I was a useless farmer but even I know cheap meat comes at a heavy cost
There were a couple of dozen animals in the pen. All of them young steers being fattened up before they were sent off to market. To my inexpert eye, they all looked pretty much the same. except for one. he was scrawny.
I asked the farmer who was trying to sell me the farm what was wrong with him. ‘Wrong?’ he queried. ‘Nothing…’ So why didn’t he have the same meaty hindquarters as the others? Presumably, he wouldn’t fetch much at the auction.
‘Ah…’ said the farmer, ‘he’s not going off to market. he’s going in my freezer.’
I was still puzzled. The farmer gave me a rather twisted smile. ‘hasn’t had the jabs, has he?’ And then it dawned on me. The others had been treated with hormones and antibiotics and goodness knows what else to help them grow fatter faster.
Great for the farmer’s balance sheet — but not the sort of meat he wanted his own family to eat. he didn’t trust it.
Neither, it was to turn out, did the bureaucrats of Brussels. A few years later, eU farmers were banned from doing it and, in 1989, imports of foreign meat stuffed full of chemicals were banned, too. So far, so good.
Then we voted to leave the eU. A trade deal with the U.S. became a top priority in Westminster. Washington said fine — but only if you start buying our meat again.
Britain’s farmers went into meltdown. If we let that happen, they said, cheap meat will undercut our prices and we’ll be ruined.
But Britain began formal trade talks with Washington last month and Tokyo three weeks ago. Negotiations with Australia and New Zealand are due to begin soon.
And that’s where it stood until a few days ago, when the International Trade Secretary Liz Truss announced that an independent commission will be set up to ensure that British farmers will not be undercut.
WhIch was just what the farmers and many others wanted. except that Ms Truss went on to say that the commission’s recommendations should ‘be advisory only’.
Not so good. You could cover half the fields in england with all the reports successive governments have commissioned and then ignored.
But so what? Why not allow cheap meat across our borders? Farmers are always getting angry — and if they can’t compete with imported meat that’s their problem, isn’t it?
Well, yes, but it’s not only farmers who disapprove. Waitrose has said it would be ‘simply wrong’ to import meat produced under ‘weaker’ standards than on British farms.
It points to hormone-treated beef and the ‘extensive’ use of antibiotics as examples of American farming standards that are ‘well below our own’.
It might also have pointed out that an eU scientific review in 2003 concluded that one of six hormones commonly used in the U.S. was carcinogenic, and there was ‘insufficient data’ to adequately assess the health risks of the five others.
So this is not a battle about farmers. It’s about food. Including, of course, the notorious American practice of washing chickens in chlorinated water to kill bacteria that flourish in the disgusting conditions in which the animals live their pathetic lives.
And there is more at stake. Much more. It’s about our countryside. It’s about biodiversity. It’s about the respect we pay to animals. It’s about climate change.
But let’s stay with the price of food and let’s assume we cut a deal with America that opens the door to their farmers. Two things will happen. The first is that the big farmers in Britain will compete. They’ll have to. And when it comes to beef and other livestock, they won’t be competing with farms. They will be competing with feedlots.
An American feedlot bears about as much relation to a British beef farm as a seamstress running up a few dresses in her spare room in Bradford does to a factory in Bangladesh employing a thousand workers turning out a million T-shirts a week.
It is industrial agriculture on a massive scale. except that these are not farms.
These are concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (cAFOs). A typical cAFO for beef might house 100,000 or more animals and every year there are more of them.
Needless to say, the animals never see a blade of grass. Nor can they move very much. Moving uses energy. That’s wasteful.
Disturbingly, there has been a move in this country towards feedlots. There’s no register of how many there are yet and, compared with the States, they’re minnows. But there will be more and they will be bigger, simply because they are more efficient. Farmers need to make a living and most do not.
The latest figures show the average profit for a lowland livestock farm in england is about £12,000. Nearly half have gone bust in the past decade. how long, you have to wonder, before there are no small farms left in this country?
So why can’t we hand the land back to nature? Well, we can. It’s called rewilding and it can produce some wonderful results. I’ve seen it for myself at the Knepp castle estate in West Sussex.
It’s good for the environment and biodiversity and, ultimately, climate change. But it could not survive without large subsidies.
And, anyway, we are a small country with a relatively large population, and the less food we produce for ourselves the more we have to import.
That is massively bad for the planet. One example: we have bought billions of pounds’ worth of beef from companies in Brazil that chop down trees in the Amazon rainforest to graze the animals.
It’s also massively bad for our health. For the past few months, the world has been obsessed with finding a vaccine to defeat the coronavirus.
Infinitely more important in the long run is the desperate search for new antibiotics to replace those that no longer work. That’s partly because we pop a pill every time we get a sniffle, but also because those feedlot cattle and many more farm animals are treated with them.
Not because they’re sick, but to help them grow faster.
American farmers use nine times as many antibiotics as farmers in this country.
SO, ONe way and another, it’s a scary picture. But there is some hope out there. Maybe the Government really will stand firm and tell Washington what to do with its hormone beef. And maybe the world will recognise that farming need not be a race to the bottom, with profitability as the only prize. That notion is gaining traction.
The Sustainable Food Trust was set up nine years ago with support from some grand figures, including Prince charles, and even grander ambitions.
It wants to link government support for farmers — without which most could not survive for five minutes — to those who satisfy a set of sustainable standards it’s drawn up. Wales is already running a pilot. Next step: the world.
cynics will argue that this is quixotic idealism. That ‘cheap’ food is all that matters and animals are perfectly happy to be incarcerated in a feedlot so long as the food keeps coming.
Well, I did buy that farm all those years ago. I was useless at running it, but I had a brilliant young manager called eddie. And to those cynics I would say: I wish you’d been with me when eddie made me watch what happens when cows are finally let out of their sheds in the spring after their long winter lockdown.
They behaved like a gang of sixyear-old kids released from the classroom. even the most elderly of them tearing across the young grass, throwing their hind legs in the air. If cows could whoop with joy, that was it.
It taught me a very simple lesson. Animals are more than figures on a balance sheet. And so is farming.