75% of the UK was once covered in wildwoods. By the end of the Second World War, this figure was down to 6%.The habitat that sustained the evolutionary development of Britain’s native flora and fauna has been all but decimated. The reason for this is simple; until the end of WW2, the only way to produce more food was by digging up more land.
Mercifully, with almost all of the suitable farming land across the world in use by the end of WW2, technological advancements in farming allowed us to increase food production without requiring any additional land. Industrial herbicides, pesticides, fertilisers, and high-yield crops prevented mass starvation as the global population exploded. However, this intensification of agriculture during the Green Revolution has severely damaged ecosystems and depleted soils at the expense of the biodiversity that was able to live alongside traditional farming methods.
Converting forests and peat bogs to farmland releases stored carbon and reduces the land’s ability to absorb it, worsening climate change. Given the urgency of the climate crisis, and the fact that nature-based solutions are the only means of drawing down carbon from the atmosphere that are proven to work at scale, we must find a way to attribute value to these vital ecosystem services.
Thanks to the Green Revolution, we now produce an abundance of food. So much that we are able to be highly inefficient in the way we use it. The average farm animal converts just 10% of the calories it eats into meat and dairy foods. Most of the protein fed to animals comes from human-edible food, rather than from pasture grazing. 85% of the farmland used to feed the UK population (at home and abroad) is used for feeding and rearing livestock, who produce only a third of the calories we eat. This is unavoidably inefficient given animals' intrinsic need to walk around, ruminate and produce heat as well as grow body parts which are not edible. The carbon opportunity cost (the potential carbon sequestration lost when land is used for a less carbon-efficient purpose) of using land in this way is substantial.
Today, the global population continues to rise, per-person meat consumption is increasing in developing countries and the climate crisis is intensifying. The destruction of the Amazon Rainforest to grow crops (particularly soybeans required for beef production) is well-publicised. Our food system cannot continue this way without irreversibly damaging vital life-supporting systems. We are living well beyond planetary boundaries.
A very simple way for us to drastically reduce the ecological impact of our food system on the planet would be for the global population to adopt plant-based diets en masse, since they require significantly less land than diets high in animal products. However, meat holds substantial cultural value, is highly nutritious and ultimately is something that many people enjoy eating. Much of the rural economy in Britain and elsewhere is heavily dependent on animal agriculture and so, supporting farmers is essential for a just transition to a sustainable food system. Landholders must be incentivised to restore natural habitats, which will help store carbon from other sectors and halt the decline of native wildlife. Population-wide dietary change at the speed demanded by the urgency of the climate crisis seems highly unlikely and economically problematic.
However, an emerging technology offers a revolutionary solution to the inefficiencies of animal agriculture. It is fraught with moral hazards, complex social implications and some scientific uncertainty, but could also be the single most revolutionary change to our food systems since the domestication of plants and animals….
Continue Reading - Introduction to Red Tail Part 2: The Promise of Cultivated Meat
