Farmers dispose of seven billion meals a year as waste
FARMERS are burning surplus produce as a shortage of workers means they can’t make a profit on food left in fields, a new report has found.
Almost seven billion meals’ worth of food goes to waste every year, much of it left to rot in fields, turned into energy or burned, WWF researchers found.
Food waste from farms is not counted in official statistics, despite accounting for about 25 per cent of the national total, and roughly 10 per cent of the overall greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector.
Aesthetic or size demands for fruit and vegetables, labour shortages and supermarkets changing their orders at the last minute are among the main reasons food is rejected, the report said.
Some £750million of Government subsidies encourage the use of anaerobic digestion plants, which turn surplus food and other waste into biogas.
About 7 per cent of the food produced in the UK is wasted before it leaves the farm, but there is little tracking of exactly where it goes.
“At a time when people up and down the country are struggling to put food on the table it is unfathomable that millions of tons of food is going to waste on UK farms each year,” said Kate Norgrove from WWF. “This hidden crisis shows why we need urgent action to fix our broken food system.”
Brexit has exacerbated labour shortages, and the National Farmers’ Union has warned of a reduction in the 2022 harvest because of a lack of workers, with some 40 per cent of farmers reporting crop losses as a result.
WWF has suggested that consumers can help reduce food waste by varying diets to include crops better suited to the land, and being less picky about how food looks, and reducing meat in our diets.
The report also suggests directing some of the £750 million in subsidies for anaerobic digestion towards projects that collect and redistribute surplus food.
Chris Molyneux, a kale farmer based in Lancashire, supplies high-end supermarkets and restaurants, and said he was seeing more surplus this year, which he attributed to the cost of living crisis changing people’s eating habits.
“We’re just trying to supply the market, and we’re trying to guess what’s going to happen and nature will change,” he said.
Mr Molyneux has started opening his farm to volunteers who pick up leftover crops and redistribute them, in a practice known as gleaning.
A common practice from biblical times until the end of the Second World War, awareness of gleaning has risen in recent years amid rising costs and environmental
‘With people struggling to put food on the table it is unfathomable that millions of tons is going to waste’
concern. But he said unpredictable weather patterns exacerbated by climate change made it harder to avoid surplus in some years, and deficit in others.
“You’re dealing with nature, it’s a really complicated thing,” he said.
British homes and businesses throw away 9.5m tons of food every year, according to official statistics.
But the three million tons of farm waste is not counted in official statistics, and therefore not included in the Government’s pledge to reduce food surplus 20 per cent by 2025.
“We recognise the size of the problem that this new estimate clearly highlights, and welcome the ambition to support more farms introducing a target-measure-act approach to food waste,” said Will McManus from waste management charity Wrap, which is funded by the Government, said.