Direct Messages on Climate Change

We are inundated with messages on climate change. The perceptions survey asked a question about our food.

“Is it better to eat locally produced food including meat and dairy or to have a vegetarian diet where some of the food is imported from around the world.” The correct answer is the vegetarian diet even if some or all the food is imported.

Why?

Producing red meat and dairy products from cows is an incredibly inefficient use of resource. Our farmers are very good at doing this as efficiently as possible. Indeed the agricultural support policies of the European Union subsidised beef production very heavily indeed.

Additionally, the UK produces vast amounts of lamb, most of which is exported. Yet we have a unique stratified sheep farming system. We also import quite a lot of lamb from New Zealand. This system is quite simply bonkers. It sends out awful messages on climate change.

Consequently our green and pleasant land is not what it appears. Neat fields of lush green grass which are cut for silage in mid May are ecological deserts. Huge applications of slurry and nitrogen fertiliser ensure big yields of grass.

The cows and beef cattle are also fed concentrated food which is bought in to the farm from elsewhere. The protein element of this feed is usually Soya imported from North or South America.

Why are these Messages on Climate Change Important?

Our planet is in absolute crisis. All of the data available to us supports this statement. We wish it didn’t. We wish that climate change deniers are proved right. The problem we have is that this is a risk we cannot take no matter how small that risk is. Because hindsight will not work at the end of that process.