Dream of industrialisation …
“Walking through the English countryside on a glorious autumn morning, it is hard to imagine that a battle is raging over the future of our food and the countryside. Dappled shades of green and brown line my path; glistening grass, gently kissed by the weak morning sun; heavy dew spits from my boots with every step. Winter thrushes, recently arrived from Scandinavia, feast on berries; cattle dot the hillside, grazing on the last of the summer’s growth.
I live in the rural south of England where pasture, hedgerows and wildlife are very much part of the landscape. Yet, under a guise of ‘sustainable intensification’, battle lines have been drawn; a more industrial approach to farming, with little room for luxuries like animals out in the fields, is now seen as the way forward. After all, we need to feed a growing population - billions of extra mouths are expected on the planet within decades. This will mean, like it or not, they say, animals confined in mega-farms, disappearing from the landscape and replaced by crops grown in prairies with the aid of chemical pesticides and fertilisers.
Things have been moving in this direction for a while, but now the pace is quickening. The strain is already showing; farmland birds that were once common in Britain are at an all-time low; bees have declined below what is needed for the proper pollination of crops in Europe; and concerns about the quality of food on supermarket shelves - where it comes from, how it is produced and what it’s doing to our health.
What the intensive farming lobby doesn’t acknowledge is that the system already produces enough to feed everybody - and plenty more besides. Industrial farming now makes up a third of global production and is responsible for the greatest damage and greatest inefficiency. The biggest single area of food waste comes not from what we throw in the bin but from feeding crops that might feed human beings to industrially reared animals, losing much of its calorific value in the process.
And that really brings us to the crux of Farmageddon; far from being an uninterrupted series of warnings or horror stories, it is above all a story of hope. It shows that grazing animals on pasture, converting things people can’t eat - grass and marginal lands - into things they can - meat, milk and eggs - is a far saner way of producing food.” - Phillip Lymbery
Watch out now, we’re going to chuck our two penn’orth in … Our biggest bug bare, drives us crazy, in the world of Instagram attention spans, sensationalised media et al, is the absolute disregard of clarification of large and small scale farming practices when it comes to articles, snippets, ‘facts’ and figures around food production.
Put bluntly (and surely quite obviously) the same argument on beef production for example should not, can not, be applied to a small scale, multi generational, mixed livestock farm in the West of Cornwall as to meat produced from a ‘farm’ containing tens of thousands of animals and exported around the world. Or an opinion on dairy production be the same for a producer such as Trink Dairy - with herd numbers in the low hundreds, animal welfare as paramount and artificial input minimalised - as to a dairy mega farm - the biggest being in Mudanjiang City Mega Farm in Heilongjiang, China - with herd numbers over 100, 000 that remain indoors
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