When the East Anglian Daily Times published an article by Emily Cashen on vegan food, NFU adviser Oliver Rubinstein wrote this response.
The NFU has no issue with people choosing a plant-based diet – our farmers grow fruit, vegetables and salad crops, as well as rearing animals for meat. However, our concern is that this can be based on misleading or incorrect information about the impact of British livestock farming.
According to Defra figures, agriculture in the UK accounts for 10% of our total carbon emissions. Within this, livestock production accounts for just 3.7% of UK emissions when you take into account the carbon that is taken up by the grassland they graze on.
This contrasts significantly with the global figure of 14.5% that Emily mentions in her article, and more recent estimates from the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation put this at 11% of global emissions.
In the context of fast food, the carbon footprint of UK beef burgers is around 2.5 times lower than the global average as a result of world-leading animal welfare and the high quality grazing pasture that the UK provides. Therefore, choosing to buy British beef is already a positive action for the environment.
Although we are surrounded by high-grade arable land in the East, our changeable weather makes it challenging to produce human-grade protein crops in the UK, so almost all plant-based burgers will be produced with imported ingredients.
Often these can be sourced from countries with environmental standards that are lower than in the UK. Therefore, although this may not your intention, when you opt for the plant-based alternative you may well be displacing traceable produce from British farmers, in favour of imports.
If you look for the Red Tractor on your burger packet, you can be confident that the farms have been properly audited, with checks continuing across the whole length of the food chain. Unfortunately, you can’t say the same for many meat-alternatives. It can be almost impossible to know how the raw ingredients have been produced, or where they have come from.
Also, is it really better for the environment to ditch a balanced diet, with British meat and dairy alongside plenty of seasonal fruit and vegetables, in favour of a solely plant-based diet?
A recent Oxford University study by Lynch & Pierrehumbert suggests not. They concluded that, in the longer-term, a shift to meat-alternatives may well result in higher levels of global warming overall, due to the dominance of long-lasting carbon dioxide versus short-lived methane in plant-based diets.
Farmers in East Anglia are working hard to improve their soil organic matter levels. Storing more carbon and reducing chemical inputs, using livestock manure and introducing grazing livestock within crop rotations are some of the sustainability strategies now being used.
All this suggests that, if we’re going to grow crops sustainably, livestock are a key part of the equation too. Also, although on paper meat alternatives may have a low carbon footprint, when you take the considerably higher nutrient density of animal products into account, the environmental credentials of many plant-based alternatives simply do not stack up.
UK farmers are deeply committed to tackling climate change and the NFU has launched an ambitious commitment to get to Net Zero by 2040, ten years ahead of the government target. We believe this can be achieved while maintaining a balanced diet.
Every sector has a role to play in getting the UK to Net Zero, but placing too much emphasis on agriculture in general, and livestock farming in particular, ignores the elephant in the room, which is our reliance on fossil fuels.
To put things in context, if I ate all the recommended 0.5kg of meat per week as British beef, this would produce 8.3kg of CO2 equivalent. One return flight from London to Prague would produce roughly 550kg of CO2 equivalent per person, or the same as eating beef for almost 18 months.