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?

I'm not sure the vegans of the home counties are quite ready for the return of wolves, bears, and other predators that the UK ecosystem is missing to enable wild areas for animals just 'to be'.

Anyone that's taken an early morning rural train journey will be well aware of the growing deer population. It's becoming quite a problem for rewilding.

scrowy with all due respect that sounds like absolute bollocks. Which RSPB reserve is this, out of interest?

I find scrub to be some of the richest habitat for birds- whitethroats, siskins, yellowhammers, stonechats, etc etc. And don't forget that, left alone, scrub will eventually turn into woodland.

Could you give me some examples of these "lots of places" that have tried rewinding and then abandoned it?

Do you have any areas of original wildflower meadow on your farm, or are your fields all "improved"?

I'd be quite happy to see more people eating culled venison.

‘We can't just pretend that 100s of years of farming and agriculture can be reversed. ‘

That’s a very defeatist (and convenient) attitude though. Imagine if everyone felt like that.

@crackofdoom the best example of rewilding is Knepp Castle Estate.

www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/25/veganism-intensively-farmed-meat-dairy-soya-maize

One of the nature reserves I manage bring livestock in for conservation grazing as it’s widely recognised that it has huge ecological benefits. Similarly when I helped managed large swathes of the Lake District for the National Trust, conservation grazing was essential for biodiversity and the survival of lots of rare species.

Yes elbea, I know about Knepp. To be honest, cattle/ponies/pigs/deer do have a part to play in a large rewilded landscape. I can't see that this even presents a problem from an ecological/ climate emergency point of view. I know, for example, that the animals at Knepp have no supplementary feeding whatsoever (at least that's what Isabella Tree said in Wilding). My main beef (see what I did there 😆) is with the "We must have classic livestock agriculture on upland because otherwise the land is waste and useless POV.

So are the National Trust managing to make any inroads into those bald, overgrazed uplands in the Lake District elbea?

@crackofdoom

scrowy with all due respect that sounds like absolute bollocks. Which RSPB reserve is this, out of interest?

I find scrub to be some of the richest habitat for birds- whitethroats, siskins, yellowhammers, stonechats, etc etc. And don't forget that, left alone, scrub will eventually turn into woodland.

Could you give me some examples of these "lots of places" that have tried rewinding and then abandoned it?

Do you have any areas of original wildflower meadow on your farm, or are your fields all "improved"?

There's no shortage of UK rewilding projects and reserves that are deliberately using cattle, water buffalo, or ponies at low densities to maintain a patchwork of successional habitats. Most species diversity is associated with habitat edges, which is why scrubland is so valuable - but requires intervention to maintain the habitat to edge ratio.

Rewilding is not, for the most part, just letting nature take it's course. That only works for large enough areas land that already have and can support a balance of species at all trophic levels.

I recommend Feral by George Monbiot, it's not perfect but it's a very informed discussion of rewilding and accessible to the layperson.

That's cow shit.

and how are you differing a grazing animal from livestock? Do my sheep that roam freely over 1000s of acres of fell ground chomp fewer plants than the ones I keep in fields?

I'm not? I said less than 4% of grazing animals are naturally occuring. Sheep, cows, pigs, etc are here because humans want them here. Therefore their interaction with the environment are a result of human intervention.

The OP was telling us that there's been a decrease and the fields are empty. You are telling us there's actually been a year on year increase and there's too many animals eating grass in the fields?

The OP was commenting on a personal observation, I was using statistics from Statisa and the United States Department of Agriculture. The two are not related.

What are the fossil fuel emissions on making a processed fake meat food, the real ones not the fake ones where half of its been offset by e.g planting a load of trees on good productive farm land here and in other parts of the world?

I can't say for all products obviously but a study published in October 2021 in the sustainable production and consumption journal on beef burgers v plant burgers found that plant burgers had a 77% smaller climate burden and that by switching fully to plant based burgers on the UK we would save between 9.5 and 11 Mt of CO2e per year. (Volume 28, pg 936-952)

Also as an FYI high quality carbon offset schemes are bound by a fairly robust set of criteria that covers aspects like verifiability, additionality, leakage, double-counting, and permanence. And current best practice is to focus on reducing emisson, with only the residual impossible to remove emissons being eligible for offsetting. People randomly playing trees on farmland and claiming to be green are not considered to be doing anything over than greenwashing and the community is well aware of that.

@crackofdoom

So are the National Trust managing to make any inroads into those bald, overgrazed uplands in the Lake District elbea?

The National Trust as an environmental organization, someone's having a giraffe, surely?

Beef farmer here (although mainly arable). All the cows are inside due to calving. We have been slowly reducing our cows but not because of a reduction in demand, more because the health and safety world has gone mad and it's becoming too expensive to keep up with the regulations.

In regards to subsidies and wild bird patches etc, we do this but it tends to be on the edges of fields.

@Thebestwaytoscareatorythey are linked - part of the carbon cycle is waste products and decomposing animals sequestering carbon. Those waste products also improve soil health and fertility.

The natural carbon cycle does not contain farming though, just like fossil fuel burning is not part of it either. Both still interact and impact (negatively) on it but they are not part of it.

I may be wrong but I don't think farms usually let their animals decompose back into the ground do they? I would assume the ones not sold for meat that die on site are removed and disposed of in another manner?

Bizarrely, it seems like you are agreeing with me. We can’t carry on with intensive farming so rotational farming using livestock is the environmentally sound way to go.

We semi agree, I do not believe that using rotational farming is environmentally sound (I'm honeslty not sure there is a solution to the issue and that we will be facing widespread problems regardless of methods). It is better than intensive yes, that we can agree on, but it won't prevent the impending environmental catastrophy, especially not if the livestock used is still being reared for meat. You might have more of a case for keeping cattle/sheep whatever to help improve soil fertility if you left them to live their entire natural lives and were solely using them for the purpose of improving crop production for however.

With the price (and likely supply) of fuel, fertiliser, and actually wrap for bales too, I suspect if anything livestock farming will be a bit of a solution. Muck for straw from overwintering instead of bought in fertiliser, for growing all those veggies. Maximising grazing opportunities instead of using fuel and inputs baling, where practical. If I didn't have a footpath through my hay field I'd be looking at changing my grazing system to incorporate it, my girls did really well on foggage one year (2018 I think? Cold winter then beautiful summer?)

The queue was out the door at the village butchers at the weekend, luckily we'd got a nice wether hogget in the freezer after he'd had two summers in the field, so I didn't need to join them.

DoginaTent The National Trust are genuinely doing some good stuff down my way- notably, managing their coastal farms better for wildlife, allowing wildflowers (proper ones!) to recognise the meadows, with a resulting impressive increase in insect life. But- I know they're not perfect everywhere, and that correct upland management is fiercely disputed (which is where we come back to farmers and deliberate misinformation 🙄).

Ps- I've read Feral x

So.... Live on a farm, husband works on a farm and lots of friends who work on farms, no drop in anything that they produce, everything has been increased especially now with people realising they might not want to rely on food imports with what's goin on in Ukraine. Rewilding doesn't help trees to grow as trees need space and light which things like brambles suffocate, eg to grow trees well they need to be managed areas. All the farms and farmers I know which I can guarantee is more then what some people on here think they know, all of them have free range animals and are kept to incredibly high standards (trust me when I say that the farm animals are treated better then lots of women are in maternity wards) Also rewilding isn't so great for lots of animals as the majority of the UK has been cultivated for thousands of years without that you'd lose a lot of wildlife, birds such as lapwings like farmland as do hundreds of other species, where I live on a regular basis I see 3 different deer species, hares, rabbits, barn owls (these love to nest in the farm buildings as they're safe from predators such as corvids) lapwings, geese, ducks, yellowhammers, swallows, starlings, sparrows, bunces, siskins, long tailed tits etc the list goes on! This is land which is agricultural! The farmers aren't your enemy if you want to take issue with someone take it up with supermarkets and Thier ridiculous standards for things like fruit and veg shape and size which means tonnes of food doesn't make it into the food chain when it is edible! Famers which generally grown food for human consumption as they get paid more for it, however not all food reaches that grade for lots of different reasons which means instead of all this food going to waste and being left to rot it is fed to the animals,.which then produce poo, which is then used to spread on the fields to produce more food, it's a circle that works very well! All the government care about is money, land when built on creates money, the farm land you see won't be used for re wilding they'll concrete it over and build on it! All your vegan imported ingredients are by far more damaging to the environment then a cow fart ( cows in UK are grazed on grass which actually takes.in CO2 and releases O2 ) and you really need to open your eyes and see that! You obviously live in a city and just believe things you read that suit your view rather then actually talking to people who work within the industries that you so hate? And just an FYI I used to be a vegetarian until I moved to the countryside and actually saw with my own eyes what happens and realised I'd been spoon fed rubbish about how "cruel" it all is.

@crackofdoom

I'd be quite happy to see more people eating culled venison.

Yes. I don't eat red meat myself, but if we have to cull deer (and I accept reluctantly that we do), we might as well eat the results. Free range, healthy meat. If you are a meat-eater it makes far more sense than eating processed nasty stuff.

As for dairy being bad for you, it's not. I love cheese, it's good for my bones, and I am not stopping eating it.

Could I ask a question please. It is not meant to be provocative and I hold my hand up that I have no experience of beef / dairy farms of any sort.

Is it true that when male calves are born, you kill most of them instantly because they are expensive to rear and will have no use for dairy? Someone on another chat was telling people how a lorry comes and gets piled high with the dead calves who only lived for minutes because they had no value.

Do you milk the female cows with no rest until they become to weak and lame and then kill them?

We can't just pretend that 100s of years of farming and agriculture can be reversed

Of course it can be changed. Look at any old map of the UK where there were quarries and gravel pits and they are lakes and country parks these days. You can easily repurpose land, and you can change the way farming works. I don't agree with doing away with meat and dairy, but there are certainly more sustainable ways of farming, and if we are prepared to pay more for food (not realistic at a time when everything is going up massively) we will see results.

I have dairy farming friends who are making more money than they have for years.

I also know several people who, having been vegetarian for decades, have quietly started incorporating fish and chicken and even venison into their diets. Lockdown was so boring that I think a lot of us started looking for new ingredients and flavours.

Is that so bad? That's what nature does, if a species needs more resources than are available then it begins to die out. Your point is loaded in that you seem to think humans are a special case compared to other species. We're not, the same rules apply. If we die out we'll deserve to. But that really isn't an immediate worry, it will be decades before there are serious problems and most of us will be dead before then.

Try to live life one day at a time.

We are a special case though and the same rules do not apply to us, that is the issue. Our intelligence and adaptability has meant we have been able to bypass the usual controls that nature imposes to keep species in check. We have now gone so far beyond our natural limits that we are literally destroying the planet for everything. Background extinction rates are 100-1000 times higher than normal, if you really think we aren't a special case you should be outraged at the impact we are inflicting on other species.

You're also incredibly naive to think the issues are decades away. For example, forest fires are a natural occurance (giant sequoia can hold their seeds for 500 years while they wait for one to occur and clear the ground, but they are now occuring year round in the states and 9/10 of the most significant fires in Californias recorded history have occurred in the last decade. Speaking of California it has also been in a state of drought now for the past 20 years (currently 38% of the state is in a state if extreme drought). Elsewhere desertification is increasing, year round temperatures are rising with extreme peaks in summer, and storm frequency and intensity are increasing across the planet. The issues aren't far off just because the UK is largely isolated from them due to its geographic location.

BIL raises pigs and chickens. Demand from local butchers has increased year on year.

Don't know anyone who turned vegan/vegetarian in last few years, do know 2 vegans who reverted back to meat eaters though.

We're a family of 4 and we have meat every day. Always British.
Our local butcher always busy and queues outside and they don't smell.

We're no longer a dairy farm, but @anotherotherone that's nonsense in my experience. I don't know anyone who killed or kills male calves. They've value as beef, or potentially for breeding depending on the quality of the calf. I've raised some bull calves myself for beef, on a very small scale - 2 at a time.

As for the cows, there's a standard of welfare that needs to be met in order to get better prices for one thing. And they dry off before pregnancy. Lameness is possible in any animal and would be treated as soon as its seen. Farming is a business, its a livelihood, so cows who are older and not productive will be sent to the factory. Although a lot of chefs on cooking shows use retired dairy cow for beef, I think most of that meat is what makes mince, according to my local butcher.

All your vegan imported ingredients are by far more damaging to the environment then a cow fart ( cows in UK are grazed on grass which actually takes.in CO2 and releases O2 ) and you really need to open your eyes and see that!

I'm sorry but this is just fundamentally false. There are no studies that show beef to be more environmental friendly or less resource intensive than any vegetable or fruit production. Beef is consistently shown to be one of the most resource intense foods requiring more land, water, and energy to produce than virtually any other product (I think chocolate is worse for water consumption).

I've also addressed the misconceptions around the relationship between carbon and cows but to reiterate, it is not a positive one. Yes grass sequesters carbon, but cows then eat the grass, carbon and all, and emit some of it back into the atmosphere through methane. We then add a bunch more carbon to the atmosphere to rear, transport, slaughter, process, package and distribute it to consumers. If it were a simple case of cow eats grass, lives for 25 years in a field, then dies and decomposes back into the ground it might be a bit more positive but that's not how it goes.

I live in a farming community but am not one myself. Mix of agriculture, beef and dairy, also sheep. Business is as per usual tbh.

So you think that the fruit and veg aren't grown, transported, cut, cleaned, processed, packaged and distributed? And how are avocados and almonds which are grown abroad and flown in not worse? You really think a cow which is a naturally emitting CO2 is worse then a plane?! Come on! www.farmersagainstmisinformation.com/news/do-livestock-emit-more-ghg-than-transportation-no