The Beef With Beef

Last week Channel 4 aired a documentary entitled The Big British Beef Battle. It has received a lot of opprobrium, including a 1 star review in the Guardian. I watched it, thought it quite silly, and a polemic that missed its mark. I doubt it convinced anyone to stop eating beef and, more likely, irritated a significant number of its target. Cue countless social media posts from beef farmers howling with rage. One caught my eye: it talked about a heritage breed bull called Harry that had an excellent 2.5 years of life on his farm eating grass, silage and brewery grains (a byproduct of the brewing industry). It's undeniable that this form of beef husbandry has a much lower carbon footprint than intensively reared beef. But, there are still several enormous problems that articles about this approach to beef farming ignore.

Firstly, the articles skate over the fact that Harry and his friends still burp a significant amount of methane (at least 28 times more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2). And, silage production to feed the cattle in winter also emits significant amounts of greenhouse gas. These articles usually talk about regenerative farming practices that means that the land locks in CO2 while ignoring all the emissions.

Secondly, cattle require a huge amount of calories to produce 1kg of meat. Much more than other meats as this graph from Our World In Data shows: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/feed-required-to-produce-one-kilogram-of-meat-or-dairy-product In terms of grass fed beef, this means that a lot of land land that otherwise could be used to grow other crops is given over to pasture (I accept that some land is not suitable for arable use). In terms of the wider beef industry, it's massively associated with widespread deforestation to find ever more land to grow soy for cattle feed.

Finally, implicit in all these articles showcasing happy cows on green British farms is the notion that somehow grass fed beef husbandry is a practical alternative to supply cheap beef to British food producers and supermarkets. This is fantasy thinking of the first order. Heritage grass fed beef like Harry retails at over ￡20 per kg (the choicer cuts much more so) and the idea that this is going to replace the cheap beef mince in the chilled aisle at Asda is as big a fantasy as it is to suggest that MacDonald's will use it in their burgers.

Grass fed beef is a luxury product that only the wealthy can afford. It would be these same wealthy that Oxfam recently highlighted in their report that showed that since 1990, the richest 1% of humanity have emitted more than double the amount of greenhouse gases than the poorest 50% of humanity. And before you think, "How does that apply to me?" to be in the top 1% of earners across the globe you need to be earning a little more than ￡75k and to be in the top 10% you need to be earning just over ￡27k. How many people earning ￡27,000 think that buying grass fed beef is an affordable every day option?

I have a great deal of sympathy with farmers who work hard on animal welfare and sustainable farming practices. I'm in the fortunate position to be able to use my local butcher who is scrupulous about the provenance of the products he stocks. But equally, I have made a big effort over the last few years to reduce the amount of meat in my diet. Shrink My Footprint has published a study that a meat eater who swaps out beef for other meat products will reduce the carbon footprint of their diet by 1.4 tonnes per annum. For a family of 4, that's pretty significant. https://shrinkthatfootprint.com/food-carbon-footprint-diet/

In short, I find it difficult to conceive of a future for our children that includes beef as a significant part of our diet. Channel 4 may have missed the mark with their documentary, but it's difficult to argue with the underlying scientific reality. As the authors of an international research project looking at the impact of grass grazed beef concluded, "Choosing grassfed beef may have benefits, but saving us from climate change isn't one of them."