Fact Check: the latest propaganda campaign about trade between the UK and Australia

ISABEL OAKESHOTT: I'm a free-trade Brexiteer but the idea of beef from this Australian mega farm in British shops appals me Fact Checked in bold by Catherine McBride

By ISABEL OAKESHOTT FOR THE DAILY MAIL Bold italics by Catherine McBride

PUBLISHED: 22:00, 22 May 2021 | UPDATED: 22:13, 22 May 2021

According to the local tourist board, the small town of Dalby in Queensland, Australia, offers a taste of life as it used to be. Visitors are encouraged to explore by horse and cart, following a heritage trail to a museum displaying ancient farm machinery.

However, further off the beaten track is somewhere less reminiscent of a simpler past. In fact, it is a warning of a dystopian future.

Grassdale Feedlot is the largest beef farm Note that she calls it a farm, but they call it what it is – a feedlot. The UK has them too, as does the EU. Feedlots are where cattle are taken to be fattened before going to market. In this case the cattle are in a bare field because they are to be sold as ‘GRAIN FED’. Cattle like eating grain. Like humans, they are predisposed to eat calory dense food when they can get it. They also eat grains in a field but only a few seeds at a time on the top of each grass stem. Down Under and if the UK Government signs a controversial trade deal with Australia, meat from here could soon be on Britain’s dinner plates. This is great news as Australia also produces the best quality, exclusively grass fed, beef in the world, and unlike in the UK, Australian prime beef is 30 to 42 months old. UK beef is mainly killed before it is 30 months old because of BSE. A disease that destroyed British beef farming in the 1990s and even now any cattle older than 30 months must be slaughtered in a specialist abattoir, their spines removed after slaughter and sent away for analysis to ensure that they don’t have BSE.

The farm is a vast, bleak expanse of dust and mud, home to 78,000 cattle. All around are luscious green fields and woods but these animals rarely see a blade of grass. They spend most of their lives no, see above the lack of grass. The cattle in the picture are Brahmans – these are used in tropical climates (ie not Dalby, QLD) because they are tick resistant and have thin coats so survive the heat. standing listlessly in what looks like an enormous car park, waiting for their next meal to arrive via a metal chute, or huddling under the drab grey awnings that provide some mercy from the scorching sun. Here is a picture of the same process in the UK but the cattle are kept in sheds.

And if you want to know what they feed UK cattle to fatten them, here is another interesting website – this UK company makes cattle feed pellets for fattening UK cattle - with or without yeast….

Cattle in sheds like the one above, would die of heat exhaustion in Queensland which is why the cattle remain outdoors with some shade if they want it. Isabel might find the heat scorching but if these cattle were reared in the far north, as looks likely, then they are probably feeling a little chilly in Dalby (Southern Queensland). This is probably why so many of them in her photograph are not under cover – but in the sun keeping warm.

On a farm this size, it is very difficult to see the animals as individuals. Instead, operators describe them as ‘standard cattle units’. While in the UK they are all iven names like Daisy or Ferdinand are they?

The owners are eager to expand and especially keen to build the export side of their business – and doubtless would jump at the chance to send their meat That is not how trade works – it is demand driven – distributors in the UK would have to buy it and import it. Farmers do not send you imports that haven’t been bought and paid for. to the UK without having to pay export tariffs or worry about import quotas. So like Ireland? And France? Here is a picture of an Irish cattle shed.

Oh and if you read the article – Irish cattle are cheaper than UK cattle but silence from Oakeshott or the NFU about tariff free and quota free trade with the EU.

That is what Trade Secretary Liz Truss is trying to achieve with a major post-Brexit trade deal.

Australia currently pays 20 per cent tariffs on all exports of beef and lamb to the UK. (No, this is tariff rate on their tiny quota of only 7,150 Tonnes of beef for the whole EU, it was split between the UK and the EU on 1st Jan 2021. To put this in perspective the UK imports about 330,000 tonnes of beef each year – mostly from the EU Under the controversial new plans, these levies would be phased out over 15 years This is a terrible idea – postpones the Brexit trade dividend and strengthens the re-join campaign, in an agreement widely seen as a template for a raft of other trade arrangements. No each trade deal is different – otherwise the EU deal would be the template and we would not be arguing about tariffs or quotas for Australia nor about phasing them in.

Boris Johnson urgently wants to unveil the deal at the G7 summit in Cornwall in two weeks’ time.

But UK farmers and many MPs are horrified, fearing it would signal the death knell for the traditional British farm. That happened years ago, as it did all over the world. Food is mass produced in the UK – first came automated dairy farms, then intensive chicken sheds, then intensive pig sheds, then cattle feedlots and now even sheep are being finished in sheds and fed barley and beet pulp…in the UK.

Picture of Scottish upland sheep finishing shed

As a Brexiteer, I am conflicted. After all, one of the biggest attractions of leaving the EU is the ability to strike our own trade deals. No longer fettered by Brussels, we can negotiate far more favourable terms with trading partners – a huge potential boost for the British economy. But as someone who cares passionately about farm animal welfare and the quality of the meat we eat, I do not want to see British farmers thrown under a bus. Efficient UK farmers are fine now and will remain so – they compete with the EU after all. But most UK graziers only survive because they are subsidized. I believe that is it the subsidies that keeps them inefficient – they have never needed to be efficient in order to pay their bills. Australian farmers are not subsidised – so they have to run profitable farms, if not they have to sell their farms.

Standards in the UK are by no means perfect but thankfully we have very few cattle, pig and dairy mega farms of the type common in Australia, America, China, and other parts of the world. Ah, No, if she is talking about intensive factory farming. See this article for more information on this. The UK has over a thousand of these mega farms and the EU has over 200,000 – yet the UK has tariff free and quota free trade with the EU.

But if Oakeshott means mega as in large, then that is because these countries are larger than the UK – Australia is 31 times larger and the US is even bigger than Australia. Also, their farms have not gone through as many generational subdivisions that have happened in the UK and most of Europe. Even though the UK has a system of primogeniture succession, extremely high death duties during most of the 1900s caused the demise of many large farming estates. The average farm size in the UK is now only 81 hectares. And the average UK farm over 100 hectares is only 323 hectare – tiny by Australian standards. However, if you take out the handful of exceptionally large farms owned by a few dukes and a couple of billionaires – the average UK farm would be much smaller.

Indeed, Grassdale Feedlot is about 25 times the size of Britain’s largest cattle farm. (see above – no surprise in that, Australia is 31 times larger than the UK)

While the average American dairy herd is 900 animals with countless farms of 10,000 or more, the average UK herd is only around 150 cows. Emotional propaganda alert, – real numbers for averages, but farms over 10,000 are ‘countless’. No, in the US large dairies are licenced and strictly monitored, according to the USDA there were 714 dairy farms with more than 2,500 cows in 2017. Meanwhile in the sanctimonious UK: According to the House of Commons Briefing Paper, number 2721, published in May this year, milk yield per [UK] cow has almost doubled, increasing from just over 4,000 litres per cow in 1975, to almost 8000 litres in 2018. I doubt that this increase is due to ‘traditional farming methods’ Isabel.

British farmers take great pride in exceeding minimum food quality and animal welfare standards, even if their meat is slightly more expensive. No, they don’t. The UK’s higher welfare standards are incredibly low, mostly about superficial things rather than outside space and just a laborious box ticking exercise which most farmers complain about. See this article and this one for more details.

However, cattle in farms such as the Grassdale Feedlot are pumped with hormones No, hormone pellets are put into the animal’s ear – the pellets drip feed tiny amounts of naturally occurring hormones into the animals bloodstream over 120 days. Not all cattle are given hormones. They make the cattle more muscular and the meat leaner. Australia produces meat for many different markets – some like lean meat and others have banned hormone use – like the UK. Customers get to buy whatever type of meat they like and the use of hormones in cattle is strictly monitored. and antibiotics No it is the EU that still has high use of antibiotic – see map below from 2010

Australia has a lower antibiotic use per unit of production than the UK. Meanwhile the UK imports meat from Spain, Italy and Poland whose antibiotic use is still high. Table 5 in this report from the European Medicines Agency shows not only do some European producers still use antibiotics – they use ones that the WHO considers to be critical to human health and the US banned their use in 2005.

 before being rendered into cheap meat for fast food chains and supermarkets. Implants under the skin at the back of the ear continually release hormone doses to speed up the animal’s ability to convert feed into muscle and fat. Hormone residues are closely monitored. The hormones used in cattle are naturally occurring in humans, they are also naturally occurring in many foods including Soybeans, Pinto beans, peanuts, eggs, butter and milk. There are four times as many hormones in milk as in the same weight of beef from a hormone implanted steer, 40 times as much in the same weight of butter, 80 times as much in eggs, 14,000 times as much in peanuts and 130,000 times as much in Pinto Beans. But the big hormone containing food is soybeans – tofu contains 113.5 million nanograms of estrogenic activity per 500g from isoflavones and defatted soy flour has more than 750 million nanograms per 500g. More details here.

These are banned in the UK and the EU. Indeed, there is widespread concern about the impact on human health of such growth hormones. No, this is a straight lie. The US took the EU to the WTO about this assertion and the EU lost. It was forced to give an additional quota of 45,000 tonnes of beef as compensation to 5 countries (Australia, Argentina, Uruguay, NZ and the US) on a first come first served basis.

I have seen the horror of such mega-farms in Argentina, another country keen to strike a free trade deal with the UK. Argentina? I thought we were talking about a trade deal with Australia. So what have farming standards in Argentina got to do with Australia?

I visited the country while researching Farmageddon, a book I co-authored about the true cost of cheap meat.

In the belief that Argentine beef was a delicacy, I envisaged happy cattle roaming free on the pampas.

The reality could not be more different. Argentina has no shortage of land but much of it has been turned over to soy production and who do they sell soy to? See Denmark Dairy Industry website for ideas – and if you don’t like soy production then stop buying Lurpak butter – the largest selling butter in the UK by the way. Or maybe UK consumers prefer soy fed cattle to grass fed cattle – just saying. In place of beautiful pastures were miles of chemical-drenched yellow/brown soya, a crop exported to feed pigs and poultry.

The majority of Argentine beef comes from animals reared on fetid feedlots where they eat grain Cattle in the UK are also finished on grain. And kept in a shed while this is happening. Cattle are sold by weight internationally – so farmers fatten them with grain and reduce their exercising for the last few months of their lives. I am sure that Argentine cattle are bred on the pampas and only grain fed for a few months in a feedlot because it is cheaper to do this. and their mountains of waste and vast water consumption are creating a environmental catastrophe. Cattle waste is very environmentally friendly, in the UK they use ‘slurry’ – cow waste mixed with water from the UK’s large indoor dairies to spray onto fields as fertilizer. As for the water – same again. The water that cattle drink, they later urinate back into the soil. It is full of nitrogen. The water cycle continues – ground water – rivers – seas – evaporation – clouds – rain – cattle/humans – urine – soil – ground water etc. If this is the ‘best steak in the world’ as smart restaurants claim, I’ll give it a miss.

How, if the UK-Australia free trade deal is signed, would British consumers know if the meat they buy comes from animals reared this way? The answer is that they probably won’t. if they can’t read, or can’t use the internet – possibly, otherwise no.

Encouragingly, food labelling rules are getting tighter, especially for beef products. No they aren’t – this is the free market at work. Because supermarkets can charge more for organic and free-range products, they are happy to put these standards on the label, however they rarely mention that all of the rest is ‘Produced in intensive indoor feedlots’. You must search for this information on their website and even then, it is usually disguised by euphemisms. Most intensive products sold in the UK supermarkets are done so under labels called ‘something farm’ even though they come out of massive sheds. If you want to stop this practice, ask UK MPs to give the word FARM a legal definition.

In theory, manufacturers must provide a long list of information, including an animal’s country of birth, where it was reared, slaughtered and where the meat was cut up. In practice, these details are almost never supplied. Glad she added this, was wondering where she shops, I have never seen this information in Waitrose, let alone any other supermarket.

Under a widely used get-out clause, if ‘full information is not available’, products can simply be labelled ‘non UK’ or ‘non EU’ – a catch-all that covers a multitude of sins. The same multitude of sins also happen in the UK and in the EU, why does she think EU intensively produced pork is about one third of the price of UK free range pork?

Government food labelling inspectors openly admit they have a ‘pragmatic enforcement approach’.

A rush of cheap meat imports, potentially undercutting more ethical and responsible British farms, would just add to the secrecy surrounding supply chains. The very few ‘ethical and responsible’ British farms are already being undercut by mass agri-industrial production in the UK, and from the EU, but they survive. People who buy ethical meat now, are unlikely to suddenly start buying unethical meat because it is cheaper. Unethical meat is already cheaper and much easier to find.

The constant propaganda campaign that all British meat is ethical, and all foreign meat is not, is rubbish. A totally uninformed argument. The US has a much bigger organic industry than the UK, and their organic products are cheaper because more people buy them. 

No wonder Johnson’s Cabinet is split. Among Ministers with grave concerns about the consequences of zero tariffs or quotas on Australian food imports are Environment Secretary George Eustace (Son of a dairy farmer) and Michael Gove (represents Daily Mail reading, commuter belt Surrey’s middle, middle-class – who generally have no idea how the food in their local Waitrose is produced), both staunch Brexiteers. They, too, have been trying to reconcile an ideological attachment to the free market with what it actually means for British producers and animals.

Much of the animal welfare legislation in Australia was written almost 40 years ago.

Also, pig Propaganda Alert – she includes pigs with poultry but then says nothing about them because Australia’s few pigs have a better life than UK’s 97% indoor feedlot pigs and Australia is a net importer of pork not an exporter. Australia understands that with free trade it is best to specialise in areas where you have a comparative advantage and poultry standards are very rarely reviewed there – and while Britain and the EU have phased out the most confined cages No they haven’t – not for eggs. EU cages are now slightly larger and now called enriched cages, read more about this here. the majority of Australian eggs are still laid by battery hens. That is an interesting statistic, how big of a majority I wonder and what is the proportion in the UK? Australian supermarkets stock free range and organic eggs as well as caged eggs, as supermarkets do in the UK. However, in the UK they don’t have to put the word ‘caged’ on the box. But this is another distraction as Australia isn’t an egg exporter either.  Those who opposed Brexit will crow about the uncomfortable position some of us Brexiteers now find ourselves in. The stupid thing about this argument is that if the UK were more efficient farmers, they could probably export pork to Australia – but instead the NFU (and its hired guns) are straining every sinew to protect UK graziers. I wonder what kind of farm the President of the NFU, Minette Batters, runs? Oh look, ‘Minette runs a tenanted family farm in Wiltshire. The mixed farming business includes a 100 cow continental cross suckler herd, and a small herd of pedigree Herefords as well as sheep and arable’. How wonderfully useful the internet is.

But it is vital that Ministers get it right, making it crystal clear about the food standards we expect under other trade deals.

Next up, America: the land of genetically-modified crops and chlorinated chicken (and also the country where the organic movement started and the home of Wholefoods supermarkets) from birds reared on factory farms that are among the most grotesquely overcrowded and cruel in the world. Does she know about UK mega chicken farms? Some of the biggest ones are even run by US companies but no doubt to a higher standard than in the US, yeah sure…

Amid a growing outcry, Downing Street claims all imports from Australia would have to meet animal welfare and food safety standards. British farmers and consumers who are appalled by farms such as Grassdale Feedlot deserve far more than these vague undertakings.

Isobel is assuming that what would be rational in her country is necessarily rational in all others, even if they have very different weather. Most cattle in all developed countries are now finished on feedlots close to markets or close to transport for export.

The farm pictured in her article is relatively close to Brisbane and the beef produced will most likely be exported. The cattle are Brahman crosses so will have come down from the north, where the weather is tropical, and ticks can be a problem for European breeds. Farms in the southern half of Australia would look more familiar to Britons – with grassy fields and predominately Herefords and Angus cattle.

Cattle are kept on bare ground in outdoor feed lots if they are to be sold as Grain Fed – very popular in the US and Japan. Grain is used to fatten cattle and the cattle are keep in confined spaces so that they don’t work off this extra weight. Cattle internationally are sold by weight. A dirt is more comfortable for cattle than a cement barn floor found in UK feedlots– see pictures above.

In Australia – beef labelled as ‘grass fed’ is strictly monitored because it is sold at a premium and so must be exclusively fed on grass. Aldi was fined in Australia for not understanding this – most cattle in Europe (UK and EU) only live in grassy field in summer and are moved into a shed during the winter and also into a shed when they are being ‘finished’. To be labelled as Grass Fed in Australia, cattle must be fed grass when they are being finished as well.

Last year I did an interview for Channel 4 on an award-winning UK farm in Cambridgeshire. There were only about 20 cattle because it was a small farm but they were being ‘finished’ in a barn with two open sides, the cement floor was covered with a small amount of hay, and the cattle were being fed grains in a trough that was outside the barn so they had to put their heads through the rails to eat the grain. And they did eat it. All of it. In fact, when the farmer approached them with the grain sack they rushed to get to the barriers.

I concluded from this scene that cattle must like eating grain possibly just as much as humans like eating cakes. We are both predisposed to seek out high calorie food when it is available.

I am not claiming that the UK cattle were being treated worse than Australian cattle, farmers in both countries do what is best for their cattle because their cattle are their assets and their source of income. Farmers are not sadists. If you put cattle in a shed in Queensland, they would die of heat exhaustion. If your left cattle in a field in Cambridgeshire during winter they would freeze. Farmers in both countries now routinely fatten their cattle with grain because their customers buy it.

Australian farms are larger because they can be. I am sure that if farmers in England were offered the change is increase the size of their farms they would jump at the chance. By the way, farms in NSW, Victoria and Tasmania not only use British breeds but they have smaller farms, because the land is better, the rainfall is higher, the farming land is more expensive and over the last hundred years Australian farms have gone through the same generational divisions that has happen in the UK. But they started with larger sized farms, so the subdivisions are still larger.

The definition of Propaganda must be comparing the few artisan farms left in the UK but pretending that they are the most commercial, with the most commercial farms in Australia but pretending that they are the most artisan in the country. Neither is true.

There is one thing all Australian farmers can be proud about and that should make UK graziers hang their heads in shame. Australian farmers are not subsidised by the taxpayer. They run efficient farms because they have to, they don’t have a fall-back plan other than to go out of business and sell their farms. And yet it is the already heavily subsidised UK farmers who are clamouring for even more protection.

Farmageddon: The True Cost Of Cheap Meat, by Philip Lymbery and Isabel Oakeshott, is published by Bloomsbury.