover through improving the soil chemistry. This scheme was initially introduced by the EEC as part of the Common Agricultural Policy in 1988, but was abandoned by the EC in 2008 to mitigate food shortages and increasing food prices after two successive years of poor harvests. However, fallow or set-aside land is a relatively rare commodity in the current economic climate and is rarely experienced in the field.