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[Grim Portent]

Most of the pastures serve as fridge and sofa disposal centers. 

[Frumple]

For what it's worth, pasture land generally has kinda' shitty returns on it, insofar as exportable stuff goes. And that's assuming it's all actually being used, which nqt suggested otherwise.

[Sheb]

Because French pasture are of higher quality and French cheese gets a premium. By contrast, a lot of UK pasture is low quality sheep grazing.

[Frumple]

... seems pretty obvious that it's because UK isn't actually using the land for pastures, innit? It's just classified as such and... sitting there.

Though. With those numbers, unless my eyes are borking out or I'm misunderstanding something, 43289>42984. I mean, by a bit over 300 mi², but still. It doesn't even remotely explain why UK farmers are apparently crap at doing the whole grazing animal thing despite roughly the same amount of land investment, but...

[Loud Whispers]

I don't know where you got your statistics, but the ones I have here are the opposite- France is 33.4% arable land, UK is 25.7%. Unless you mean agricultural land, which is something different (arable land is a part of agricultural land, but they are not synonymous). The reason why the UK has such high percentage of agricultural land is because it's all pastures. Almost half of the UK is pastures (45.7%). France, by contrast, is mostly arable land and forests (29.2% forests).
EDIT: Now, if you want to get into the statistics of it all, that's where things get interesting. This is the import info of Britain in 2012; here's the info for France. You can switch it, too. Now, as is obvious, France has a large amount of foodstuff exports while both have the same amount of foodstuff imports. However, what they are importing differs; Great Britain imports a hell of a lot of wine, while France imports tobacco, chocolate, and baked goods. Considering that France exports 10.2 billion in wine, it would make sense that a lot of those areas of arable land are for wine production.
The interesting part is that you'd expect a similar result for Great Britain with all of its pastures, but there isn't. Out of all their main animal products, their highest export is fish. Fish! The main export of Great Britain is cars (nuclear reactor parts, and oil, too), which makes one wonder what the hell all of those pastures are for.

The fact that our highest export is fish is because we have some of the most productive fishing grounds in the world. Forgive me for being about as surprised as finding out the Swiss are exporting watches or Sri Lanka exporting tea. Moreover most of our food produce stays in Britain as unsurprisingly people in Britain need food too, with 60% foods needs met by British farmers and supermarkets priding themselves on using British produce or else their competitors slag them off.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Pastures are for livestock. We have a lot of livestock. Livestock don't export as well as wine. Welsh jokes are close.
You'd also see a lot more dairy exports but it's hard to compete with Australian dairy farmers since they're right next to China and supermarkets artificially drive British milk prices down so low that British dairy farmers cannot afford to keep their operations running. Besides that British livestock are doing quite well for themselves.
You think it wouldn't be so surprising what the purpose of pastures are. I thought everyone knew.
Pastures are good grazing grounds. Livestock need to graze. Inside a pasture you can allow your livestock to graze knowing they won't run off. You need a lot of ground because livestock eat a lot. And of the ground that is left ungrazed, that is cut and stored for silage come the winter. Mystery solved.

[Loud Whispers]

I couldn't actually find any numbers on volume of livestock versus monetary export of livestock.

I don't know why you're looking for export numbers when we even need to import meat where British livestock is insufficient in quantity to meet demands. 90% of Pork eaten in Britain and 72% of the Beef eaten comes from Britain. Britain does not export to itself. The livestock in Britain invariably feed Britain. Can't make this any clearer.

[scriver]

You think it wouldn't be so surprising what the purpose of pastures are. I thought everyone knew.

Well yeah, hence the Welsh jokes.

[scrdest]

Pastures are for livestock. We have a lot of livestock. Livestock don't export as well as wine. Welsh jokes are close.

On the plus side, you can't fuck a glass of wine.

Or at least, I hope nobody ever tried. Someone almost certainly did try, knowing humanity.

[Frumple]

Have you seen fancy wine glasses? Some of 'em would work just fine. And that's without going straight to the bottle. You occasionally hear about a medical call to help someone that got stuck.

[Loud Whispers]

Because French pasture are of higher quality and French cheese gets a premium. By contrast, a lot of UK pasture is low quality sheep grazing.

Who's talking shit about my sheep? I'll have you know they're 10/10 sheep as judged by a consortium of Welshmen

[smjjames]

Lets not even go there, lol.......

[Frumple]

Breaching the concept of going and thus the associated coming is not how you head off this sort of discussion, friend smj.

[smjjames]

Breaching the concept of going and thus the associated coming is not how you head off this sort of discussion, friend smj.

I was actually responding to you, not loud whispers.

[Helgoland]

I pity the man who can fuck an unmodified wine bottle.

[Sheb]

Why? You just need a very strong condom, a large knife a good dose of fortitude.