Richard Young

The Sustainable Food Trust (SFT) takes issue with a recent study undertaken in Germany and cited in an article by Damien Carrington in the Guardian newspaper under the headline ‘Organic meat production just as bad for climate, study finds’.

As we cannot now afford to take vast tracts of land out of production due to the high and growing global population, the only viable option has to be to farm all land in harmony with wildlife and preserve what little wilderness is left.

‘Kiss the Ground’, currently streaming on Netflix, has huge relevance for the massive environmental and health problems we face today. Although mostly looking at American agriculture, it includes inspiring examples from Africa, China and Haiti.

While few people yet realise it, we actually need to encourage increased production of grass-fed meat, since the most effective way to restore our degraded arable soils and wild pollinators is to re-introduce grass and grazing animals into cropland rotations.

I can see big advantages, both environmental and ethical in reducing the production and consumption of grain-fed meat, be it chicken, pork or beef. But there is an overwhelmingly important case why we should continue to produce and eat meat from animals predominantly reared on grass, especially when it is species-rich and not fertilised with nitrogen out of a bag.

Comments received online and by email, in response to Emily Franklin’s recent article Milk: The sustainability issue raised three questions about the use of soya in dairy farming, to which the SFT did not have ready answers. Richard Young has been investigating, and he’s come up with some unexpected facts.