A few years ago, if you had driven around the lanes of West Yorkshire or East Lancashire, you’d have seen fields full of cows – herds of peaceful dairy animals with swollen udders, munching their way through acres of pasture. When they were called in from the fresh air for milking, they would line up and get some exercise walking to the milking parlour. Not anymore.
As you drive through this countryside now, there no cows are to be seen even in the height of summer. You will see some sheep and occasionally a field with heifers – young cows yet to calf, like these (pictured below).
Instead of the cows, there are great black bales scattered over the fields. Just about every field is now cut many times a year – but not for hay. It is all turned into silage (compressed fermented fodder). The countryside is now a patchwork of yellow, where the field has been cut very short recently with bright green monoculture ryegrass following the fertilisers.
Capital-intensive farming
These big agricultural changes are of immediate interest because COP28 considered the question of food and farming for the first time, and many are quick to lay blame for undesirable emissions of greenhouse gases on ‘meat’ and its production.
Of course, it’s not that simple. The old traditional way of producing meat and milk meant animals roamed around eating stuff we couldn’t stomach. When grazing, the methane produced by cows in fields is broken down by ‘hydroxy radicals’ – produced by sunlight on water droplets – to water and carbon dioxide. Clearly this cannot happen in barns.
Producing less methane, cow pats make the soil healthy by keeping the soil aerated, and they rely largely on local feed. This model of grazing is beneficial to the environment and could help stop desertification in other parts of the world. The new capital-intensive methods of meat production are very different and going on right under our noses without many of us having noticed. The nearest you may get to cows and cattle these days is if you hear some bellowing that tells you there is a barn nearby.
Barns and megabarns
In this country, most cows and cattle are now kept in big barns for at least part of the year, and at least a fifth of them are kept indoors all year round. A recent estimate was that over 1,000 ‘megabarns’ have been built in the last few years for a variety of livestock. They do not need planning permission.
Look out for them, tucked away, as despite their size they are usually concealed from main roads with banks of soil or have newly planted trees blocking the view.
Silage IN
In the fields where cows no longer graze, massive machines now make about four cuts a year, five in some years. There is no chance for ground nesting birds. The grass cuttings are wrapped in plastic to be condensed into silage, the huge black bales left lying to spoil the look of many a field. This is the favoured feed as it preserves nutrients well and is considered by many farmers to be more economical than hay.
Cattle are given pre-prepared quantities of feed and monitored for every drop of milk produced, or every ounce of beef. The aim is to make them as ‘efficient’ as can be, with no walking in and out for milking to waste their energy. Music often plays in indoor systems as it’s believed to help yields.
Slurry OUT
No cows means no cowpats. We learned at agricultural college how good they were at encouraging life in the soil. Various insects break them down, and then other creatures like earthworms turn the breakdown products into lumps that build the soil structure. All this creates soil that benefits from free movement of air (aerobic soil) so that its systems work better.
But that too has gone. The cowpats are now turned into ‘slurry’. After the cattle yards are washed down, the liquidised muck known as slurry is moved to tanks and ponds. There the digestion process is anaerobic – i.e., without air/oxygen. It works by fermentation rather than oxygen breakdown.
The treated slurry gets loaded into tankers which hurtle along the roads delivering to farms and finally the anaerobic liquid is sprayed on the fields, probably blocking the crucial pores and pathways for aerobic metabolism. Using slurry inefficiently is fraught with risks to human health, the environment and river systems.
Bigger and better?
The increasing size of both the cutting and spraying machines used by farmers makes for greater compaction of the soil, again blocking its ability to ‘breathe’.
The huge machines also require more robust roads, fences and even cattlegrids, to withstand increased wear and tear.
This new infrastructure is costly. But luckily, the banks are bankrolling them:
“As one of the world’s leading financial centres, the United Kingdom and the international banks headquartered here, have played a central role in facilitating the expansion of giant livestock companies and feed processors at the expense of smaller-scale farmers.”
Farmers are being forced to become ever more ‘efficient’ and need the extra capital to invest to do so.
Maize and soy imports
But, apart from slurry, other feed still has to be used, especially in the winter – £1.5bn worth of cattle feed is imported per annum, the two main types being maize and soy. Some £800mn worth of each comes into the UK every year mostly to feed these cows and cattle. Maize usually comes from the USA, most soy from Brazil and other South American countries. Soy growing is one of the main reasons the Amazon rainforest is being chopped down.
The government took advantage of its new-found Brexit freedom of being able to alter tariffs (import taxes) on its own and cut the tariffs on maize imported from US in June 2023. The 25% tariff had been imposed as retaliation for Trump putting tax on steel exports from the EU to the US in 2018.
The tariff removal is nominally to ‘help farmers with their feed bills’ – because 27% of the UK’s maize imports had previously come from Ukraine, and the war now means more has to be sourced from the US. Some $571bn maize was imported in 2021 (used largely for animal feed and commercial starch production). The EU also dropped the tariff on maize a year earlier.
These feeds come in as compounds or ’concentrates’. You can get an idea of the quantities when you see a lorry unloading into the feed hopper. Many agricultural suppliers use soy and rape in their products.
Home grown
Maize is grown on some UK farms, as it is very productive. But it is also damaging to the soil, especially in the wetter west and further north. Harvesting usually has to wait till the ground is wet, and thus prone to compaction, leading to runoff and erosion.
As an example, I looked at one maize field in autumn with a ‘cover crop’ growing, following advice from Tesco (I asked the farmer for details and he said they had told him where he could obtain advice at a cost). Clearly the cover crop was not covering much, so rain can impact on soil runoff. Many fields are left completely bare over winter, again causing runoff.
Any beef or milk produced like this, whether using imported or home-grown feeds, can and does claim to be ‘British’ and as such much of it gets approval from the Red Tractor scheme. There is a government code on welfare, but it is quite vague and refers only to ‘enough space’ for cattle to do this and that, nothing about being able to go outdoors. There is no ‘grazing only’ label.
It seems curious that there is not the same level of concern about the ‘factory’ conditions for beef and milk production as there is for poultry, despite cows being (arguably) a lot more sentient than chickens.
Farmers are in trouble too …
Yet we shouldn’t blame the farmers. They are under ever increasing pressure from the supermarkets. Ever since the 1980s the cry has been to ‘leave it to the supermarkets’ to set prices and regulate supply and demand, but their response is to keep turning the screw on suppliers.
Reports in the last few months say half of UK dairy farmers are struggling to recruit staff and a third are thinking of quitting altogether, continuing the decline of 5% last year.
We have to support our traditional farmers, and to make the distinction much stronger between environmentally friendly methods of grazing animals and the capital-intensive production of beef and milk – ruinous to the environment in so many ways.
