THE UK NEEDS A MORE SUSTAINABLE AND COMPASSIONATE FARMING SYSTEM

The Sustainable Livestock Bill and the Public Bodies (Sustainable Food) Bill will be debated in the House of Commons next Friday and deserve support.

The Bills would require the government to prioritise moving away from factory farming and towards more sustainable agriculture with higher standards of animal welfare.

Pig and poultry farming in the UK and the rest of Europe are in the main highly intensive. There are 800 million chickens reared for meat in factory farms. Up to 50,000 chickens are crammed into huge overcrowded sheds. They are pushed to grow so quickly that their legs often buckle under the strain of supporting their rapidly growing body.

Many pigs are kept in barren overcrowded pens. In natural conditions pigs are highly active, spending 75% of their day rooting, foraging and exploring. Such activities are impossible for factory farmed pigs.

Dairy farming is poised to industrialise too. There are plans to establish an 8,100 cow farm in Lincolnshire – that’s 60 times bigger than the average UK dairy farm – with other proposals to develop mega-dairies in the pipeline.

The BBC’s ‘Countryfile’ featured one such a farm in America to explain what these industrialised dairy farms are like. The cows were kept indoors with little or no proper access to pasture and produced 2m pints of milk every day.

Factory farming is dependent on feeding huge quantities of cereals and soy to animals. UK livestock consume more than half of UK cereal production. Feeding cereals and soy to animals is inefficient as much of their food value is lost during conversion from plant to animal matter. Several kilos of cereals are needed to produce 1 kg of edible meat. Using cereals and soy as animal feed is a wasteful use not just of these crops but of the land, water and fossil fuel energy used to grow them.

The UK uses one million tonnes of soy every year to feed livestock. The production of soy for animal feed and the clearing of land for cattle pastures are key factors driving deforestation in South America. This entails massive biodiversity loss and releases huge amounts of stored carbon into the atmosphere thereby contributing to climate change.
The concentrate feed given to industrially reared animals contains high levels of nitrogen. Much of this is excreted in their manure. It is then washed into rivers and lakes and leaches from the soil into ground water, contaminating sources of drinking water and damaging wetland and coastal ecosystems.

A move away from intensive systems would produce more nutritious meat. Free range chickens are significantly less fatty than those reared indoors. Intensively produced chickens contain more fat than protein whereas organic chickens have more protein than fat. Studies show that beef from grass-fed cattle has lower total fat levels and higher levels of the beneficial omega-3 fatty acids than beef from grain-fed animals.

The public sector currently spends £2.2 billion on food each year - on meals in schools, hospitals, care homes and prisons. Most of the poultry and pig meat used in public sector meals is factory farmed and most of the eggs are battery eggs. The Public Bodies (Sustainable Food) Bill would require public bodies to use food that has been produced to high nutritional, environmental and animal welfare standards.