Graham Harvey won the BP Natural World Book Prize for The Killing of the Countryside in 1997. In his next book We Want Real Food he tells how modern food production has brought us to the brink of disaster, and sets out how we can fight for food that will stop us being overfed and undernourished. His new book is out in January, watch this space for more information. You can watch an interview with him here. In this exclusive article he writes about the link between the decline in quality of farm produce and the drive for cheaper road transport...
If you eat meat or dairy products, the healthiest foods come from animals grazing fresh green grass. Human beings have been producing some of their finest foods this way for more than 5,000 years.
Strange, then, that policy-makers of both the European Union and the United States seem hell-bent on destroying this form of traditional, healthy food production. Even more extraordinary, they want to sacrifice it for the benefit of the motoring lobby and the clamour for cheap road transport.
Where I live on Exmoor, farmers used to produce some of the finest beef in the world. It came from a local breed, the chestnut red Devon, known locally as the “Red Ruby”.
The production system was simplicity itself. The animals were merely turned out on the wild moorland grazings for three years or so, and that was it. Provided the butcher knew his job the joint that appeared on the Sunday lunch table was succulent, tender and full of flavour – truly the roast beef of old England.
The steaks most of us buy at the local pub – or as economy packs at the neighbourhood supermarket – are from animals that seldom see herb-rich pastures. They spend too much of their lives in yards or sheds where their natural, leafy forage rations are supplemented with cereal grains and soya.
These foods are not healthy for cattle. Cattle and sheep are ruminants adapted to eating and digesting low-energy fibrous foods, particularly grass. Too many starchy foods such as cereals make them unhealthy and prone to disease. Yet many of today’s intensively-managed beef animals are forced to chew their way through more than two tonnes each during their short lifetimes.
New research confirms that traditional pasture-fed beef contains more health-giving vitamin E, omega-3s and a substance called conjugated linoleic acid, CLA, a powerful cancer fighter. If the pasture happens to be full of herbs and wild flowers – as on the traditional moorland grazings of Exmoor – these disease-busting nutrients are even more plentiful.
By contrast the inclusion of even modest amounts of grain in the animal’s diet produces meat severely depleted in these essential nutrients. Instead it contains more saturated fats, the kind that are likely to give you heart attacks.
So why do today’s farmers go to the trouble of feeding cereal grains when they could produce a far better product by simply keeping their cattle out on natural, species-rich grassland? As always the answer’s a mixture of political incompetence and corporate greed.
Under the criminally-idiotic common agricultural policy a generation of farmers have been paid inflated prices to grow wheat and other cereals. With such an inducement most farmers have long abandoned the traditional “mixed farm” which maintained a sensible and sustainable balance of livestock and cash crops. Instead they mobilise an arsenal of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to produce grain crops the country doesn’t need.
It’s this chronic surplus of subsidised industrial grain that has destroyed good, healthy British beef. Almost half Britain’s inflated cereal harvest now goes into animal feed. The mountain of second-rate beef it produces has undermined the market for the traditional, grass-fed product. In effect cereal subsidies have robbed us all of healthy, pasture-fed beef just as it has robbed us of real milk, real poultry and a host of other good, natural foods.
The farming lobby would have us believe that the damaging subsidies are on the way out. They’re being slowly replaced by environmental payments which should have encouraged cereal growers to switch back to pasture farming. Sadly the motoring lobby seems to have hijacked this healthy development. Subsidies for biofuel production have replaced the former farm subsidies and given chemical grain growing a new lease of life.
In the US corn prices have shot up by 60 per cent as supplies are channelled into ethanol production, part of the government’s drive to reduce the country’s oil dependence. In Britain a twenty-fold increase in biofuel production is planned. The National Farmers’ Union – spying a life-line for its commodity-growing members – is urging the Government to pour fresh subsidies into the new technology.
If the lobbying is successful the animals will stay in their sheds and consumers will continue to be fobbed off with second-rate foods. Without the subsidies on grain growing, much of the land would have gone back to healthy grassland. But under the new energy subsidies it’ll continue in chemical commodity production. Instead of being sent to “animal factories” the crops will simply be diverted to bio-fuel factories. And over-worked crop land that should have gone back to pasture will continue getting its deluge of farm chemicals.
Alongside our house on Exmoor we have a few acres of steep, gorsy grassland that has never – to my knowledge – received chemical fertilizers or sprays. As well as a dozen or more different grass species the pasture contains plants like salad burnet, rough hawkbit, meadow vetchling and bird’s foot trefoil. Our small flock of Exmoor Horn ewes seem to do well on it, and their lambs have grown at a tremendous rate.
Scientists at the North Wyke research station near Okehampton, Devon, confirm that, like beef, lamb produced on these moorland grazings has more of the vitamins and healthy fatty acids that protect against heart disease and cancer. Yet these healthy foods are no longer available as they were to our parents and grandparents.
Getting them back will take a concerted effort from all of us. For the sake of the next generation we need to reverse the damaging industrialisation of the countryside. The job of Britain’s farmers is to provide healthy, nutrient-rich foods for the people of these islands, not to produce cheap feedstocks for the global energy markets. Shouldn’t good food come before cheap motoring?
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Posted by: Account Deleted | November 04, 2011 at 01:17 PM