If you are a beef / sheep / chicken farmer, are you noticing a fall in demand?

[anotherotherone]

I was just travelling back down to London by train and there seem to be a lot less sheep and cows in the fields than normal. Am I imagining things?

There are so many meat / dairy alternatives in the shops now. AIBU to think (well, hope) that as people are eating less meat these days and this trend looks set to continue,
are farmers reacting by reducing their stocks?

We are planning to decrease our suckler cow numbers from 70 to 50 but not because of a reduction in demand (there isn't one noticeable to us) but because of restrictions coming in around manure management. We haven't got enough storage for the number of cows we have and the money would have to spend to change that would take at least a decade to recoup.

We are also on a high hill farm and the costs of fertilizer and grain currently means we simply won't be able to sustain the cow numbers we have currently on the type of land we have.

We are also worried about imports coming in from Australia under new trade deals and the impact that will have.

Conversely sheep/lamb prices are buoyant, but again its a bubble waiting to burst.

3 new butchers shops have opened in my local area in the last 18 months and are all doing really well.

I hope the 17% reduction accounts for people choosing to eat less meat but when they do to eat high welfare and locally produced rather than larger amounts of cheap low welfare meat.

It's the wrong time of year to be seeing fields full of animals. The cows will be in for a few more weeks yet.

Well I was just hoping that the slaughterhouse business is decreasing

Even if UK slaughterhouses are dropping in productivity , what is coming in from abroad.
People will always want meat , cheap meat .
They often don;t give a monkeys what has been cut to skim a few pence/pounds off .

I've been vegetarian for 40+ years now . I've noticed a huge increase in vegan food which makes life a lot easier .

@anotherotherone

Well I was just hoping that the slaughterhouse business is decreasing.

When you go in supermarkets now there are whole aisles of meat and milk alternatives. Personally I don’t buy meat alternatives (though I am vegetarian), but clearly people must be buying them or they would be there.

Yes, there's so much more plastic meat on the shelves but strangely enough , those shelves are always full unlike the chicken and fish sections at my local supermarket. This morning there were hardly any whole chickens and no chicken thighs . Even the fresh fish section seemed depleted.

As to lamb, not much has been available for a while now. Plenty of overpriced lamb joints but leg steaks have been tricky to get hold of as well as lamb's mince, strangely.

Posh little madam, aren't you?
That made me giggle - since when is it posh to have an alternative milk such as oat, almond or soya or whatever?! 😂
I have for over 20 years now and I'm as common as muck 😁
I'm with you OP - I'm not vegan or even vegetarian but I'm definitely seeing a lot more people becoming vegan, I know several and lots more just reducing their meat consumption in general.

@anotherotherone

Well I was just hoping that the slaughterhouse business is decreasing.

When you go in supermarkets now there are whole aisles of meat and milk alternatives. Personally I don’t buy meat alternatives (though I am vegetarian), but clearly people must be buying them or they would be there.

Many of those plant-based foods are ultra high processed, and we should be thinking about the food miles and other environmental costs of what we eat. The uplands of the British Isles are not suitable for arable crops but ideal for sheep to graze. Our landscape there would look very different indeed if we didn't have sheep there - a lot less grass and a lot more scrub. British (and I think Irish) grass-fed lamb is a very different proposition from US beef fed with GM soya etc.

I favour eating less meat but taking care where it comes from and how it's been reared. That means for me buying mostly UK meat. Our welfare standards are much better than most of the rest of the world.

I also think we are going to see significant changes in dietary advice over the next decade.

I think there will be a huge push from health professionals for people to eat foods with as little processing as possible. Reduce sugar and processed oils and stay away from additives.

People will be told to use full fat dairy, butter, olive oil, lard, unprocessed red and white meats, sustainable fish, limit grains and eat seasonally in terms of fruit and veg.

GoodJanetBadJanet - I’ll have you know I’m so posh I’ve been known to have a muffin with my oat latte. Yes living the high life here, madam.

GoodJanetBadJanet - I’ll have you know I’m so posh I’ve been known to have a muffin with my oat latte

Oooh, fancy

As to lamb, not much has been available for a while now. Plenty of overpriced lamb joints but leg steaks have been tricky to get hold of as well as lamb's mince, strangely

British lamb is out of season currently. It's usually replaced at this time of year with New Zealand lamb, last years lambs or with the very small amount of lamb that is born in the winter months in the UK.

We sell our lamb directly to a slaughter house that serves a number of the big supermarkets as well as independent butchers. Our very last lot of lambs born in 2021 went in very early January 2022 and we won't now have any more to sell until around late July/early August (which is when British Lamb is in season)

Oh hi.

I see you've come to tell us were all disgusting for being omnivores.

Nice to meet your agenda, but I hope I don't again.

Eat what you want, not my business.

I'll eat what I want, not your business.

Bye.

@dipdye

There is a current rise in iron deficiency in young women going veggie.

Yes, you can be healthy on a veggie diet, but it is a lot harder than one that includes meat.

I'm vegan I have been for 6 years. I was on iron tablets for years as a meat eater. My iron levels are perfect now with no supplements as are my b and d

A lot of meat products are also very processed.
bacon, sausage, hot dogs, pepperoni, ham, corned beef, chicken nuggets, packets of slices meats in the supermarket.
My vegan meal tonight was veggie and bean chilli with rice, all made from scratch and not processed at all.

Sheep trade is booming in Scotland at the moment, saw a post earlier saying a farmer averaged around £235 for 8 cast ewes yesterday. Basically old ewes who are no longer productive, which is a serious trade.
People are definitely becoming more interested in local, high quality, high welfare meat.
Agriculture has much less of an impact on climate change than the BBC would like you to believe. It is the imported meat that is bad for the environment, as well as out of season veg being flown thousands of miles round the globe to allow vegan/vegetarian diets to have variety when the majority of veg is not in season in the UK.

I don’t know anyone reducing meat consumption in real life, although I read about it on the internet a lot. Out of my family’s, dp’s family, both sets of friends and my colleagues I only know 1 vegan and no vegetarians 🤷‍♀️
Humans like eating meat and I can’t see that ever changing for the majority

No, I just looked it up, the number of livestock in the uk has been consistent (just over 9 million) since 2005.

I think decline in meat eating probably comes from v cheap meat, which is often imported.

Globally the demand for meat is going up, last I heard, as people in developing economies get wealthier.

These threads are so tedious. People who have absolutely no idea about agriculture declaring how dreadful it is. Animal agriculture is essential to fresh produce and arable. I’ll assume it’s naivety rather than ignorance.

I doubt it.
Meat eaters for all their bleating about meaty delights also purchase meat substitutes to be healthier or lose weight. 🙄

I’ve a friend who is vegetarian but doesn’t give a flying fig about animals and wears fur. She just doesn’t like eating dead things. There’s always be a market for cruelty.

@MrsR2be

A lot of meat products are also very processed. bacon, sausage, hot dogs, pepperoni, ham, corned beef, chicken nuggets, packets of slices meats in the supermarket. My vegan meal tonight was veggie and bean chilli with rice, all made from scratch and not processed at all.

@MrsR2be

A lot of vegan products are processed too - all the fake meats, and burgers and sausages made of all sorts of things - it’s a new market and these products have a big mark up so that’s going to get bigger and bigger. You can see new products shooting onto the shelves every month at the moment.

It’s mostly people 40+ who are still drink cow tit milk. Luckily the newer generations have realised that I drinking milk from another species is weird!

Of course there is a decline but the meat/dairy industry won’t easily admit it.

“These threads are so tedious“

Sorry you find 9 million animals being slaughtered per year “tedious.” Anyway, it’s happening. You can go back to sleep now if you like.

I still eat meat every day. And drink a fair amount of milk too.

Pleased Tesco have started re-stocking my ostrich steaks. They'd not had them for ages.

I did do 6 months as a vegan after my husband bet I couldn't, due to how much meat I eat. Was the worst 6 months of my life and by the end I was quite poorly and my fitness was awful.

I just ate all the fake meat crap basically 🤦‍♀️

I've finished lambing but we do it early and my sheep are now outside but most wouldn't be.

Was the worst 6 months of my life and by the end I was quite poorly and my fitness was awful. I just ate all the fake meat crap basically 🤦‍♀️

Well there you go then, nowt to do with going vegan and everything to do with having a crap diet in general, just like people eating meat can have

@Mangogogogo

You keep going on about the smell of butchers and I think they smell fine? Not everyone is grossed out by carcasses and blood and stuff, literally loads of posters have replied saying how busy their local butchers are. You can be disgusted by meat and be veggie all you like but don’t pretend we’re all forcing ourselves into butchers despite the horrible smell

I’ve never noticed a bad smell in my local butchers. I like the fact that my leg of lamb was reared locally rather than buying something shipped frozen from New Zealand.

Thanks for this thread, OP.

It’s very thought provoking.

For example, I had a vegetarian pizza in the fridge for dinner tonight but this thread got me thinking about meat so I ended up cooking steaks instead.

It was delicious.