At a time when governments are once again backing productivity, technology and intensification, are we overlooking the fact that intensive farming systems may be becoming less resilient, not more? The SFT’s Senior Research Manager, Robert Barbour, considers the question in light of the UK’s increasing number of mega dairies.

What kind of food system are we building?

That question has been brought into sharp focus by two recent developments in the British dairy sector. First came an investigation by Andrew Wasley for The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, revealing that the number of so-called ‘mega dairies’ – where hundreds or even thousands of cows are kept permanently indoors – has doubled over the past decade. Then came the news that the number of dairy farms in Great Britain has fallen below 7,000 for the first time, less than half the number operating in the early 2000s.

Taken together, these stories tell a familiar tale. Faced with years of low milk prices and rising input costs, many dairy farmers have been pushed into a corner: either leave the industry or invest heavily to increase production. The result has been fewer farms, larger herds and a growing reliance on intensive systems that depend on imported feed, synthetic fertilisers and high levels of production to remain viable.

For some, this is simply the inevitable modernisation of agriculture. For others, including Sustainable Food Trust CEO and dairy farmer Patrick Holden, it points to a deeper problem. As we argued in our Grazing Livestock report, the long-term future of livestock farming should not be judged solely by how much it produces, but by whether it works within the ecological limits of the land while supporting food security, farmer livelihoods, animal welfare and environmental health.

Until recently, the argument for more agroecological forms of livestock farming was often dismissed as unrealistic. The assumption was that lower-input systems could not deliver the volumes needed to feed the population. But as climate change intensifies and global supply chains become more fragile, that assumption deserves much closer scrutiny.

The blockade of the Straits of Hormuz – through which a third of the world’s nitrogen fertiliser is transported – and extreme weather events like the June heatwave in Europe, show why transitioning to low input, pasture-based systems is more critical to food security than ever before. In part, this is because such systems have a much lower reliance on fossil fuel-intensive imports of energy, feed and fertiliser: animals can ‘upcycle’ human inedible plants into nutrient-dense foods and soil quality can be improved without synthetic fertilisers, for example with the dung of grazing animals and nitrogen-fixing plants like clover. The recent news that the Straits has, to some extent, reopened, must not serve as cause for complacency in the drive to transition to more resilient farming practices. Ongoing geopolitical instability means it is unlikely to be the last such instance, with sobering warnings that Europe’s food system is likely entering an era of permanent stress.

Climate change and environmental degradation are, of course, a massive driver of this stress. A significant proportion of our agrifood imports come from countries that are highly vulnerable to climate change, with a Government security assessment, published earlier this year, concluding that the UK would probably be unable “to maintain food security if ecosystem collapse drives geopolitical competition for food”. But environmental and climate breakdown also pose major challenges for domestic production. In their most recent report, the Climate Change Committee predicted that, without adaptation, the amount of ‘high-quality farmland’ in England and Wales could shrink from 38% to 11% by 2050 under a 2°C warming scenario. Soil erosion is expected to increase by at least 15%, and arable crops will become increasingly threatened by drought, with the worst year in 20 causing 20% yield loss in wheat in the South East of England. Extreme weather is already negatively impacting yields, with England having experienced three of the worst five harvests on record over the past decade driving the five-year harvest average below the 20-year average – an unprecedented reversal.

In short, there are serious questions around whether we will be able to keep on producing food and feed in the same high input, high output manner as we do today. It feels even more difficult to argue that we will be able to use as much arable land to feed livestock – an inefficient use of a finite and increasingly pressurised resource, that will only get worse if livestock production continues to intensify.

Livestock production centred on grazing, on the other hand, could make a central contribution to a more efficient and resilient UK food system by converting grass and other inedible feeds into nutrient dense meat and milk. The total quantities produced would be lower than today; our Feeding Britain report, for instance, modelled a 20% reduction in dairy production alongside steep falls in pork and poultry, due, mainly, to the much lower quantities of arable crops available for feed.

This means that transitioning to an agroecological farming system will go hand-in-hand with changes to our diets, but smaller amounts of high-quality meat and dairy would still represent a significant source of various key nutrients, and one that, crucially, would complement, rather than compete with, the food we get from croplands. This, in turn, could create more space for systems of crop production that may be lower yielding, but which, through greater diversity and better soil health, are more resilient to extreme weather. Research from Wageningen University, for instance, has shown that a global food system where livestock are fed entirely on human-inedible feeds would only require 75% of the arable land needed for a vegan diet, because of the additional supply of calories and nutrients made available through meat and dairy.

Add this to the major environmental issues associated with intensive livestock production, and we have a clear imperative for a shift to farming animals in a less resource-intensive way – and adapting our diets accordingly.  Doing so, will bolster food security and support us to be healthier, all while using millions of hectares of UK grassland otherwise largely unsuited for food production. Realising this vision isn’t easy. As tempting as it is to think that the recent surge in input costs might precipitate such a shift, this seems unlikely, so it cannot be left to the market alone – Government needs to up its game, in all sorts of ways. We also need to broaden our understanding of sustainability and efficiency, from a narrow focus on product-level footprints (which tend to favour intensive systems), to a more aggregated, system-wide measurement of impact – which is, of course, the scale which ultimately matters.

The rise of ‘Big Dairy’ in the UK is certainly an issue that needs focus right now – it is a situation that should make us question whether bigger and more intensive necessarily means better. Yet, ultimately, this is about much more than dairy farming. It is about deciding what kind of food system we want, and what we mean by efficiency, sustainability and food security. If we continue to judge success primarily by output, we risk accelerating the loss of farmers, wildlife and resilience at precisely the moment we need them most.

Read about our London Climate Week session on Big Dairy here.

SFT CEO, Patrick Holden, responds to the recent announcement from Tesco’s to cut a number of farmers from their Sustainable Dairy Group – a decision which Patrick calls ‘misguided’.

I’ve just read in Farmers Weekly that Tesco has announced their decision to reduce the number of dairy farmers in their milk supply pool, giving just 12-months’ notice to those who will be dropped. Apparently, they’ve taken this decision against the background of declining milk sales and the need to improve the sustainability of their supply chain.

In my opinion, this decision is misguided. It will have a range of direct and indirect negative impacts on climate change, pollution, biodiversity, milk quality and employment. Worst of all, it will perpetuate and accelerate the loss of one of our most precious cultural assets, the small family-run dairy farm. This community used to form the backbone of UK rural culture, however, during my lifetime of dairy farming, it has been decimated.

Customers are increasingly suspicious that many of the foods they eat, and milk in particular, are coming from ever larger and more industrialised farms. Unfortunately, these suspicions are well founded – more than half of the milk that is sold in UK supermarkets, now comes from dairy cows that are, to use the euphemistic jargon of the industry, ‘fully housed’, meaning they never get out on to grass.

I can understand the motives of Tesco’s head milk buyer – after all, their brief is to maintain profitability. They are in a price war against the other retailers who often use milk as a ‘loss leader’ because it is one of the few so-called KVIs (Known Value Items) the pricing of which they believe will persuade customers to shop in their stores.

In addition, they may have been told that the carbon emissions for each litre of milk produced by intensively managed ‘fully housed’ cows, is less than the emissions from lower-yielding, mainly grass-fed cows – in other words, the cows that I and thousands of other dairy farmers look after on our family farms. Even if this turns out to be true, which I dispute, that low carbon footprint is coming at the expense of multiple environmental, social and animal welfare costs, none of which are associated with small well-managed family dairy farms.

“More than half of the milk that is sold in UK supermarkets, now comes from dairy cows that are, to use the euphemistic jargon of the industry, ‘fully housed’, meaning they never get out on to grass.”

Arla, one of the big milk cooperatives is now paying a premium for so-called ‘carbon friendly milk’ based on exactly this formula. I suspect they are doing this because the cooperative is producer-owned and most of the producers on their board own these large, industrialised herds. You can understand why Arla and others are setting their own standards which cast their particular production systems in a better light. But we should understand that it is the inevitable consequence of not using common harmonised criteria for measuring farm sustainability.

I do care passionately about this existential threat to the family dairy farm. Holden Farm Dairy is one such unit. We are one of the ever-declining number of dairy farmers with fewer than 100 cows, which, I believe, is the ideal number for our 300-acre farm, where a herd of this size ensures cows are able to walk to grass twice a day, feed on fertiliser-free pastures, can be known individually and be treated with the dignity, respect and compassion that all dairy cows – and other creatures – deserve. When herds number 500 or more (with sometimes thousands of cows), the consequences of this industrial scale are inevitable: increased pollution, welfare issues and a whole range of negative social impacts in rural communities, all with stories the supermarkets wouldn’t want you to know.

Many years ago, when I was running the Soil Association, I had the good fortune to meet the then Chief Executive of Tesco, Sir Terry Leahy. Over a cup of tea, I politely suggested that Tesco’s policies were in danger of putting small and medium size UK farms out of business. His response stuck in my mind. He said, “What do you expect us to do? We are stuck between a rock and two hard places – our customers, who want ever cheaper food, our shareholders who demand better returns on their investments, and our competitors, who will gain market share unless we drop our prices.”

“When herds number 500 or more (with sometimes thousands of cows), the consequences of this industrial scale are inevitable: increased pollution, welfare issues and a whole range of negative social impacts in rural communities, all with stories the supermarkets wouldn’t want you to know.”

In response, I said, “Good answer. So if your job is giving your customers what they think they want today, mine is changing their attitudes so they become committed to buying better quality food tomorrow.” He then said, “We are like Pavlov’s dogs – we will do what our customers want us to do.”

Leahy was not wrong; as citizens and consumers, we have become fixated on the cheapness of our food, and at the same time we haven’t used our consumer power to insist that we have a right to know the story behind it. If you think about it, that is not a disempowering statement, it is the very opposite!

The introduction by the Danish government of a cow carbon tax, announced last week, is in my opinion a deeply misguided decision.

I’m sure it was well intentioned, but the truth is that introducing this tax may make it even more difficult for farming to move from being part of the problem (which it currently absolutely is) to being part of the solution.

Furthermore, and this is a controversial statement if ever there was one, it is my contention that beef, lamb or dairy products from grass-fed animals managed in a holistic grazing system are amongst the most sustainable foods we can eat.

This proposition runs counter to the overwhelming consensus in the scientific, research, policy, NGO, and medical establishment that livestock, in general, and ruminants, in particular, are part of the problem in terms of climate. However, before you dismiss me as a heretic, I’ll try and set out the arguments which justify this statement.

Let me start by defending the undoubtedly good intentions of the policymakers in the Danish government. They are simply following the lead of many reports and institutions who have been saying for at least a couple of decades now that ruminant animals (cows and sheep) are part of the problem in terms of climate change because they emit methane.

This is correct, but what they don’t factor in is the inter-relationship between the emissions from those same grazing animals and the pastures they eat, which, if correctly managed, can be a major source of carbon sequestration.

For evidence, look no further than the corn-belt in the USA, as it is now known, whose soil fertility was built (in some cases several metres of it) by an interaction between millions of bison and grasslands.

Furthermore, the current way by which we calculate the global warming effect of methane, termed GWP100, does a poor job of measuring its actual warming impact. A new and improved metric, termed GWP*, has been developed in response, and this shows that the carbon footprint of herds or flocks with stable or declining methane emissions have been significantly overestimated.

I suggested at the beginning of this article that we should not be too hard on the policy makers because they are simply misinformed. What they now need to do is to differentiate between the animals that are part of the problem – intensively farmed, mainly grain-fed, animals which never get out to grass – and those animals that are not only part of the solution, but are actually central to the farming and food systems transition that all farmers will need to undergo if we are to avoid irreversible climate change.

Let me conclude by declaring an interest. I have been lucky enough to have stewardship over a 300-acre dairy farm in West Wales for over 50 years during which time we have been producing milk, cheese, meat and vegetables – all without the use of any chemical fertilisers, doing our best to farm in harmony with nature.

Like many farmers, we haven’t been keeping robust soil carbon records but from analysis over the last 10 or 15 years there is strong evidence to suggest that we are actually carbon negative, if you balance the carbon sequestration which we have achieved in our soils, hedgerows and grassland against the methane, diesel, electricity, and other inputs that are part of the problem.

So, if you are one of the many millions of people that have been persuaded to move to a plant-based diet, please do think twice and consider purchasing meat and dairy products from grass-fed (or mainly grass-fed) cattle and sheep. By doing so you will be actively enabling the much-needed transition towards more sustainable food and farming systems.

Grazing livestock are a key focus of the SFT’s work and the subject of our next report, due out later this year. In the UK, cattle and sheep dominate, with traditional regionally adapted breeds having been crucial to our health and food security for millennia. Yet, many communities in the world’s drier regions depend upon a different animal: the camel. Here, Ilse Kohler-Rollefson, scientist and author of Hoofprints on the Land, explores the vital role of camels in providing health-giving foods and explains how, just like sustainably managed sheep or cattle, they are crucial to environmental and cultural resilience.

Camels have been domesticated for some 4000 years, but they are not a conventional farm animal. In fact, until very recently they were not kept on farms at all. Fitted out with long legs and a digestive system that thrives on fibrous, spiky, thorny and salty plants, they are designed for those parts of the world too dry for crop farming, places like the Gobi and Sahara deserts. Having evolved to walk and roam over vast expanses, searching out sparse vegetation to aggregate the solar energy captured by drought resistant plants, their breeding was always in the hands of people who gave them the freedom to roam, adopting a nomadic lifestyle themselves. For these people that included ethnic groups such as the Raika in India, the Arabian Bedouin, the Somali in the Horn of Africa, the Tuareg in the Sahara and many others, camels represented the staff of life providing everything they needed to survive in harsh environments: food, clothing, transportation, companionship and more. In return, these cultures developed intimate emotional bonds with their camels, treating them with respect and affection, venerating them as a ‘gift of God’, immortalizing them in their poetry, using them as inspiration in their art and honouring them as their source of identity.

Food and farming writer, Steph Wetherell, explores the potential of share farming, an agricultural model common in the New Zealand dairy farming industry and on the rise in the UK, whereby new entrants gain access into farming through connecting with existing landowners who in turn benefit from the support they receive for succession arrangements.

In the UK, the average age of a farmer is now 60 and a staggering 40% of farmers are over the age of 65. Many do not have a succession plan for when they retire. Alongside this, we have a new generation of farmers, a significant proportion of whom do not come from a farming background. To compound these challenges, land prices are high – trebling between 2004 and 2014 and continuing to rise in the last decade – leaving the purchase of a farm out of reach to many.

This situation requires a range of solutions that includes training, land access initiatives and succession planning. One potential model is ‘share farming’, where new entrants and landowners enter into a shared risk and shared income arrangement.

In 2015, we quit our jobs and sold our flat in London to become farmers. Seven years on, we were the UK’s only organic duck egg producer – then it all came crashing down. In hindsight, what we did was crazy, but we have no regrets.

When we quit our jobs to start farming, we had a small budget and lots of enthusiasm. Our mission was to earn a living as full-time regenerative farmers on just 10 acres in South West Wales. We were going to do this with no farming experience, no side hustles and no farm subsidies. We knew from the beginning that it would be hard, but now we know how unrealistic that mission really was.

Though it’s considered a valuable food, one rich in nutrients, 490 million pints of milk are wasted in the UK per year. David Wilson looks at how our deteriorated relationship with food enables us to waste so much of it, specifically milk.

The relationship we have with our food has changed dramatically compared to only a generation or two ago. In our grandparents’ day, food waste was considered a sin to be avoided at all cost and memories of wartime shortages prevailed amongst the majority of the population. As that collective memory died and the rise of corporate food system control became the norm, our daily bread has got significantly cheaper and more available. This shift has in turn led to an expectation of infinite and plentiful low-priced food inspiring little or no thought as to food’s true value. We take this bounty for granted.

Among the top 5 most wasted foods in the UK is milk, which, as dairy farmers know, is often sold for less than the cost of production. A dairy enterprise involves a high level of skill, long hours and dedication, not to mention the huge financial investment needed.

We waste an estimated 490 million pints a year overall – a shocking figure that equates to the production of 200 cows from 200 dairy herds.

And even more starkly, the milk from 40,000 cows (300,000 tonnes) is tipped down the kitchen sink each year – a real slap in the face for the farmer.

To help visualise this monstrous figure, it equates to the contents of more than 122 Olympic swimming pools per year and with milk having a carbon footprint of around 1.1kg CO₂ per litre, that’s a whopping 3.3 million tonnes of CO_2.

One of the reasons for this waste is ‘use by’ dates which people obey to the letter and which supermarkets like Morrisons are replacing with ‘best before’ to try and turn this wasteful tide. In days gone by, a sniff would tell us all we needed to know and even if the milk had slightly turned, the worst it would do was to make your cuppa taste a little different. Have you ever heard of anyone getting food poisoning from milk that’s gone off?

Just to rev this topic up another notch, in terms of total UK dairy product waste, we chuck out more than 500,000 tonnes per year, with most of this waste occurring in the home. Then there’s the jaw dropping figure of total annual global food waste which is 1.3 billion tonnes and enough to feed 3 billion people.

These numbers are almost too big to comprehend but it does tell us a whole lot about our relationship with food. Milk is very easy to waste – it is so cheap that it doesn’t warrant a second thought and is easy to pour down the drain. It even has the added bonus that we can smugly pop the empty plastic bottle into the recycling bin and cancel out any guilt about food waste.

Milk is such a valuable food. It provides a rich source of nutrients that are essential for growth and strong bones – a fact so well recognised by the government of the post-war era, that it was supplied free to all UK schools and, alongside fortification of foods, is considered to have played a role in the disappearance of rickets, incidences of which have been rising in the UK in recent years.

This is just one very obvious tip of the food waste iceberg, clearly showing the casual approach we have to what we eat each day. Exactly the same attitude is seen in the throwing out of wonky but perfectly edible carrots – beautiful food thrown away for cosmetic reasons, a concept unthinkable to our sometimes hungry forefathers.

There is no doubt that commoditisation of any product somehow dehumanises it and the consumer becomes what Wendell Berry calls “an industrial eater” – disconnected from the farm of origin in every way. Direct sales of milk through vending machines or direct delivery, can help people connect more with the farm and farmer of source and there is no doubt that customers love a story behind their purchase. Constant engagement with the consumer has to be a positive thing, but there is a long way to go.

There was a rock song back in the 1970s that predicted a time when we have virtually destroyed ourselves and “a piece of bread will buy a bag of gold”. Unless we rethink the way we value our food, those words may turn out to be prophetic.

If we can come to think of ourselves and our communities as intimately entwined with farming, we might view waste in a different way. And if eating is thought of as the final part in a long drama that starts with the planting of a seed or the birth of an animal, we might view food as something far more special, even sacred, and integral to life itself.

Stroud Micro Dairy is an innovative award-winning community supported cooperative dairy – the first in the UK. Founded by Kees Frederiks, it launched in 2017 in a local Stroud pub, with 40 members agreeing to take a subscription. Five and a half years later the dairy continues as a cooperatively owned business, with three and a half full time equivalent employees and 18 cows.

Kees is the son of a dairy farmer, but growing up, he vowed never to go into farming, instead working in London designing and building bike parking. It was Graham Harvey’s book, The Carbon Fields, that made him change his mind. Harvey’s argument for the value of small-scale mixed rotational farming and the power to sequester carbon in our soils, opened a door. He began to see that farming could be “an opportunity to do more good, rather than less bad”. Kees moved to Stroud with his partner Alice and with the help of the Biodynamic Land Trust, they were able to secure the land needed to start their dairy business. 

A cooperatively owned model of Community Supported Agriculture

Kees describes the relationship with his customers as “a kind of social insurance”. Customers buy a ‘share’ of the business, which entitles them to a quantity of milk for the year. And, as the first community owned dairy co-op in the UK, members have a say in how their food is produced and a share in the profits. This financial commitment allows the business to weather storms which they may otherwise struggle to survive. As a community supported model, they can “hang in there” in the event of a positive TB test, for example, which they say would be disastrous for a small farm, but their financial set up allows them to pull through. 

The regenerative agricultural practices of the dairy

Stroud Micro Dairy is “inspired by permaculture, biodynamics, and organic farming”. They practice tall grass holistic grazing, which places an emphasis on a rest period for the grass, rather than the grazing. In this system, grass is grazed in sections by the herd, so that it has the opportunity to grow tall and root deeply. Deep roots secure the soil structure, preventing soil erosion and allowing the soil ecosystem to thrive rather than being constantly disturbed. Biodynamic preparations are applied, and the team are currently “looking to improve [their soil] with herbal lays” to increase their local biodiversity and further support the soil macro and microbiota.

The challenges of selling raw milk 

On the rewards and challenges of selling raw milk in the UK, Kees explains that selling a premium product is what makes regenerative agriculture possible on their ‘micro’ scale. Selling raw milk is both “simple and hard”, Kees says. He refers to Schedule 6 in the Food Safety and Hygiene regulations for England on the sale of raw milk products which means they’re only able to sell their products on the farm gate. Whilst admitting that such restrictions on the range of sale does maintain a direct link between producer and seller, important if anything going wrong, this legislation also severely restricts the ease of sale of the products.

 Financial stability in micro-dairying

Kees acknowledges that they will need to expand the business in order to reach their sales target and to ensure further financial security.

Labour is an ongoing issue. Kees explains that they have to make the most of their small scale. “You can’t dilute labour when you do things in small quantities; labour is still the biggest cost.” He said that one of the real challenges of being small scale is that the numbers are difficult to do, that “at this scale, numbers are not on your side.”

Unfortunately, there’s currently no single place to find your nearest micro dairy, but a quick google search throws up plenty of small farms bucking the trends of industrialisation. If you’d like to support Stroud Micro Dairy, why not take a look at their investment opportunities?

 

As we stride ever nearer to the 2030 climate targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and keep global temperature rise capped, countries and businesses continue to take further responsibility for their environmental impact and are making huge commitments to reduce it. 

Researchers recently concluded in Science that world climate goals cannot be achieved without fundamental changes to our food system and the way that food is produced.

Like other food companies, Nestlé’s agricultural supply chain and sourcing of ingredients is responsible for 71.4% of its emissions, with the lion’s share of these emissions going to dairy and livestock production. So, Nestlé has made some strong commitments to limiting its environmental damage in relation to agriculture. It has promised that it will:

By 2025

• reduce emissions by 20%
• source 20% of key ingredients through regenerative agricultural methods
• use 100% certified sustainable palm oil by 2023 and 100% certified cocoa and coffee 

By 2030

• reduce emissions by 50%
• source 50% of key ingredients through regenerative agricultural methods

By 2050

• be net zero in carbon
• deliver a regenerative food system at scale

Nestlé (among others such as Cargill, Danone and Walmart) seem to have jumped on the regenerative agriculture bandwagon, identifying this in its Net Zero Roadmap as one of the most effective ways to reduce the company’s agricultural environmental impact.

Regenerative farming, which centres on building soil health, is one promising pathway for decreasing agriculture’s carbon footprint. But how does a large food company, such as Nestlé, motivate the multitude of farmers in its supply chain to adopt farming practices that bind carbon in the soil? How does it achieve this across varying farm archetypes of different scales? And how do we know that these agricultural practices are truly sequestering carbon, and for how long? Or is ‘regenerative’ the new ‘sustainable’ – a vague buzzword that sounds meaningful but is far too broad to be pinned down?

Nestlé is clearly taking its climate commitments seriously as it has worked with the Science Based Targets initiative, taken note of IPCC reports and targets, looked at farm carbon accounting with the Cool Farm Tool, and teamed up with ETH Zurich Sustainability in Business Lab. But scratch below the surface to find out whether the regenerative talk is just that – talk.

Nestle’s Net Zero Roadmap sees pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, scale up initiatives to absorb more carbon from the atmosphere, improve soil health, invest in farmer livelihoods and animal welfare, help develop climate-resilient and more equitable farming communities, and much more. It’s safe to say that Nestlé has its work cut out with these targets, but it is reassuring to see a company of that scale commit to the regenerative movement.

Livestock

Unlike many of today’s companies, Nestlé sees livestock farming as a vital part of the solution to achieve net zero in agriculture. Indeed, Nestlé has collaborated with ETH Zurich Sustainability in Business Lab on the ‘Towards Climate Positive Dairy Farms’ report which observes three different archetypes of farms from South America, Central America and Asia. Based on expert interviews and literature, a model that assesses abatement potential and the cost of different abatement options was developed. In this context, abatement simply means curbing emissions in order to reduce the concentration of certain gases and contaminants in our environment. This report recognises that different locations, types of farms and landscapes, require different solutions and it concludes the best solutions to reduce emissions associated with livestock farming include:

• selective breeding programmes to optimise fertility, yield and eventually GHG emissions in cattle, in order to lower emissions by 2.4%;
• heat abatement to reduce heat stress and increase milk production, lowering carbon emissions by up to 5.1%;
• use of silvopasture, where trees are incorporated in pasture, allowing for carbon sequestration where trees are planted, and shade for cows; additionally, trees can be used as income generators through offsetting schemes and sale of wood products, though this would require large management change, but this could see emissions cut by 24%;
• manure management and capture of biogases through biodigesters.

At first glance, it seems that Nestlé have got the regenerative memo, particularly with its recommendations to incorporate silvopasture. However, when you zoom in on the fine print, none of these recommendations are made to farms with permanently housed livestock. Indeed, the target comes across as somewhat counter-productive as it is pledging to improve soil health and animal welfare, but does not appear to join the dots between housed livestock, the feed they require, their welfare, manure management, soil health and environmental impact. This demonstrates that Nestlé is really playing around the edges, picking the low hanging fruit and continuing to intensify the broken system for maximum efficiency. 

Whilst we can appreciate that it is a huge system to reshape, the commitment to regenerative agriculture must be followed through, not just talked about. So long as Nestlé is sourcing its ingredients from permanently housed livestock, it’s unlikely its environmental impact will see a huge improvement. Intensifying the system for yield efficiency will only intensify the environmental problems.

It can be quite easy for corporations to get locked into ‘carbon tunnel vision’ where reducing the carbon footprint and creating ‘climate-smart solutions’ often causes unintended consequences such as biodiversity loss or different forms of pollution. Regenerative agriculture, in theory, helps to avoid these unintended consequences as it follows the principles of farming with nature and takes a whole-system approach.

Soil and forest

Nestlé recognises that the conversion of natural landscapes for ingredients in its supply chain is estimated to account for between 25-35% of its total ingredient emissions. For key crop supply chains, such as cocoa, coffee, palm oil and soybean, the proportion can be even higher. Nestlé has longer-term ambitions to make conservation and restoration standard practice throughout its supply chains, including caring for soil health and introducing new agricultural practices to support nutrient uptake, water retention and fertility, and restore the soil’s carbon content. There’s talk of reduced tillage or ’no till’, cover cropping, multiple crop rotation and switching to organic fertilisers for most soil-grown ingredients. Some circularity will be introduced with composting of agricultural waste to enrich the soil with nutrients.

These are great ideas, based on regenerative principles, which is encouraging to see from such a large company. However, it seems oxymoronic to talk about intensifying housed livestock production in one chapter, then improving soil health in the next, without observing the symbiotic relationship between livestock and soil health in a truly regenerative system. Again, Nestlé seems to be saying all the right things, but the initiatives remain disjointed.

Nestlé makes a further commitment to restore rainforest and high carbon stock or high conservation value (i.e., areas of land that have huge carbon sequestration potential), but in the same breath it promises an increase in plant-based ingredients, specifically in its frozen meals, pizzas and dairy categories. These plant-based alternatives, such as soy, palm oil, almonds, coconut oil and jackfruit have become ubiquitous with the rise of veganism and are often sourced from forested areas. We can all be in agreement that we need to eat less but better meat and dairy products, but it is essential to also be conscious of meat substitutes, their origin and environmental and social impact. Nestlé appears to contradict itself as it recognises livestock farming and regenerative agriculture as a solution to climate change, but also plans to scale up plant-based ingredients associated with deforestation and environmental damage.

Nevertheless, it’s significant that such a large corporation with so much market influence is working towards net zero in carbon and interested in regenerative agricultural practices. Nestlé has a clear vision, it sees its environmental impact and wants to improve it. This calls for a measurement and common framework of what an environmentally positive regenerative agricultural system looks like, in order to enable, benchmark and track this supply chain-wide progress. This is an opportunity for large corporations such as Nestlé to collaborate with third-party certifiers and measurement tools like the Global Farm Metric to ensure the changes it makes to its systems are good for the environment.

Nestlé recognises that these agricultural developments are also subject to the local context and that blanket changes across many different farming systems will see negative consequences too. Use of the Global Farm Metric would help keep an eye on these local contexts to ensure that any changes being made will benefit the land and people. The Global Farm Metric would also help avoid the ‘carbon tunnel vision’ trap as it takes a holistic measure of the whole farming system, including water, soil, biodiversity, social impacts and much more.

Overall, this is a great opportunity for change with such a huge player willing to operate differently. Nestlé should be proud of the start it’s making and continue to look to the future, working with others, and aiming to join up the dots in its large-scale processes. An ability to demonstrate this progress, through the Global Farm Metric, would be beneficial for everyone involved in Nestlé’s operations, from the primary producers of agricultural commodities, right through to the consumers.