Regenerative agriculture? Meat tax? The meat/methane debate rumbles on…
Extraordinarily, you can google something along the lines of ‘food with highest (or lowest) carbon footprint’, and while one listing will claim that because of carbon sequestered in permanent grassland, grass fed beef wins hands down – the next says it is by far the worst. Last Monday’s Guardian had an editorial titled ‘cooking animals is cooking the planet’, while two pages later, it published a letter from Simon Fairlie (author of ‘Meat: A Benign Extravagance’) extolling the biodiversity benefits of his Jersey-cow-grazed, permanently-grassed smallholding in Dorset.
Beef and dairy farmers claim bovine flatulence is just a speeding up of the carbon cycle and that methane only lasts a few years in the atmosphere, but they conveniently ignore the fact that fields get grazed multiple times a year, while ‘wild’ grass has a yearly cycle. It’s a bit like your lawn; the more you mow, the faster it will grow. It’s possible that methane isn’t the problem but, whether methane or carbon dioxide, I don’t see how they can argue that multiple cropping of high-yielding grassland isn’t a factor. Maybe, as a temporary fix, farmers should slow down the cycle (as suggested with logs in last month’s newsletter) and store the grass as silage for a few years before feeding it to the cows.
Is regenerative agriculture the answer?
Regenerative agriculture seems to be the buzz phrase of the moment and, I have to admit, I’m having a bit of trouble getting my head around it. After nearly forty years running a farm shop stroke food processing business, trying to sell the produce of Riverford, and various other, local farms, the worm has turned and product seems to be almost of secondary importance. It’s not about output but soil health, carbon sequestration and biodiversity. All important factors that have been ignored for far too long, but where’s the food going to come from? Or more importantly; where’s the affordable food going to come from? Follow the argument, as apparently voiced by George Monbiot in his latest book that I still haven’t read (Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet), to its logical end and you have to conclude that we’ll all be living off a combination of supplements and laboratory cultivated meat – which makes the concept of a farm shop somewhat redundant.
Less is more…
With the exception of the Smithfields and Cargills of this world, I don’t think many of us would deny that we need to eat less meat. Henry Dimbleby, whose National Food Strategy was so disgracefully rubbished and ignored last year by ‘he who I refuse to name’, came to the conclusion that, along with a number of other factors, a 30% reduction would just about do it. He was looking at it from a healthy diet and food security perspective so, in global warming terms, I’d be surprised if his recommendations go far enough to really keep 1.5ﹾC alive.
As the son of a livestock farmer, extremely unaccomplished butcher and all-round glutton, it pains me to say that I think the arguments of George Monbiot are probably a safer bet. The problem is that I, and tens of million others, are not going to go vegan. Livestock farming is an intrinsic part of our countryside and even businesses like Riverford Organics would struggle growing their vegetables without animal muck. Also, like gluten-free, manufactured vegan food has often been subjected to high levels of processing, and as Henry Dimbleby points out, it’s this together with the accompanying fat, salt and sugar, that causes so many health problems. The drawbacks of ultra-processed food have been well publicised, but isn’t laboratory produced food likely to have its own issues. ‘Get some genetically modified bacteria from the fermenter and print me a steak for tea’, sounds simple enough but I can’t believe it will be.
Add to the equation conventional agricultures dependence on carbon hungry and, as we’ve all heard, incredibly expensive, artificial nitrogen plus arable, animal free, monoculture and it feels like a particularly messy dead-end street – with the bonus of a vegan Sunday joint of bread and honey – if you remember the Kinks song. I know, vegans don’t always eat honey.
A meat tax?
So, what’s the answer? Liberal foodies have been banging the ‘eating less meat of better provenance’ gong for ages and, good though it may be, when the vast majority can’t afford it, it doesn’t really cut the mustard. Just eating less meat is more practical but, as said, getting 65m people to go vegan isn’t going to happen. I’m 90% sure that some sort of meat tax is the way forward. I have no idea how it might work. It could be levied on the farm, at the abattoir, or as a sales tax at the till, but you can’t get a way from the fact that it would be punitive on the less well-off. ‘Let them eat offal’ is definitely not the answer, although more nose to tail cooking would be a help (for everyone), but a meat tax would have to be accompanied by some sort of help or it would be akin to forcing people to go vegan. Assuming one pays for the other, that’s going to make meat pretty expensive, so it really should have some effect on demand. I can see that I’m thinking myself into a pretty deep hole here so I’d better stop.
It all sounds absolutely horrible but, one thing’s for sure, the free market isn’t going to come up with an acceptable, or workable, answer. Once demand is curbed, we can start looking at how to supply meat, and food in general, in a sustainable way. I’d like to think that that could be through a combination of lengthy rotations, permanent grassland and agroforestry. It all looks so easy, a/ when you’re not a farmer and b/ when you take some of the millions of hectares of land used for growing animal feed out of the equation.