I am a farmer, the third generation to grow crops and pedigree beef cattle on my family’s modest farm on the edge of the picturesque Charnwood Forest in Leicestershire.
Summer and autumn is primarily given over to long days of harvesting and planting crops while our 150 traditional longhorn cattle munch at grass; in the long winter nights, they come indoors to shelter and chew at hay harvested and stored in the spring.
Most of you reading this, I would wager, are not directly associated with agriculture. It might therefore be assumed that there’s a gulf between our plains of existence, that we do not and cannot understand each other. I believe this is a false assumption.
Sustainable British agriculture will most likely be sold down the river in any quick free trade agreements
In recent months many farmers have felt a genuine sense of beleaguerment; the tectonics of our world have shifted perceptibly. While a hard Brexit poses an existential threat to our livelihoods and heritage (the chill winds of which are already being felt), we are also baffled as to why we have come under sustained assault from much of the media for farming’s contribution to climate change. The echo chamber of the virtuous seems to have decreed that modern agriculture deserves a good hiding for its sins; real, exaggerated and imagined. Demand for help from charities specialising in aid for farmers, both mental and financial, is increasing.
Yet when it comes to our food, we all appreciate that we live in a world of finite resources, within a warming atmosphere, and that a sustainable approach to our food production is – in the long run – the only responsible approach. Trust me, farmers are at the coalface when it comes to the worsening consequences of the climate crisis. We feel the effects in our everyday lives.
Where our understandings may diverge, however, is in the reality of what sustainable food production really means for your shopping basket, your diet and for food policy in this country. Red meat is currently the bête noire of the environmentalist movement. As a farmer, it’s impossible to go a day without being assailed by criticism of this oldest of farming practices. But it isn’t out of personal or professional pride that I take exception to the false, binary narrative that switching to a “plant-based diet” is necessary to avert climate disaster. It’s frankly a facile misrepresentation of the evidence.
Take the recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on land use and climate change. Meat consumption was only one element of a balanced look at global agriculture, but it has become a clarion call to western veganism – despite the IPCC promoting the “opportunities and benefits of resilient, sustainable and low greenhouse gas-emission (GHG) animal-sourced food”. As the report says, there are vast global variations in the sustainability of food production. In the UK, we happen to be world-class. Ruminants such as cattle emit methane; they are a source of GHGs. But permanent pasture – accounting for 70% of farmland in the UK, on which nothing else can be grown – is also a GHG sink. Grassland absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere as the grass grows, and sequesters it in the soil as organic matter; the more it’s grazed and trampled by livestock, the more it absorbs. In the UK, 10 million hectares of grassland hold 600 million tonnes of CO2 and sequester another 2.4m tonnes per year. UK agriculture as a whole contributes some 10% of the UK’s GHG emissions – but this takes no account of our ability to also act as a sink. This dichotomy makes farming unique in the economy.
British livestock production is among the most sustainable in the world; 85% of the water consumed by our sheep and cattle falls as rain on our abundant grass – which our temperate climate is perfectly suited to growing. This grass constitutes 90% of the feed consumed by our cattle and sheep. Our carbon footprint is 2.5 times lower than the global average, and our methane emissions have dropped by 10% in the past 30 years. Is British production perfect? No, and we look to improve it in the coming years: Minette Batters, the president of the National Farmers Union, recently committed to the ambition of a net-zero target for agriculture by 2040, 10 years earlier than the government’s own aim.
Contrast this with livestock produced elsewhere, for example in the Amazon basin. Is it sustainable to consume cattle bred on land recently cleared of rainforest, or fed grain that is grown on that same land? Of course not. Yet in July, more than 1,400 sq km of rainforest – an area larger than Greater London – were cleared in Brazil alone. This is environmental nihilism on a grand scale. By the same token, it makes no sense to shun sustainably produced British meat in favour of a “plant-based diet” of avocados or almonds grown in some of the driest places on Earth using blue water sucked from rivers, lakes or aquifers.
In the UK, despite alarmist headlines about the mass extinction of wildlife as a result of modern “intensive” farming, the truth is more nuanced. As the State of Nature 2019 report made clear, climate change, urbanisation, pollution, invasive species, predation – all are contributory factors to biodiversity loss. Any loss resulting from agriculture can be traced back decades – even centuries – to very different times. British farmers have never been more environmentally proactive, in recent years planting 10,000 hectares of wildflowers and planting or restoring 30,000km of farmland hedges. Can British farmers do more to reverse declines? Of course. But can the same be said of food producers currently clearing untouched spaces around the world?
A truly sustainable food system must be a triumvirate of producer, consumer and state. It’s an inescapable fact that British consumers are overwhelmingly concerned with the price of their household food above all else, despite enjoying the third most affordable shopping basket in the world, accounting for less than 10% of average household income. Indeed, a recent European Food Safety Authority study found that British shoppers are significantly more concerned with price than the EU28 average, while their concerns over sustainability came a distant last.
And herein lies the paradox for our food system: sustainable food has a monetary cost that few are willing to pay. Farmers cannot act alone as the social and environmental conscience of the nation, not while they receive just 7% of the agri-food value chain. In past decades, support payments from the common agricultural policy (CAP) have underwritten our cheap food culture and kept prices low – along with the market dominance of the large supermarkets. CAP support currently constitutes 61% of the average farm’s income, and all that UK farmers really know about the post-Brexit trading environment is that these payments are set to disappear, while standards and environmental protections are set to increase.
To the challenge of higher standards, farmers say bring it on. But we have to operate on a level playing field. Sustainable British agriculture will most likely be sold down the river in any quick free trade agreements, our markets opened to the cheapest, most unsustainable and environmentally damaging foodstuffs from around the world. The result: sustainable, quality British produce becomes the preserve of the well-off, while the poorest make do with the global dregs, which it would be illegal to produce here – and which have a cost greater than money.
We must do better than this. Sustainably produced, quality, high-welfare British food must be a choice for all. But to achieve this, farmers, consumers and government must make climate-friendly food a priority. Our future depends on it.
