- Location
- Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
I suppose we’ll have to talk about George Monbiots wretched ‘Apocalypse Cow’ TV show.
For those who don’t know, George is a newspaper columnist, who uses his platform to promote his own peculiar environmental theories. This is handy for him, and he’s pretty slick at putting his message over – especially if no-one is able to challenge it. So let’s take a look at his telly show.
The thrust of it was that we shouldn’t raise livestock at all, but should use protein from gloop developed in a laboratory, grown in factories. This would, he reckons, allow us to ‘rewild’ most of the farmed landscape. Subsidies paid to farmers should be redirecting them to allow trees to grow, which would recapture all the carbon we’ve lately released by burning oil. There’s more to it, interwoven with his own deep seated prejudices, although he smoothly assures watchers it’s simply logical.
He belabours the centuries of carbon released when farmland is cleared of trees- which is partly true-, but neatly skips over the hundreds of millions of years worth of carbon released when coal or oil is burned. I notice he carefully doesn’t mention methane from livestock …presumably he’s realised it’s a complete red herring.
He introduces us to, and then takes apart, a very pleasant Welsh dairy farmer called Abbie –who remained calm and reasonable in the face of his stupid rationale.
Upon finding out there’s a bit of palm oil kernel – an imported by-product- in her cow cake, he leaps to it being her fault the orangutans are being shaken out of their Indonesian trees. This is a bit rich, as using such products is simply a facet of a complex global economy… it’s hardly reasonable to zero in on this one part of it. Rubbishing the entire UK dairy industry because of that tiny element is puerile.
He repeats the ludicrous suggestion that poor management of topsoil is leaving us with ‘only 60 harvests left’. I’m a bit perplexed, since this claim was made several years ago…but the timeframe remains 60 years. In fact, while many of us could do with improving our soil management, the headline claim is demonstrable baloney. And cutting livestock out of farming definitely isn’t going to help. Ironically, he later talks about how we should all live on the aforementioned gloop…grown in factories. Er….hang on George.
While he laments how much tillable ground is devoted to growing animal feed, and how it would be so much more efficient to grow crops for people, he omits some little details. An awful lot of animal feedstock is actually by-product, or from low grade crops. In fact, in soggy temperate climates, it’s very difficult to predictably grow perfect bread making wheat –just a few heavy downpours in the days preceding harvest can have a profound effect on quality. Happily we’ve developed a system for converting what doesn’t pass muster. But George doesn’t want to face up to this, he pretends it’s all simple, and he knows better.
Then we go off to paddle about in the River Wye, where he points out the lack of aquatic life, squarely laying the blame on polluting farmers upstream. And, in part, he may very well be right. Indeed, my toes curl whenever I hear of another spillage of effluent killing fish…it’s indefensible. Mind, it should be pointed out that it’s not always farmers doing the spilling. Ask the surfers. Anyway, it’s a whole lot more complex than he wants us to see. There are several streams around me whose life is slowly disappearing, changing them out of all recognition, streams I’ve known all of my days. And here’s the thing George….most of these have no slurry stores upstream, no poultry manure being spread, no nitrogen fertiliser being applied. They rush off rainy moorland, where even the number of grazed livestock has dropped to the lowest level for many decades. There are clearly airborn pollutants coming out of the sky, and if you want to start talking about this, we need to face what everyone is doing, not just farmers.
George then paused to polish his little eco-halo, claiming he hardly ever flew nowadays, before hopping on a plane to visit a factory in Finland. Here, some clever boffins have manged to ferment up a source of protein from thin air – well, thin air, water, plenty of electricity, and ingredients unspecified. George is determined that this gloop is going to replace meat in our diets, and that farmers are going to become redundant. The key ingredient is apparently some microbe using hydrogen as a fuel. I laughed out loud at this, as my livestock are currently also using hydrogen as a fuel. Only instead of doing it in a factory, my clever cows and sheep allow moorland vegetation to harvest the energy from a big ball of burning hydrogen that obligingly appears over the Eastern horizon each morning.
Whether consumers want to see my cows grazing their hills, or a factory growing gloop in a vat, remains to be seen. But I’m wagering on the former. As to what health problems arise from living on the gloop…that remains to be seen. Ironically, the only real benefit I could see from this fake high protein stuff is that it might be a cheap animal feed supplement, rather snookering George’s argument about arable land usage.
He then amusingly took us to meet a ‘revolutionary’ farm in –I think- Oxford, where some ‘beard and sandal’ types were organically growing crops using no animal manure. George was almost lost in awe as he showed us how they were using what we farmers call ‘greencrops’ as fertiliser. Because in my opinion he’s an epically ill-informed man, George thinks it’s new, despite there being- for instance- a well-known research farm called Rothampstead, where similar work has been going on for over a century.
In fact it’s as old as farming. Allowing land to lay ‘Fallow’ is the simplest form, through to deliberately growing crops which best build organic matter, and hence vicariously nitrogen, to rotations that include legumes that specifically grab nitrogen. Mixing livestock into the system is the pinnacle of such thinking, but we’ll have to wait for a moment here, while poor George catches up.
Bringing us back to his pet rewilding theory, where we should allow nature take over most of Britain, he visited a Scottish estate where they’re trying to nail the red deer numbers down to allow trees to grow across the hills. George would prefer to re-introduce wolves to do this, especially as the current method is to shoot -and eat- Bambi. He was even allowed to pull the trigger, although it made him cry. Curiously he doesn’t seem to shed tears for the animals denied their very existence in his quinoa fields, wherever they might be.
He goes on about allowing trees to grow in the uplands, to store carbon, ignoring the fact that such mountainsides will barely grab any carbon with the scrub that might eventually creep up the slope. Again, there’s a wealth of research on it, with maps of what yields might be expected where. You would get vast thickets that no-one could walk through, and his wolves will eat your dogs, but never mind.
George stupidly thinks he knows better than everyone else, and Channel 4 –who are corporate investors in the ‘meat free’ industry- allow him to promote his hurtful disingenuous nonsense, insulated from the reality of how the world actually works.
Perhaps tomorrow, instead, we’ll consider what changes we could be making.
-------------------------
Anton's articles are syndicated exclusively by TFF by kind permission of the author and WMN.
Anton also writes regularly for the Dartmoor Magazine
For those who don’t know, George is a newspaper columnist, who uses his platform to promote his own peculiar environmental theories. This is handy for him, and he’s pretty slick at putting his message over – especially if no-one is able to challenge it. So let’s take a look at his telly show.
The thrust of it was that we shouldn’t raise livestock at all, but should use protein from gloop developed in a laboratory, grown in factories. This would, he reckons, allow us to ‘rewild’ most of the farmed landscape. Subsidies paid to farmers should be redirecting them to allow trees to grow, which would recapture all the carbon we’ve lately released by burning oil. There’s more to it, interwoven with his own deep seated prejudices, although he smoothly assures watchers it’s simply logical.
He belabours the centuries of carbon released when farmland is cleared of trees- which is partly true-, but neatly skips over the hundreds of millions of years worth of carbon released when coal or oil is burned. I notice he carefully doesn’t mention methane from livestock …presumably he’s realised it’s a complete red herring.
He introduces us to, and then takes apart, a very pleasant Welsh dairy farmer called Abbie –who remained calm and reasonable in the face of his stupid rationale.
Upon finding out there’s a bit of palm oil kernel – an imported by-product- in her cow cake, he leaps to it being her fault the orangutans are being shaken out of their Indonesian trees. This is a bit rich, as using such products is simply a facet of a complex global economy… it’s hardly reasonable to zero in on this one part of it. Rubbishing the entire UK dairy industry because of that tiny element is puerile.
He repeats the ludicrous suggestion that poor management of topsoil is leaving us with ‘only 60 harvests left’. I’m a bit perplexed, since this claim was made several years ago…but the timeframe remains 60 years. In fact, while many of us could do with improving our soil management, the headline claim is demonstrable baloney. And cutting livestock out of farming definitely isn’t going to help. Ironically, he later talks about how we should all live on the aforementioned gloop…grown in factories. Er….hang on George.
While he laments how much tillable ground is devoted to growing animal feed, and how it would be so much more efficient to grow crops for people, he omits some little details. An awful lot of animal feedstock is actually by-product, or from low grade crops. In fact, in soggy temperate climates, it’s very difficult to predictably grow perfect bread making wheat –just a few heavy downpours in the days preceding harvest can have a profound effect on quality. Happily we’ve developed a system for converting what doesn’t pass muster. But George doesn’t want to face up to this, he pretends it’s all simple, and he knows better.
Then we go off to paddle about in the River Wye, where he points out the lack of aquatic life, squarely laying the blame on polluting farmers upstream. And, in part, he may very well be right. Indeed, my toes curl whenever I hear of another spillage of effluent killing fish…it’s indefensible. Mind, it should be pointed out that it’s not always farmers doing the spilling. Ask the surfers. Anyway, it’s a whole lot more complex than he wants us to see. There are several streams around me whose life is slowly disappearing, changing them out of all recognition, streams I’ve known all of my days. And here’s the thing George….most of these have no slurry stores upstream, no poultry manure being spread, no nitrogen fertiliser being applied. They rush off rainy moorland, where even the number of grazed livestock has dropped to the lowest level for many decades. There are clearly airborn pollutants coming out of the sky, and if you want to start talking about this, we need to face what everyone is doing, not just farmers.
George then paused to polish his little eco-halo, claiming he hardly ever flew nowadays, before hopping on a plane to visit a factory in Finland. Here, some clever boffins have manged to ferment up a source of protein from thin air – well, thin air, water, plenty of electricity, and ingredients unspecified. George is determined that this gloop is going to replace meat in our diets, and that farmers are going to become redundant. The key ingredient is apparently some microbe using hydrogen as a fuel. I laughed out loud at this, as my livestock are currently also using hydrogen as a fuel. Only instead of doing it in a factory, my clever cows and sheep allow moorland vegetation to harvest the energy from a big ball of burning hydrogen that obligingly appears over the Eastern horizon each morning.
Whether consumers want to see my cows grazing their hills, or a factory growing gloop in a vat, remains to be seen. But I’m wagering on the former. As to what health problems arise from living on the gloop…that remains to be seen. Ironically, the only real benefit I could see from this fake high protein stuff is that it might be a cheap animal feed supplement, rather snookering George’s argument about arable land usage.
He then amusingly took us to meet a ‘revolutionary’ farm in –I think- Oxford, where some ‘beard and sandal’ types were organically growing crops using no animal manure. George was almost lost in awe as he showed us how they were using what we farmers call ‘greencrops’ as fertiliser. Because in my opinion he’s an epically ill-informed man, George thinks it’s new, despite there being- for instance- a well-known research farm called Rothampstead, where similar work has been going on for over a century.
In fact it’s as old as farming. Allowing land to lay ‘Fallow’ is the simplest form, through to deliberately growing crops which best build organic matter, and hence vicariously nitrogen, to rotations that include legumes that specifically grab nitrogen. Mixing livestock into the system is the pinnacle of such thinking, but we’ll have to wait for a moment here, while poor George catches up.
Bringing us back to his pet rewilding theory, where we should allow nature take over most of Britain, he visited a Scottish estate where they’re trying to nail the red deer numbers down to allow trees to grow across the hills. George would prefer to re-introduce wolves to do this, especially as the current method is to shoot -and eat- Bambi. He was even allowed to pull the trigger, although it made him cry. Curiously he doesn’t seem to shed tears for the animals denied their very existence in his quinoa fields, wherever they might be.
He goes on about allowing trees to grow in the uplands, to store carbon, ignoring the fact that such mountainsides will barely grab any carbon with the scrub that might eventually creep up the slope. Again, there’s a wealth of research on it, with maps of what yields might be expected where. You would get vast thickets that no-one could walk through, and his wolves will eat your dogs, but never mind.
George stupidly thinks he knows better than everyone else, and Channel 4 –who are corporate investors in the ‘meat free’ industry- allow him to promote his hurtful disingenuous nonsense, insulated from the reality of how the world actually works.
Perhaps tomorrow, instead, we’ll consider what changes we could be making.
-------------------------
Anton's articles are syndicated exclusively by TFF by kind permission of the author and WMN.
Anton also writes regularly for the Dartmoor Magazine