Attacks on eco-friendly farming misplaced
A YOUNG Exmoor farmer looks out at his cattle and sheep grazing peacefully amid a scene of stunning natural beauty, and feels bewildered. Richard Dart is wondering how he, and others like him, are helping to wreck the planet.
After all, the landscape around his farm at Molland on Exmoor's high southern ridge, seems to reflect Mother Nature in all her finest glory.
So, how can the livestock, which have been making the Dart family a living for generations, be causing untold environmental damage?
Some 20 miles west, a dairy farmer is pondering the same question. Tom Morris, who keeps 180 Friesians on his 400-acre organic spread near Bishops Lydeard, has spent 15 years developing a low-input form of farming – that means he uses no artificial fertilisers and only a tiny amount of diesel.
Both these farmers – and many others like them – are wondering why livestock is suddenly being swept into the firing line in the great climate change debate.
"Eat less meat and save the planet" barks one headline. "We must rid our farms of livestock and grow veggies instead" snaps another.
Even serious publications like the Lancet have been echoing such thoughts – in the latest edition, a report by two eminent scientists calls for a reduction in the number of farm animals as a way of fighting global warming.
But, like a burger made from cheap imported meat, it is a call that's a bit hard to swallow if you happen to be a Westcountry farmer who relies on one perfectly innocent, eco-friendly, crop.
It's called grass.
We can't eat it but livestock can. A fact which makes grazing animals the perfect environment-friendly machine when it comes to producing nutritious non-polluting food. If nature hadn't evolved the cow, we'd have to invent it.
"You'd go to an agricultural machinery research place and ask them to produce a machine which was a self-propelled mower," says Tom Morris. "It would have to not only mow the grass, but pick it up – then you'd have to develop a thing on the back that would ingest it as a fertiliser while it was mowing.
"It's what they call a cow. All we're doing is using a cow as a machine to harvest grass – then we walk it back to the farm and it produces milk."
Put like that, it sounds a bit like a miracle – which is how some more industrially-minded farmers might describe Tom's low-input dairy system.
"We grow grass and clover organically without any inputs and this farm is utterly sustainable," says Mr Morris. "We haven't re-seeded in 15 years – and the grass lays are better now than they were 15 years ago.
"We only graze cattle – we make very little silage. A cow grazing is not having food brought in to her – she goes out to get it," says Mr Morris, who tells me his machinery diesel bill is lower than the one he pays for his Aga cooker oil.
"We hardly buy anything in – no fertilisers. Okay, so I'm not producing huge yields, but I haven't got any inputs – and once the oil runs dry, I will still be here," he concludes.
Back on Exmoor, Richard Dart and his father William keep prize-winning Red Devon cattle as well as Devon Closewool and Exmoor Horn sheep.
These are local native breeds that can deal with the harsh elements up in the hills, they produce some of the best red meat you will ever eat, and they are reared in the old-fashioned traditional way.
What this means is the animals are not reliant on tonnes of proteins brought in from goodness knows where – they live off that same magical stuff called grass.
"We farm in a very traditional way and I think it is environmentally friendly," Mr Dart tells me. "The sheep graze the natural herbs on the slopes – and that's good for insects, birds and wildlife.
"Fertilisers are far too expensive, so we don't use much at all. What we do hasn't changed very much in years – we use a little mechanisation but not much. The grass is giving us a living," says Mr Dart.
Asked what he thought of the "eat less meat and save the planet" lobby, Mr Dart replies: "It's obviously a veggie campaign – I'd have thought driving cars and things like that would be far more harmful than these cattle and sheep. This is a renewable source of protein – we are not depleting any natural reserves."
Now, let's meet a man who's made a name for himself selling meat. You'd expect Launceston's Philip Warren to go red as a beef steak with fury at the mere mention of cutting down on our carnivorous habits.
"In a roundabout way, I am all for it," he grins. "What we've been saying for years is – eat less meat, but make sure it's better meat when you do.
"If you read all these environmental reports, everything points towards the fact that grassland will save the planet – and those who use grass to feed cattle are going to be here for a long time to come.
"What all this is hitting is the East Anglia farmer with his feed-lot bringing in all sorts of food from elsewhere," says Mr Warren. "The problem is that we've taken a wonderful product and made it an eat-all-you- like-anytime-you-like thing.
"Grass is so important," he goes on. "And by grass, I mean all the herbage – all the other things that an animal can get in the grass – it produces the very best, most healthy meat around.
"You don't need all those sprays and mass ploughing – they want to stop all that – you don't need it if you can grow good grass. Which we can. Down here in the Westcountry we are in a very good position."
This has been the merest snippet of a tour into the grasslands of the Westcountry but it begs the question why opinion appears to be turning on an industry that seems to be pretty innocent when it comes to wrecking the planet.
But livestock gets blamed for other things too – and tomorrow, we'll be looking at how the products gleaned from grazing are actually good for our health rather than bad.
Comment on this story