Farmers hit back as BBC documentary exposes 'devastating effect' of meat production
The impact of animal agriculture on biodiversity and climate was a hot topic that continued to gain steam as 2019 came to a close.
The debate spilled into the mainstream after a BBC documentary sought to highlight the negative consequences of meat production.
In the documentary, animal biologist Liz Bonnin investigates the environmental impact of animals being raised to supply the world's demand for meat, and looks at efforts designed to reduce the effects.
She noted: “In the last 50 years the global cattle population has increased by 400 million, the number of pigs has doubled and the number of chickens has increased five-fold, and all to keep up with our meat-eating demands.
“This is having a devastating effect on our ecosystems as more and more land is being used for meat production, intensive farming is polluting our rivers with animal waste and the ever increasing number of livestock is contributing to global warming.”
But Patrick Holden, CEO of the Sustainable Food Trust (SFT), told us there needed to be a differentiation ‘between the livestock systems and meats that are part of the problem, and those that are part of the solution’.
"There is no doubt that grain fed, intensively farmed livestock, including those found in feed-lots in the USA, are hugely damaging to the environment and public health, and for this reason should be phased out entirely,” he said.
However, he added that sustainable agriculture represented one of the most ‘significant opportunities to mitigate irreversible climate change, primarily through the regeneration of our soils’. Grazing ruminant animals (including cattle and sheep), have a critically important role to play in rebuilding our soil fertility and carbon stocks, he said.
“We must move away from the prominent models of intensive, often monoculture systems which rely heavily on chemical inputs, towards more regenerative, mixed farming models, that integrate the production of plants for human consumption with natural soil fertility building phases within rotations.
“This can include the introduction of cover cropping and grass, which when grazed in a sustainable way can not only produce food we can eat, in the form of grass fed meat and dairy, but also improve the fertility of our soils.”
The heated debate certainly got FoodNavigator’s readers talking – and reaching for the share button.
