There have been several news headlines in recent weeks about the Big Oil scandal – how, 30 years ago, the oil industry began a campaign of misinformation about climate change. There have even been calls for the ringleaders to face lengthy prison sentences. Yet today, while we fume about that, an equally serious but relatively unacknowledged campaign of misinformation is in full swing.
Big Farming.
A couple of weeks ago, I was sent an uninvited email from the National Farmers Union under the banner “Back British Farming”. The email comprised a quiz designed to test the recipient’s knowledge about British farming. For instance, did you know that 1 litre of almond milk requires 158 litres of tap water whereas 1 litre of dairy milk only requires 8? Or that British farmers are managing the land “in the most sustainable way possible”?
This is nonsense. A broad range of researchers outside the farming industry, including the World Wildlife Fund and a team at Oxford University amongst others, have calculated that almond milk, whilst thirstier than other forms of non-dairy, requires less water than dairy milk. The WWF points out that over 93% of the water required for a litre of dairy milk is used to grow the cattle feed, with the remaining 7% equating to about 10 litres, similar to the NFU’s figure. So it would appear that the NFU’s analysis has conveniently ignored all the water that is required to grow the cattle feed, perhaps because it is grown overseas. As for the “most sustainable way possible” … well, all rational argument withers before anyone taken in by that.
The Sustainable Food Trust
Meanwhile, the Sustainable Food Trust, a self-proclaimed “global voice for sustainable food”, has written a long critique of George Monbiot’s recent book, Regenesis. The name Sustainable Food Trust sounds reassuringly authoritative and independent, a bit like the Global Climate Coalition, that actually represented the fossil fuel industry 30 years ago. I am not aware that the SFT represents the farming industry as such – but it is led by people with a background in livestock farming. With the best will in the world, it is difficult to criticize one’s life’s work.
The critique is interesting, polite, and well-written, but does not hang together. There are two main criticisms of Regenesis. The first is that organic farming should be judged on metrics per hectare – e.g. carbon emissions per hectare, nitrogen leakage per hectare – rather than per kilogram of product. Thus judged, organic farming is clearly a big improvement on conventional farming in ways other than the obvious one of animal welfare.
But this line of reasoning fails to account for Monbiot’s point about low yield. The SFT indirectly concedes as much. They fully agree with Monbiot that intensive farming is appalling; but argue that a diet with “small quantities” (their words) of high-quality meat and dairy is preferable to one that is entirely vegan. And they enthusiastically endorse a study that claims pasture-fed organic meat, dairy and eggs can provide 9-23 grams of protein a day, with a midpoint of 16 grams. The average adult in Britain consumes about 35 grams of protein daily from meat and dairy (source: British Nutrition Foundation, June 2021). Ergo, we should reduce our meat and dairy consumption to probably less than half its current level. And that conclusion from the promoters of pasture-fed beef.
The second main criticism relates to land use. The SFT says that land which is unsuitable for growing crops might as well be used to feed animals. This begs the question: why not use it to regenerate woodland (subject to the caveat of having to feed the population, which is not going to happen from low-yield organic farming)? By general consensus, Britain would be largely covered by woodland in the absence of livestock.
Perhaps it is better to have at least some cattle rather than none. I don’t know. There have been a number of books written recently by farmers arguing that cattle are needed for rich ecosystems – Wilding by Isabella Tree and English Pastoral by James Rebanks, for instance – although there seems to be no scientific consensus that animal manure is essential for soil fertility. Rebanks is now taking steps to ‘wild’ his farm in Cumbria. In Isabella Tree’s case, the number of cattle she maintains in order to have a balanced farm would – extrapolated to all farming in Britain – only meet a few percent of our current meat consumption. This accords with the view of another beef farmer, Wade Muggleton – who occasionally writes for Permaculture – which is that beef should be considered as a luxury product, not as a staple. Something to be enjoyed once in a while.
The difficulty we have, as a nation, is that agriculture has become ingrained over many centuries, to the point where it’s hard for us to imagine what Britain might be like without it. It’s ingrained in our culture, our economy, our literature, our view of the countryside, our religion, and the thought processes of organisations like SFT. Half of our acreage is devoted to livestock. That was OK, planetary wise, whilst it was just Britain plus a few other rich countries – but over the last century the rest of the world has largely caught up in this respect – nearly half the habitable global land surface is now pasture and grassland (note: it’s less than this if all land is included, habitable or otherwise). The changes are visible in photos from space – now compared with 50 years ago. It is not too much of a leap of faith to imagine that this geo-engineering, through farming practices, must have an impact on the planet and its climate.
We need to keep coming back to basics: eating animals is inevitably highly inefficient, is land-intensive, water-intensive, energy-intensive, and enteric fermentation releases most of the methane from global agriculture. Nothing in the SFT’s critique changes those basic facts.