A timely bombshell from the author of ‘Farmageddon’

NOT SURE I always understand where the author is going, but Philip Lymbery gets plenty of Brownie points for a full go at industrialised farming methods – also the subject of his previous book,

Farmageddon – from how animals are treated to the impact on the environment.

The biodiversity crisis is made all too clear in Dead Zone, Where The Wild

Things Were as Lymbery, a twitcher (bird watcher), nature lover and chief executive of Compassion in World Farming, writes that we stand at an “almighty crossroads”, a unique time during which the future of life on the planet might be decided.

He writes: “70 billion farm animals are reared for food every year, two-thirds on factory farms where they chomp their way through food that could otherwise feed billions of hungry people.

“Indeed, the biggest single area of food waste today comes not from what we discard in the dustbin, but from feeding human-edible crops to industrially reared animals. Together they emit more greenhouse gases than all of the world’s planes, trains, and cars combined. Yet the global livestock population is expected to near enough double by 2025.”

Reading this work, I felt the author sent mixed messages for solutions. He insists enough food for billions could be produced without destroying the planet if wastage in the food production and distribution system was eliminated – a third of all food produced being lost to wastage.

Cereal crop land the size of France and Italy combined will be needed, he says, by 2050 to meet food demand – up to a fifth of the world’s remaining forests, he insists, will be gone by 2050 – to grow crops to feed livestock. But he does not urge eating less meat, only to eat meat that has been reared humanely.

Chapters on disappearing wildlife are certainly disturbing, but when one reads of vast dead zones dotted throughout the planet, the link to animal production and wastage of foodstuff becomes alarming.

From the beginning of humanity, he says: “for better or for worse, Homo sapiens have outdone all comers, from the magnificent mammals like the bison that roamed the American plains in vast numbers, to birds like the passenger pigeons that once flocked in great grey rivers through the sky, and to species of fellow humans like the Neanderthals.

“Whatever has stood in our way and more often just in our reach, we have erased it. Now we have met our match. The great irony is that our most fearsome competitor for food – livestock – has been put there by us.”

Fertilisers are the major agricultural culprits, says the author – 160 million tons of nitrogen are produced in the US annually, but only a fraction of that ends up being absorbed by crops – the rest ends up as run-off, hence the vast dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico deposited by the Mississippi – nothing lives in it.

Read this book and gain valuable information about where the planet is heading – you’ll be amazed at what peril lurks if we shrug off a problem that affects us all.