Environment: The wider view

While the anti-meat lobby is putting across strong messages about the environment, not all of their arguments stack up and the meat industry would do well to concentrate on the facts. James Aufenast reports

By James Aufenast

- Published: 14 May, 2010

"We're worried about the sea-change in attitudes, I'll admit that. Every day we have to answer some statement from a scientist, or on a website, or from a celebrity or a crank and it takes up a major chunk of our time."

This is John Mercer, chief livestock adviser at the NFU, on the way he and his organisation have had to deal with increasing attacks on agriculture in the past 18 months. US writer Jonathan Safran Foer's book Eating Animals, released in the UK in March, slammed the industrial meat industry and was picked up by newspapers and bloggers over subsequent weeks. Climate expert Lord Stern, government advisor Gareth Edwards-Jones and chief medical advisor Sir Liam Donaldson have all spoken against eating meat. "Our diet is warming the planet. It is also damaging our health," said Donaldson this year.

In February, a 'Greener Living' website appeared from Tesco, suggesting: "Vegetables use less energy to produce than meat. So eat vegetarian or vegan meals to reduce your environmental impact and lower your carbon footprint."

But none of these anti-meat outbursts has caused quite as much a stir as Paul McCartney's call for a day a week free of eating meat, termed 'Meat Free Mondays'. Compassion in World Farming suggested in November that people should cut down on two days not just one as a way for "greener farming methods to be used", but this went almost unnoticed, whereas McCartney's 'Meat Free Monday' has been picked up by Waitrose supplier Ocado as a piece of advice on their website, and it has been mentioned at every recent NFU and Bpex conference.

If one was to be absolutely literal, the advice that 313 days of the year can be filled with eating meat would be highly beneficial to industry coffers, but McCartney appears to represent a larger agenda that worries people: "The animal activists are using climate change as a way of saying we should get rid of meat eating. It's a convenient way of targeting our industry," says head of trade development at Bpex Peter Hardwick.

It's worth considering, nonetheless, that the Meat Free Monday page on Facebook has only 1,600 members not a huge amount for a celebrity-backed campaign. McCartney is not converting swathes of people: so rather than getting carried away by emotion, it might be time to concentrate on the facts.

What are they? Well, first, it takes 9,680 litres of water to produce 1kg of beef compared to 1,790 litres of water to grow 1kg of wheat (International Water Management Institute, 2004). According to the Stockholm International Water Institute, an average human's water requirement for the year is 18,250 litres; producing 1kg beef takes up to 20,000 litres. Methane emissions from cattle form only 3% of all agricultural emissions, but the global warming potential of this gas is high 21 times as effective as carbon dioxide in fact. Nitrous oxide, which comes from manure and fertiliser, is even worse 300 times as harmful a greenhouse gas as CO2 (Bpex figures). Andrew Tylor, director of Animal Aid, sums it up: "In terms of the land needed, in terms of the amount of water consumed, in terms of the pollution generated and in terms of the greenhouse gases emitted, the data is coming thick and fast from the UN and other organisations, which paint meat production as hugely inefficient compared with plant food production."

As Tyler mentions the UN, however, it is worth looking at the organisation's recent environmental report, written in 2006, called Livestock's Long Shadow. It was much hyped at the time for purportedly showing that agriculture had a worse impact on the ecology of the planet than transport as the title might suggest creating 18% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. But in March, US scientist Frank Mitloehner from the University of California at Davis demonstrated that the UN had factored in all greenhouse gas emissions for meat production: fertiliser production, land clearance, methane emissions and vehicle use on farms, while transport emissions only took account of fossil fuel burning.

A number of organisations have quoted this 18% figure and continue to do so McCartney mentioned it when talking on Radio 4 this month. True enough, Mitloehner was sponsored to the tune of $250,000 by agricultural commodities groups, including beef producers, but the UN has accepted his conclusions and are to produce a second report at the end of the year, which should include a much lower estimate of meat industry emissions.

In fact, in the UK, carbon emissions for agriculture lag well behind other industries. According to Defra, the industry accounts for 4.1 mt, compared to 9.7mt for the public sector, 77.6mt for residential, 88.1mt for business, 134.9mt for transport and 215.2mt for the energy industry. Even when some of the 'industrial process' figure of 14.3mt is sliced out to account for meat processing and some of that figure for business to account for the retailing of meat, the industry is still well behind other major human activities. A recent study in New Zealand put processing at only 3% of its entire meat industry emissions.

Furthermore, Eblex and Bpex produced an environmental 'roadmap' last autumn, in which emissions reductions of 18% were laid down as the aim by 2020. A second report, looking at processors, is due out in the autumn. Roadmap part 1, called 'Change in the Air', focuses on an 11% reduction in beef and sheep emissions through increasing feed efficiency. This can often be as simple as the length at which the grass is cut, creating 0.32 extra kg per head of cattle every day. Fertility will also improve emissions losses, with 0.05 calves per cow the target for 2020. The roadmap doesn't take account of overall targets for 2050, set by the Copenhagen agreement, which are even stiffer: a reduction by the UK of its carbon emissions by 80%, of which 70% must come from the food industry. But as the report says, "It's a starting point."

At the same time, the roadmap expands on managed grasslands as being "increasingly valued for the range of other desirable environmental goods and services they provide including carbon storage, water quality, flood prevention". Bpex calls it a 'carbon sink' terminology that in fact is regularly used by industry figures. The idea that, yes, animals release methane through both front and rear ends, but the land they feed on also absorbs carbon in the atmosphere better than urban or sparsely vegetated (horticultural) land is one of the strongest pro-livestock arguments in the carbon equation. It makes the industry into a benefactor to, as well as a drag on, the world's carbon count. It is, if you like, the industry's main get-out clause.

However, Ceris Jones, climate change advisor to the NFU, isn't so sure. "Storing carbon in soils and vegetation is complicated. People say that soils are the biggest store of carbon, but the problem with this is that there is so much variability, and it's a really slow process. Also, depending on the soil type it's not something that goes on forever."

lowland efficiency

The Bpex roadmap in fact demonstrates the greater efficiency of lowland livestock farming, which is less dependent on grassland: 12.62 GWP100 (Global Warming Potential based on a 100-year life cycle) kg C02 for lowland sheep flocks compared to 18.44 for hill grazing, and 10.97 GWP100 for dairy herds versus 16.98 for hill and upland beef. If a growing world population needs to be fed, then surely intensive farming is the way forward.

This may be true, but getting rid of upland farming because it is non-intensive, or because animal rights campaigners want it, will actually harm carbon numbers. Taking the animals away, then ploughing the land or planting it with trees may sound ideal, except that the drying of the moorland peat would release vast greenhouse emissions.

Further, it's not all about carbon. According to Jones at the NFU: "To have an accurate idea of every farmer's emissions and consequently of possible targets you would have to put a methane monitor on every cow and measure the nitrous oxide emerging from the soil every day." That of course, is too expensive, even for individual farms.

"It's far easier to measure the processing industry," Jones adds, "where you can see electricity savings with meters placed across a plant to determine areas of efficiency and inefficiency, and where workload or machines can be adjusted accordingly."

There are plenty of good models for plotting carbon footprints, notably those from Kite Consulting, used by supermarket Asda. The New Zealand government recently released a report on its lamb market emissions and Northwick Research Station and Cranfield University are producing extensive research. But it would be well to see more to the environment than counting emissions numbers. As Sion Jones of Hybu Cig Cymru Meat Promotion Wales says, one of main arguments for livestock farming is that the land isn't good for much else: "The Welsh mountains are only good for grazing sheep. You wouldn't get many contractors sending a combine harvester or seed drill up some of those slopes!"

And there are other factors beyond 'needs-must'. According to Mark Driscoll, head of the WWF's One-Planet food programme, "Landscape character, biodiversity and employment of local communities take this pro- and anti-meat situation beyond a black-and-white debate." Intensive farming doesn't score so well on this count, with a build-up of nitrates, land degradation and imported feed. The use of soya as feed in intensive farming has its complications as between 2003 and 2006, 70,000sq km of Amazonian rainforest was destroyed to produce the crop (Greenpeace figures) "a hugely negative environmental impact", according to Driscoll.

But, says Peter Melchett, policy director at the Soil Association, "ultimately, it is incredibly good news for British farmers".

"The UK is one of the best areas in Europe for producing beef and lamb," he says, "with traditional areas such as the Somerset Levels and the Norfolk Broads. The South Downs have National Park status because of the grazing of sheep. The range of breeds such as Aberdeen Angus and Red Poll in the UK is fantastic. It's wrong just to say 'don't eat meat'. I would say eat more grass-fed meat and less that depends on grain or soya feed. The opposite of what has caught the public imagination is the truth."

This is no clearer than with fruit and vegetables in many parts of northern Europe. The huge carbon impact of heated polytunnels in Finland is creating significant issues for the country's farmers, who are seeking to get carbon emissions down to Copenhagen agreement levels. The AHDB's business development manager Steve Tones admits this high-energy growing of plant food is "a nightmare for the environment on a per square metre basis", although in the UK the impact is minimal.

We should not forget, either, one final way in which the industry footprint is coming down inexorably year-on-year. The annual decline in the UK's beef and sheep herd numbers is helping massively towards the 11% reduction in emissions by 2020. Thanks to many farmers going out of business, natural economic forces, for once, are on the side of the environment.