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.

As food systems took centre stage at London Climate Week 2026, the Sustainable Food Trust was there to listen, challenge and contribute to the debate. In this round-up, the SFT’s Bahareh Sarvi (SFT’s Trials Data Manager), Amy Warner (Head of Fundraising) and Jessica Gunn (Director of Advocacy and Communications) reflect on five of the most significant conversations – from affordability and investment to regenerative agriculture and the rise of ‘Big Dairy’ – and what they mean for the future of food and farming.

The irony wasn’t lost on anyone: as the Capital sweltered in temperatures of 35C, scientists, policymakers, executives and activists gathered in their thousands to discuss the climate crisis. Newspaper headlines screamed “London Climate event on coping with extreme heat cancelled due to extreme heat” and “London isn’t calling, it’s cooking!”; it all felt very real.

London Climate Week Action 2026 was bigger than ever – reportedly surpassing even New York Climate Week in the sheer number of events. There were panels, roundtables, big events and intimate gatherings across the gauntlet. The good news was that food systems as a topic was well represented from the Palace to Goals House. As ever, the Sustainable Food Trust (SFT) was deep in the weeds of it all, so if you weren’t able to be there in person – these are the five main things you need to know from this year’s event.

1. The affordability trap

The Economist launched its Resilient Food System Index, a serious attempt by a serious institution to hold companies accountable for food system performance. The Index presents four pillars of measurement and success – availability, quality and safety, adaptability, and climate and affordability. This all sounds very sensible, until you get to that last, despot of an argument that, in reality, has driven decades of soil degradation, biodiversity collapse and public health crises – here now again enshrined as a measure of success.

A UNICEF representative offered the most single, devastating data point in response: obesity has now overtaken hunger as the world’s primary form of malnutrition. Both conditions disproportionately affect people in poverty. Both are driven, in large part, by cheap food.

The SFT view: The race to make food cheaper has not fed the world or made us healthier. It has malnourished us – differently, but no less completely. Whenever a proposal emerges that might raise food prices, industry players (and Government) reach for ‘affordability’ like a weapon – and it works every time. Price has become equated with public good at the expense of every other measure of a food system’s health. Finding new language for this – language that holds space for both access and quality – is one of the most urgent tasks in food policy today.

Find out more here: insights.economistenterprise.com/energy-environment/resilient-food-systems-index

2. The investment gap nobody wants to own

Harry Farnsworth from Rabobank said something that should have made the front page: the climate is still not priced into the market. The reality of agriculture’s risk model still failing to reflect the environmental reality it operates within – global conflict, climate change, degraded soil, dwindling biodiversity etc, and the fact the margins on farming are already too low, means a sustainable transition is simply not investable at scale – unless someone steps up to take the first loss.

Two new funds have been set up to address this: a DEFRA-backed nature bond and a Wildfarmed initiative, both relying on government or philanthropic capital to absorb risk that private markets refuse to touch.

The SFT view: These are promising experiments. But they are two drops in an ocean that requires a tide. The food industry’s lobbying budget runs to tens of billions annually – while philanthropic capital flowing into food system change is measured in the hundreds of thousands. We are bringing a trowel to an excavation that needs heavy machinery.

Find out more here: https://uknaturefund.com

3. Net zero: A useful framing or a dangerous one?

One of the sharpest critiques to emerge across multiple sessions was directed at net zero itself. The framing, various participants argued, has created tunnel vision – a single metric absorbing all available attention, investment and political will, while biodiversity, water quality, soil health and community resilience, are treated as afterthoughts.

The SFT view: Net zero has become too narrowly focused on carbon. Offsetting has overtaken genuine emissions reductions, and has inadvertently rewarded intensive production because it can appear carbon-efficient (see Big Dairy) while in reality still harming ecosystems. Measuring success primarily through CO₂ can obscure wider environmental and social outcomes. Instead, we need a whole-systems approach that integrates climate, food security, ecosystem health and long-term resilience.

4. Thinking in systems, not commodities

‘Regenerative’ might be a buzz word but how to define it? Discussions around the week confirmed the answer remains elusive. Regenerative agriculture however, many now agree, is not a destination, it is an approach to farming that by design is in constant motion. Regenerative wheat is classified as such, not simply because of how the crop itself is grown, but because of the barley, legumes and grass leys that preceded it – the label emerges from a community of plants (or commodities) working together. The whole farm system is the unit of analysis, and most of our financial and regulatory infrastructure is completely unequipped to handle that complexity.

The SFT view: A true understanding of regenerative agriculture (or lack of) has profound implications for how we finance, measure and incentivise farming. Supply chains that claim to support regenerative practice must begin investing in farmers to support the transition. This process must not simply be a matter of passing the cost to consumers, nor relying on government alone to bridge the gap. If a company’s share price was genuinely exposed to the climate risk embedded in its supply chain, that investment would follow quickly. The Regen10 Framework believes that ownership of the transition must not be a dictatorship; each farm and landscape is different and the challenge for each will reflect that. Our role is to define where we need to go, not necessarily how we get there.

Find out more here: True Cost Accounting report and https://regen10.org/outcomes-framework/ 

5. A big debate about Big Dairy

The SFT hosted its own panel on the rise of Big Dairy in the generously donated environment of Goals House. There was a diverse line-up of people in the room, with Patrick Holden at the helm. Against a landscape of the number of ‘mega dairies’ in the UK doubling over the last decade, while dairy farms overall have declined rapidly from 54,000 in 1974 to under 7,000 today, it leaves in no doubt the reality that the message to dairy farmers has felt like ‘go big or get out’.

Today 60% of the milk now consumed in the UK comes from Big Dairy, aka: ‘fully housed’ systems – and the public are only just waking up to this – helped by high profile campaigns from Project Sling Shot. High on the agenda was agreement that the dairy system is trapped in a commodity model that rewards low price above all else. Commodification has simultaneously dissolved dairy’s intrinsic value, and the sector’s control over its own narrative. Stronger storytelling around its stewardship, nutrition and security is vital.

The SFT view: we need a trusted, shared framework on measurement that rewards farmers for sustainable practices, higher welfare and ultimately, human health. The current system is optimised for a small number of actors – we need pricing mechanisms that serve farmers, the public, climate and food security. Bringing people together from all sides of the debate is the first step towards a shared vision.

In a nutshell
What we need now is not more agreement on the problem, but rather the leadership – political, financial and institutional – to act on it.

This makes it all the more striking that London Climate Week generated very little mainstream press coverage. Thousands of people, hundreds of events, some of the most consequential conversations happening anywhere in the world about food, land, water and climate – and the national newspapers were largely silent. When the public conversation isn’t happening, the urgency stays trapped in the room. That, perhaps more than anything else, is what needs to change.

Image credit: Photo by Benjamin Davies on Unsplash

Last week, the High Court ruled in favour of a judicial review challenging regulations that remove labelling and traceability from so-called ‘precision bred’ organisms. The judicial review was led by Beyond GM, with Patrick Holden, CEO of the Sustainable Food Trust, and two others standing as co-claimants. Here Patrick reflects on why he chose to speak out and on the importance of the case.

I cannot pretend that I fully understood all the legal arguments when I first agreed to become involved in a judicial review challenging new regulations governing genetically modified ‘precision bred’, organisms (PBOs).

I am a farmer, not a lawyer. What I did understand was that the new regulations, which removed traceability and labelling from certain types of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) would make it harder for producers and consumers who wished to – or had to – avoid genetically engineered organisms to do so.

That seemed wrong to me then and, following the High Court’s judgment last week, it’s clear the Government did not fully consider all the options available or the impacts of a profound change in legislation.

Becoming a claimant in a judicial review is a serious commitment. It required putting my name to a public legal challenge against the Government and accepting a level of scrutiny that many might prefer to avoid. But then again, the core issues of the case led by Beyond GM – the integrity of living organisms and the protection of organic standards – are issues that I have a long history with.

The experience has caused me to reflect not only on the case itself but on how dramatically the debate around genetic engineering has changed since the battles many of us fought in the 1990s. History, it seems, still has some important lessons to teach us.

Lessons to learn

Back in the late 1990s and early noughties, when I was director of the Soil Association, one of the standout campaigns with which I was involved was against the introduction of GMOs.

Our GMO campaign, arguing that the Government should not allow genetically engineered foods to creep into our food system was won, due in no small measure to the massive media attention it attracted, but also because Labour’s Environment Minister, Michael Meacher, was both privately and virtually publicly on our side.

Michael was the one who championed the Farm Scale Evaluations – a series of large-scale trials to test the impact of GM crops on local biodiversity and ecosystems, prior to any commercial approvals. The results raised serious concerns about the environmental consequences of planting GMO crops and undermined claims that they would automatically deliver public benefits.

He paid the political price for doing the right thing.

Coincidentally, I met with him on the day that he was sacked by Tony Blair. “I’ve got some bad news,” he said, “let’s go and have a drink on the Terrace.” It was never stated publicly, but many of us believed his opposition to the Government’s pro-GM policy played a significant role in his departure.

It is heartening to know that one of the last actions Michael took before he passed away, was to stand with Beyond GM on the steps of Number 10, to deliver the ‘Letter from America’ – a plea from American farmers, businesses, food advocates and civil society organisations, representing some 57 million people, for the UK not to follow America’s unquestioning embrace of GMOs.

The empire strikes back

Twenty years later, how things have changed! There is no equivalent to Michael Meacher in the Government. Many of the MPs who waved this legislation through without scrutiny probably couldn’t tell a GMO from their own elbows and are utterly seduced by the idea that we can improve on nature using the great white heat of technology.

After a decisive blow, the industry, or perhaps one might say the empire, has struck back, and very effectively too. It did this in the form of a seemingly innocuous piece of legislation – the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act of 2023 – which sought to distance GMOs from their past failures by giving them a shiny new name: precision bred organisms (PBOs).

Ask anyone on the street and they likely won’t be able to tell you what a PBO is, yet 8 in 10 people in the UK believe that all GMOs should be labelled and traceable in our food system. This change of law has a major impact on the right to exercise informed choice and to choose not to plant, sell or buy GMOs.

The Act was signed into law by the Conservatives, but it is Labour that passed the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Regulations into law in 2025, which allow the commercial planting and sale of PBO plants.

Despite a feeling of a fait accompli, Beyond GM and its legal team at Leigh Day and Matrix Chambers believed there was still a possible route to challenge what was happening. Not by reversing the primary Act, which would require another Act of Parliament, but by challenging the legality of the regulations made under it.

Taking the fight to court

The gathering of co-claimants was part of an intense and meticulous 13-month effort by Beyond GM and its legal team at Leigh Day and Matrix Chambers.

What was needed was evidence from farmers who could explain how the absence of labelling and traceability would affect their ability to maintain the integrity of organic and non-GM production. Organic farming depends not only on what happens in the field, but on the reliability of the whole chain – seeds, feed, ingredients, certification, trust. Organic farmers are legally obliged to avoid all GMOs, including PBOs. If precision bred organisms can move through parts of that chain without being identified, then the ability of organic producers to avoid them is compromised.

The case also needed a consumer voice, and that was provided by Joanna Blythman, whose long-standing commitment to food quality and transparency is well known.

As with all legal issues, there were fine lines to negotiate. Today’s organic standards, for which I can claim some credit, have always recognised that absolute purity can be difficult in a contaminated world. Spray drift, environmental contamination and other forms of unwanted intrusion have long been part of the reality organic farmers face. But that is precisely why a functioning regulatory system matters. If the Government creates a regime in which contamination becomes both inevitable and harder to identify and avoid, it cannot then pretend that organic producers and consumers are unaffected.

“Organic farming depends not only on what happens in the field, but on the reliability of the whole chain – seeds, feed, ingredients, certification, trust. Organic farmers are legally obliged to avoid all GMOs, including PBOs. If precision bred organisms can move through parts of that chain without being identified, then the ability of organic producers to avoid them is compromised.”

The Court’s verdict

I may not be a legal expert but I can read and the Court’s judgement makes very good reading.

It concludes that the Defra Farming Minister was repeatedly “misadvised” by his advisors that he had no power to mandate labelling and traceability for these new GMOs. It goes further, noting that had the Minister been given correct information he would have given greater consideration to the wider impacts of the regulations and indeed might have made different decisions about what they should contain.

The Court accepted that the consequences of removing the tools necessary to support traceability and transparency were real and likely to impose greater burdens – and costs – on famers, businesses and consumers.

It went further still, stating that organic farming is not merely a technical standard or certification scheme. For many, it represents a fundamental set of values, principles and professional commitments which the Regulations make much more difficult to maintain. To my knowledge, this is the first time something this impactful to organic has been made plain in a legal judgement.

More than a food issue

These are serious findings and, beyond their relevance to the food system, they reveal something very troubling about the way the government now works. If ministers are not properly informed, if MPs are not fully engaged and if complex regulations are waved through on the basis of ‘party lines’, industry lobbying and soothing language, then democratic oversight becomes little more than theatre.

Will the judgment make a difference? We shall see.

As I write, Beyond GM and its legal team are now in discussions with the Government about what should happen next. The Court has identified serious flaws in the way these regulations were developed and these cannot now be ignored.

The missing media

One thing is unfortunately clear. The media appetite for this issue is much less than it used to be. When the judgment was handed down, I rang my contacts at the BBC Radio 4 Today programme to let them know about a major breaking story. They said they were interested, but in the end came the familiar refrain: “Do keep in touch, we are interested in this, but unfortunately it didn’t make the cut for tomorrow’s programme.”

That would not have happened in the 1990s.

Today, the public, politicians and much of the media have allowed themselves to fall into a state of torpor about food and farming. The progressive industrialisation of our food systems has gone so far that many people have almost lost the will to complain. It is now difficult to buy genuinely high-quality, nutrient-dense, contaminant-free food.

What comes next?

I suspect this lapse of attention may be temporary. People such as Chris van Tulleken, who I recently interviewed for the Sustainable Food Trust podcast, have done a brilliant job alerting the public to the dangers of ultra-processed food. Many younger people, especially in Gen Z – if my sons are anything to go by – are increasingly worried about what is being done to the food they eat.

So, thank you Pat Thomas at Beyond GM and Lawrence Woodward, who provided strategic advice throughout, for your thorough and thoughtful work on this issue. Please do not give up – because this issue will not go away.

I may be just an ‘average person,’ albeit rather better informed than most because of a lifelong interest in this area, but I do not want to re-design nature. I do not want to eat food of poor nutritional quality. I do not want food contaminated by pesticide residues, GMOs, additives, preservatives or anything else I cannot identify or avoid.

Some people who shared these views were, perhaps understandably, reluctant to step forward and put themselves through the rigours of being a co-claimant. I chose to do so because I believe these regulations compromise my right, and the rights of others, to eat food that reflects our values and to grow it for others.

I am absolutely convinced I am not alone.

Write to your MP – you can be part of the action by writing to your MP. Use this link, expressing  your concerns and your support for transparency and labelling for PBOs. It’s quick, there’s suggested text to use and it does meaningful work in letting the Government know what the people really want.

Food trends come and go, shaping what we eat and how we think about health. From plant-based to low-carb, with each new wave comes a surge of products designed to cash in. But behind the marketing, what does the evidence on health really say? And how do these trends relate to the realities of farming and food production? Joanna Blythman takes a closer look, through the lens of protein.

Suggest to the beefy blokes lifting weights in the gym that ‘high protein’ is merely the latest food-fad, and they’ll put you right. They have long seen a high protein diet as the only way to build muscle and need no persuading that a daily plate of steak and eggs could only be a good thing. But in recent years, high protein diets have crossed over from the sports nutrition domain to capture a much wider market, one with a more feminine demographic.

We were probably ready for that change of message. The ubiquitous ‘plant-based’ trend peaked in 2021 and has been losing ground ever since; UK plant-based food sales fell 4.5% in the year to January 2025.

Veganism, its most extreme incarnation, is right off the boil. An eating pattern that always appealed more to women than men, its Waterloo moment in the UK, came last year when the former head of communications at Veganuary quit her role to advocate a shift away from veganism to ‘less and better’ meat-eating. The proposition that populations would eventually transition to a diet free of animal-sourced foods proved to be a harder sell than its ardent proponents had hoped.

But another significant factor powering the taste for high protein is the arrival on the market of GLP-1 weight loss drugs, such as Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro. Available from GPs, or unsupervised over the internet, these drugs suppress appetite and reduce overall calorie intake, but they also cause loss of lean muscle mass.

Nutrition advisers of a ‘Keto’ inclination have habitually stressed the value of protein-rich foods as a means to feel fuller longer. But now that so many people – once again, a majority of them women – use weight loss drugs, higher protein intake is advanced as the prescription for muscle repair during periods of rapid, drug-induced weight loss. “Muscle mummies”, who are full of the joys of a high protein diet combined with resistance training, attract more social media ‘likes’ than ‘cardio bunnies’ who remain loyal to Zumba and low-fat as the formula for weight control and health.

Perhaps it’s a reaction to the plant-based craze, but more people now seem to understand the fact that animal-sourced foods – meat, fish, dairy and eggs – are typically nutrient-dense, much higher in protein, weight for weight, than plant-sourced foods. Furthermore, it is gradually becoming more widely appreciated that the protein in meat, dairy, eggs and fish is more ‘complete’ in terms of providing the nine essential amino acids we need, in their most easily absorbable, digestible forms; the Sustainable Food Trust’s Grazing Livestock report has noted that, “…grass-fed meat and dairy tend to have superior nutritional profiles compared to their grain-fed equivalents”.

The Digestible Indispensable Amino Acid Score (DIAAS), endorsed by the FAO as the most accurate method of assessing protein quality, measures amino acid absorption in the small intestine. By this score, animal proteins (meat, egg, dairy, fish) score higher than plant proteins. On the DIAAS scale, beef and eggs, for instance, score 1.22 and 1.12 respectively, while kidney beans and oats score 0.61 and 0.44 respectively.

Soy is one of the highest-quality plant proteins, with a DIAAS score of 0.92, but consumer attitudes towards it are mixed, with taste preferences and perceptions varying widely across populations.

The role protein plays in supporting hormonal health, by regulating our appetite and stress hormones, has now emerged as a talking point. In women’s health circles, where the perimenopause and health in ageing are big issues, protein is commonly discussed as a strategy to combat muscle loss, stabilise metabolism, manage weight and maintain bone health, as oestrogen declines. The logic here is that women need to get less energy from carbohydrates and fats, and more from protein, to compensate for the biological changes that occur at menopause.

Over the years, government ‘healthy eating’ guidance has told us that overconsumption of fat is making us sick and obese. The low-carb lobby has argued back that carbohydrates, so rapidly digested as sugar, are the real culprit – not fat. Enter the ‘Protein Leverage Effect’ theory. It focuses on the satiating effect of protein and postulates the idea that without an adequate proportion of protein, the body’s drive to reach its target protein intake will make us continue to over-eat unnecessary energy from fats and carbs until we get the protein we need.

Heightened awareness of protein’s critical role in maintaining good health is, of course, good news for livestock farmers. UK meat sales saw a substantial upswing in 2025. We spent £500 million more on meat products.

Meat is off the naughty step, at last. The ‘yuk’ reaction towards meat has taken another knock from soaring interest in bone broth. Our grandmothers and great-grandmothers always had a stock pot of bones and carcasses bubbling away and saw that precious liquid as a foundation for good health. Bone broth contains collagen, which breaks down into gelatine during cooking, providing amino acids that are essential for joint health, gut lining integrity and connective tissue repair, along with useful micronutrients – magnesium, potassium and more – and fat-soluble vitamins from the bone marrow. As the currently strong growth in demand for ready-made bone broth products shows, previously squeamish meat avoiders can nevertheless be persuaded to purchase 500 ml of liquid bone broth at £7 a time, or keep powdered bone broth beside the kettle. Might concentrated powdered bone broth be the new Bovril?

But it is minimally processed dairy products, such as Skyr, that have benefited particularly handsomely from the protein quest. Witness the fortunes of cottage cheese. For decades, it looked like a legacy product from the 1960s, but now, powered by a TikTok buzz, cottage cheese is hot, hot, hot.

Grahams, the Scottish family, reported cottage cheese sales growth of 40%, just in 2024 alone. Propelled by the appetite for protein, its new Protein Cottage Cheese, with 25% more protein than standard cottage cheese, is flying off the shelves.

Manufacturers of ultra-processed foods are, naturally, only too glad to surf the protein wave. A ‘high protein’ label is the latest way to imbue products that least deserve it, with a halo of health. So, you can buy high protein everything, from crisps and energy bars, through meal replacement shakes and smoothies, to pizza dough and wraps.

A closer look at the composition of M&S’s High Protein Chocolate Porridge gives a flavour of the less processed products of this type.

It contains more than 21% sugar, which qualifies as high in sugar by even the most forgiving dietetic measure. It also contains chicory fibre (inulin). Fibre, in particular chicory fibre, is having a moment in some weight loss circles and is used in many ultra-processed food formulations, not exclusively high protein ones. But it can produce bloating, gas and other irritable bowel symptoms, particularly when taken in large doses in the form of supplements and powders.

Most high-protein supplements and snacks are based on concentrated ingredients, such as whey protein isolate, milk protein concentrate, pea protein isolates and soy fractions. Inclusion in a formulation of these hyper-processed substances allow manufacturers to keep the protein-seekers happy, but their creations lack the pleasing taste and texture of protein found in natural forms. Protein isolates can make products overly dry and chalky, with a challenging dense texture. Like soy, they often taste bitter. At this point, food technologists and product developers reach for emulsifiers, stabilisers, sweeteners and flavourings to make them palatable. Meanwhile the marketing departments are hard at work, positioning such novel creations as convenient tools for sating appetites and building muscle.

But there is no robust research on how these highly synthesised, industrial forms of protein might impact on human health in the long term. It’s more than likely that such new-fangled protein forms won’t be as well adapted to our body needs as protein in its more traditional forms.

So, should we be cynical about the high protein trend? It has to be said that our forebears were well aware that protein ‘keeps you going longer’, as they put it. The costliness of protein foods was the only reason they saw to restrict their consumption. But now over 50% of the food we eat in the UK is ultra-processed. If that mirrors your diet, watch out for any high protein sales pitch designed to convince you that the product you’re buying is great for you when, in fact, it is anything but.

Yet for people who cook for themselves routinely and actively avoid ultra-processed products, this current focus on protein is surely welcome. The prominence of protein in diet debates demonstrates that many more of us are now actively seeking out nutrient density, as opposed to counting carbs. That’s a welcome corrective to the stale plant-based, vegan fixation. Protein’s prominence puts animal-sourced foods back at the heart of our diets, which is where they always used to be.

To find out more about how we can produce nutrient-dense foods from sustainable livestock farming, read our report, Grazing Livestock: It’s not the cow but the how.

The new UK regulatory framework on genetically modified (GM) plants threatens both the right of farmers to choose what crops they grow and the right of consumers to know what they are eating. Patrick Holden – CEO of the Sustainable Food Trust and part of the successful 1990s campaign for the appropriate regulation of GMOs – highlights why we must act now if we want to preserve our right to keep GM plants out of our fields and GM food off our plates.

I have photographs of myself from the late 1990s, standing outside the High Court in London holding a placard. I was director of the Soil Association then, and we were in the middle of a major public campaign against the introduction of genetically modified crops into British farming. The cameras were there. The public and other civil society groups were with us. The momentum was with us.

We won – or so it seemed. Not by making GM crops illegal, but by ensuring they were regulated. A tough regulatory framework, backed by strong labelling requirements and even stronger public opinion, meant that GM crops never took root in British fields. For nearly two decades, that felt like enough.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t because regulation, as we have all learned to our cost, can be rewritten, debated by MPs who don’t understand what they are debating, or worse are told what position to take by the party, and signed into law in by ministers who haven’t read them. That was our Achilles heel, and we didn’t see it coming.

The industry we thought we had seen off came back, and it came back with a plan.

Three things converged to make this possible. The first was a genuine development in the science: a new technique called gene editing, which gives scientists the option of modifying a plant’s own genetic material rather than splicing in genes from an unrelated species. The second was Brexit – or more precisely, what Michael Gove called the “unfrozen moment,” the opportunity to strip away what his party regarded as overcautious European regulation. The third was a compelling political narrative: that Britain, freed from Brussels, could become a world leader in agricultural innovation, with Norfolk- and Cambridge-based plant scientists at the vanguard.

Put those three things together and you have a powerful lobby, a receptive government, and a story the media were willing to tell sympathetically.

Same old arguments, better PR

I was one of several NGO representatives who attended consultation meetings organised by Defra over the last few years, and we made the arguments against the proposed legislation with some force – the substantive grounds were strong. But the atmosphere was entirely different from the first time round. Instead of opposition making headline news, the media were largely seduced by the vision of Britain leading in agricultural innovation. What a contrast with the 1990s, when our campaign led the evening bulletins.

The argument the industry is making today is, at its core, the same one it had made then – that these genetically engineered plants are essentially no different from any other plant you’d find in a field or a hedgerow. Tony Blair’s government had accepted a version of this argument in private, but the late Michael Meacher, his Environment Secretary, fought it publicly and the campaign held.

Today there is no one remotely like Meacher. The legislation moved through Parliament, and when Labour came to power in 2024, rather than pause or reconsider, they accelerated it. The Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act became law in 2023, and despite some well-articulated opposition from NGOs and the House of Lords secondary regulations, which allow precision bred plants to be grown and sold as food, followed in 2025.

Taking our rights away

We cannot now unpick the primary legislation without another Act of Parliament. That argument is, for the moment, closed. What remains open – and what matters enormously – is what sits underneath it: the new regulatory framework that undermines three fundamental rights.

The first is the right of farmers to grow crops that have not been gene edited, without fear of contamination from those that have. The second is the right of consumers to know what they are eating and to choose accordingly. The third is the right of the wider natural world – the wild plants, the insects, the birds, the entire web of life that still manages to coexist with our farming systems – to be protected from changes whose long-term consequences we cannot yet know.

In my view, the regulations fail on each count. That is why a judicial review has been brought, and why I am a co-claimant in it.

It is worth being clear about who has actually been watching while others looked away. Beyond GM, the civil society organisation leading this legal challenge, and the wider UK network of UK GM groups have never stopped monitoring this issue – tracking the legislation, analysing the regulations and building the evidence base with a forensic attention to detail that puts many larger and better funded organisations to shame. While the rest of the movement drifted toward other priorities, they stayed in the room. This judicial review exists because of this.

Where is everyone?

But here is what I find genuinely shocking, and what I think demands an honest reckoning. Where are the other voices?

The National Farmers’ Union represents tens of thousands of farmers, including many who depend on the organic premium and the credibility that comes with a guarantee of non-GM status. Silence. The Consumers Association exists precisely to defend the public’s right to know what is in their food. Silence. The major environmental NGOs, with their memberships, their legal teams, their media relationships and their decades of expertise in exactly this kind of regulatory battle. Silence. And the organic movement itself – the community with the most immediate and practical stake in getting this right – seems to be fighting from the shadows and sidelines.

Time to speak up

I have thought carefully about how to characterise this absence, and I want to be direct. I don’t think it is cowardice. I think it is something more troubling: a failure to understand what is actually happening – not just where we are but where we are rapidly going. The legislation is complex.

The shift from primary law to secondary regulation is technical. The distinction between what we have lost and what remains to be fought for is genuinely difficult to communicate in the bullet point world of social media. These missing voices have been like the proverbial frog in slowly heating water – and I say this not to wound but to wake them up, because the water is now very close to boiling.

The judicial review being heard in May is not a rearguard action by a handful of obsessives. It is, I believe, one of the most important legal challenges to agricultural policy in a generation – a serious argument, mounted by serious people and serious lawyers, with serious evidence. I became a co-claimant because I believe that. I am an organic farmer. This is not an abstract issue for me.

What I am asking of the Sustainable Food Trust’s community, and of every organisation that believes food systems should work with nature rather than against it, is straightforward. Understand what is at stake. Say so publicly. And join us, spread the word, write to your MP,  make a donation to the legal fighting fund – because a coalition of the willing, speaking clearly and together before and after the hearing, may yet change the terms of this debate.

You can make a donation to the Stop Hidden GMOs fighting fund at CrowdJustice. Read more about the court case at Beyond GM and Stop Hidden GMOs

Featured image by Markus Spiske (Unsplash).

Earlier this month, the EAT-Lancet Commission launched its much-anticipated second report at the EAT Forum in Stockholm, accompanied by significant publicity and widespread social media attention. Here, our CEO, Patrick Holden, responds to the report.

Earlier this month, the EAT-Lancet Commission launched its much-anticipated second report at the EAT Forum in Stockholm, accompanied by impressive publicity and widespread social media attention.

Many of my friends hold influential roles within the EAT Forum, and I was invited to contribute to their Farmers and Fishers Consultation. Yet despite this engagement, I don’t believe the final report sufficiently reflects the perspectives and lived experiences of farmers on the ground.

So, what do I think of the report?

Firstly, there are some important and welcome conclusions:

• It rightly critiques the current food system, which is operating beyond several planetary boundaries.
• It calls for a shift to food systems that are environmentally and ethically sound and recognises the critical importance of a socially just transition.
• It highlights the need for financial support for sustainable agriculture.
• It makes clear the need for dietary shifts in line with ecological limits.

These are significant and commendable. However, I believe the approach the report takes is fundamentally flawed, with significant implications for our understanding of what represents a truly sustainable approach to food production.

1. A top-down, diet-first framework

The cornerstone of the EAT-Lancet report is the ‘Planetary Health Diet’, a universal dietary template based on an analysis of the health effects of different foods. I have two overarching problems with this approach. First, while the report’s recommendations do provide some flexibility in food choices, I take real issue with the inference that diets that exist outside the framework EAT-Lancet propose are unhealthy. Humans are, after all, a remarkably flexible species, able to thrive on a hugely diverse range of different diets. There are also all sorts of things we don’t know about the health impacts of different dietary choices, including evidently relevant factors like production and cooking method that are often not even considered in diet health studies.

Second, because EAT-Lancet’s dietary guidelines are based entirely on a top-down reading of health impacts, they have not been informed by any analysis of what different regions can sustainably produce. This, in my opinion, is a major flaw that risks missing practical, on-the-ground farming considerations that are obviously fundamental to the question of what we can and should eat. Future diets should instead reflect the food output from truly sustainable farming systems – which will vary by region. In other words, diets must emerge from farming systems that work with nature, not be imposed upon them.

2. Lack of clarity on how we should farm

This brings me to my next concern, which is that the report is inconsistent in spelling out what changes to farming systems will be needed in the future. On the one hand, the report speaks to the benefits of adopting more ecological farming practices and produces some useful figures around the potential of these to reduce the global food system’s environmental impacts. It also contains some important criticisms of industrial systems. At the same time, however, the report’s top-line modelling appears to assume further increases in agricultural yields in regions where these are already high (e.g. Europe), and this can only mean a continuation of a predominantly industrial approach – the opposite of the ecological systems the report claims to be supporting. All this does in my opinion is contribute to the ongoing confusion around which farming practices and systems we need to support – those based on ecological principles – and the ones which we need to move away from, that are heavily reliant on fossil fuel and energy-intensive inputs.

Future diets should instead reflect the food output from truly sustainable farming systems – which will vary by region. In other words, diets must emerge from farming systems that work with nature, not be imposed upon them.

3. Meat reduction without nuance

All of this is relevant to the question of meat and dairy. EAT-Lancet advocates for a major reduction in meat consumption globally. Our own modelling in Feeding Britain also acknowledges a need to reduce overall meat consumption, as do other studies that have modelled the outcomes of a wholesale shift to more nature-based farming systems. There are, however, some important differences in how we reach our conclusions.

Our starting point was looking at how much meat and dairy the UK could sustainably produce, were there to be a nationwide transition to farming systems based entirely on agroecological principles. We found there would be a very significant decrease in pork and chicken production, due to their heavy reliance on grain and feed imports. When it came to beef and dairy, however, we modelled more modest reductions, and this reflects the key benefits grazing animals provide in a food system based on biological principles. For instance, cattle and sheep play a central role in supporting regenerative cropping systems that don’t rely on agrichemicals, help manage cherished landscapes rich in carbon and nature, and produce nutrient-dense meat and dairy from our extensive grassland area otherwise unsuited for producing food.

This is a pattern that other agroecological modelling studies have broadly found. The EAT-Lancet report, on the other hand, argues that red meat and ruminants should constitute a considerably smaller part of our diets and farming systems than poultry. This simply doesn’t tally with what a transition towards a more ecological food system would in reality support. All of this is frustrating, given the report does acknowledge some of the benefits that livestock can provide – it just doesn’t go far enough in linking our diets to them.

Of course, none of this should detract from the need to produce and consume a more diverse range of plant foods – something that we too modelled in Feeding Britain. But if those crops are grown in chemically intensive monocultures or hydroponic systems, they may be nutrient-poor, lacking flavour, and environmentally damaging. This isn’t the future we need.

There are always going to be differences of opinion when it comes to the future of food. That’s healthy. But given the EAT-Lancet Commission’s growing influence, it’s vital that these differing perspectives are heard and brought together.

To that end, I’ve made repeated efforts to engage with the EAT-Lancet community – even inviting them to my farm. When I challenged the top-down nature of their dietary recommendations during the farmer consultations, there was widespread agreement among fellow participants. Yet I don’t see enough of that reflected in the final report.

Let’s be clear: we all want a food system that is fair, sustainable and healthy. But to get there, we must bridge the gap between global frameworks and local, grounded farming realities.

I hope this intervention encourages more genuine dialogue, because if we don’t work together, we risk building solutions that sound good on paper but fail in practice.

In a recent article for Speciality Food Magazine, our CEO and organic farmer, Patrick Holden, discusses the inaccessibility of ‘good’ food – often organic or sustainably produced – compared to so-called ‘normal’ food which is often cheaper to pay for at the checkout, but costly in other hidden ways.

Why is it that speciality foods are confined to people who have privileges, who maybe have more income, who have more knowledge, and out of those privileges, want to source food with a better story behind it? This kind of food should be accessible to all and be more normalised. Why hasn’t that happened?

I think value is associated with paying the true cost of something, paying for something which is delivering benefits. And I think that speciality foods would deliver benefits to you and to society as a whole. And at the moment, we’re having to pay a lot more for them. Which begs the question, why do we pay so little for so-called normal food which doesn’t deliver those benefits?

I think the answer is that we have a distorted economic system where apparently cheap food isn’t really cheap at all, because the costs behind that so-called cheap food include contributing to climate change, destroying nature, having negative effects on river pollution, reducing biodiversity, and also causing social harm including damage to public health. Also reduced cultural cohesion – for example, fewer jobs on the land – and none of those costs are attributed to the normal food that most people buy. So this idea of cheap food, which is what most people buy and it’s mostly available in supermarkets, is a delusion.

Most of us buy food according to its price and shop at speciality retailers as a treat rather than normal practice, and we need to change that. The first step is to make sure these hidden costs of food are attributed to their creator. In other words, we make the polluter pay. If your farming system or your food system is causing damage, then you should be financially accountable for that damage. Unfortunately, we live in a world where the polluter doesn’t pay, so that’s the first thing we need to put right.

The second thing we need to put right is the price gap between quality and cheap food. Our Hafod Cheddar is quite highly priced, which makes it out of reach of a lot of people. If we were to be paid for the social benefits we’re delivering such as reducing greenhouse gas emissions, improving biodiversity, employing local people and making a nutritionally dense food, then the price of it would come down and the price of normal food, which is dishonestly priced, would go up, and that would close the gap.

Our current food systems are causing damage for future generations. And, interestingly enough, a few years ago a law was passed in the Welsh Government, the Senedd, around the health and well-being of future generations – the idea that every law that’s passed in the Welsh Government should take that into account. That is not what we’re doing with our current food system.

“…we have a distorted economic system where apparently cheap food isn’t really cheap at all, because the costs behind that so-called cheap food include contributing to climate change, destroying nature, having negative effects on river pollution, reducing biodiversity, and also causing social harm including damage to public health.”

Educate without preaching

The key to unlocking the barrier of dishonest pricing and the wrong kind of food – which is what most of us are eating – is a better-informed public, and the best way to achieve that is to get people onto farms. We’ve recently launched the Beacon Farms network, positioning farms as educational platforms with an aim to get every child at an impressionable age – and adults at perhaps a less impressionable age – to have seeing-is-believing experiences.

Our aim is to get millions of people to visit the farms where their food comes from so they recognise the story of its origin. I believe that if we could scale that, it would deliver the change that’s needed because too few of us know the story behind our food – in fact, very few of us do.

Farms and very often the farmers themselves are powerless because they don’t know the customers – there’s very little direct relationship – so retailers are absolutely in a pivotal position, and I would say that supermarkets have not really honoured this fact. Indeed, they have done worse than that. This means that independent fine food retailers are more vital than ever, because they are the interface between the producer and the public. They could shout about the connection between the locally-produced food they’re selling and the farm it was grown on – they even could ask if the farmer would be open to having customers visit his farm. It’s a question of show, don’t tell. We can educate, but we mustn’t preach.

My farm was part of the ‘great cheese heist’ a few months ago, and I did 20 interviews over 36 hours with media from all over the world – the New York Times as well as publications in Australia and Dubai. It caught the public’s imagination. If you ask yourself why, you’ll find it’s because more and more people are interested in the story behind their food and this rather was cheese with a story. We can be encouraged by that in a way; we can recognise that there’s an underlying interest in where our food comes from.

Power to the people

The public has the power to change and improve the food system we’re currently working and living within. We hold the key for change. It’s no longer a case of ‘them’ fixing this, it’s ‘us’. This is an empowering message and suggests that we don’t need to preach at people about what to buy and how to eat, but make eating well easier and engaging.

The large-scale food industry has pulled a veil over the reality of what they do, because in the words of Eric Schlosser, who wrote Fast Food Nation, “If their customers knew the story, they probably wouldn’t want to eat the food”. Don’t forget that an individual person is more powerful than the big companies because once you scale those individuals up, that’s the market. If enough of us buy food with a better story, then those that don’t supply these products will not survive – even the biggest supermarkets. Both consumers and speciality food retailers should feel empowered by this.

Featured image courtesy of Goals House.

This article was originally published on the Speciality Food website on 19th March 2025.

George Monbiot’s latest book, Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet identifies many of the same problems with current food systems that concern the Sustainable Food Trust (SFT). His analysis and proposed solutions, however, differ significantly from ours. Our Policy and Research Team consider some of the key issues.

Monbiot deserves our respect because he cares. Clearly, he feels viscerally for the restricted lives and the suffering of intensively farmed animals. He loves the natural world, and it pains him to see how we have degraded and destroyed it.

Back in 2006, in his book Heat: How We Can Stop the Planet Burning, Monbiot explained why we needed a 90% reduction in CO₂ emissions by 2030. If politicians had heeded his call then, we would be much further down the road towards the renewable energy future we will have to eventually adopt, even if that might now come too late to keep the global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius. It wasn’t until 2021, that the UK Government finally set a 78% reduction target by 2035.

And, whatever you feel about rewilding, Monbiot’s 2013 book, Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life, helped to draw attention to the crippling losses to biodiversity that have been taking place on farms, while policymakers slept or looked the other way. As such, the book can arguably take some credit for nature restoration projects now being developed up and down the country.

If he has the same awareness-raising impact with Regenesis, he could also play an important role in stimulating debate around the vital issues of how we produce food, what we eat and how we do both in a sustainable way. Reading the book, however, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that his years as a prolific author and columnist have taught him – that uncompromising claims and novel solutions, whether workable or not, sell both newspapers and books.

His analysis of the problems with agriculture today is difficult to fault, but in casting his main futuristic solutions, (industrially generated microbial protein, perennial grains and the ending of all livestock production), in such absolutist terms, he overlooks or downplays multiple issues. His approach risks continuing our dependence on agrochemicals and the fossil fuels from which they are made, moving diets even further towards ultra-processed foods, strengthening the grip of food and farming corporations – which Monbiot rightly dislikes – and destroying long-established grassland ecosystems. In addition, as academics who argue strongly for major reductions in meat and dairy products estimate, an entirely vegan diet, as advocated by Monbiot, would require 25% more arable land than one that includes small amounts of high-quality meat and dairy from the significant proportion of the world’s farmlands that are only suitable for growing grass.

Organic farming

Although Monbiot recognises three main benefits of organic farms – they are “more complex and diverse”, “use fewer antibiotics and pesticides” and return carbon to the soil via manure or plant material – generally speaking, he is not a fan. He says, “In other respects, organic farming can inflict more damage”, characterising it as “all muck and no magic”.

Throughout the book, he is critical of organic production, and the main reason for this is its lower yields and therefore greater land requirements to produce the same quantities of grain and other crops as intensive farming. However, while yields are obviously an important consideration (and increasing these sustainably is an aim for the organic sector), it is not necessarily the case that moving towards an agroecological approach to food production would require more farmland. Dietary change, a reduction in the amount of farmland used to grow bioenergy crops and a shift to livestock production systems which don’t consume large amounts of human-edible arable feeds could all help make space for lower-yielding but more environmentally-friendly farming systems, while still freeing up some land for rewilding or other purposes – as has been shown recently at both an EU and UK level.

The nitrogen issue

Monbiot’s focus on yields colours many of the other criticisms which he levels at organic farming. For instance, he references one study which finds that when measured according to kilos of product, organic farming causes as much nitrogen pollution as conventional farming, as well as another study which finds that organic beef loses twice as much nitrogen as conventional. However, such studies are not fully representative, and when nitrogen losses are measured per hectare – which arguably becomes the more relevant metric if dietary shifts and other changes in behaviour allow for a transition towards agroecology without any need for farmland expansion – organic products generally result in lower levels of nitrogen pollution, as found in the original paper which Monbiot references.

Another important issue here is the question of where nitrogen comes from. Conventional farming systems generally rely upon the addition of new nitrogen from synthetic inputs (i.e. chemical fertilisers), whereas on organic farms, most of the nitrogen is recycled, and in the UK most of it is originally provided by nitrogen-fixing forage legumes (like various types of clover and lucerne). This means that all of the greenhouse gas and ammonia emissions (as well as the spiralling financial costs) associated with the production, transport and application of nitrogen fertilisers is avoided in organic systems. But it’s also an important difference because it means that organic production adds less nitrogen to the environment, at a global level, than conventional production, and therefore causes less pollution overall – an uncited point in one of the papers that Monbiot uses to criticise organic farming. Of course, there is important work to be done in reducing the amount of nitrogen lost at present from organic systems, and this is something the organic sector recognises.

A related issue is that Monbiot makes the assumption that the difference between organic and non-organic farms is the fact that the former get their fertility from manure while the latter get theirs from fertilisers. Sadly, this is partly true of some organic farms in some other countries, most notably the US, where ‘big organic’ influenced the setting of lax standards by the USDA, much to the disquiet of traditional US organic producers. However, if we consider organic cattle and sheep farms, it is clear they produce less, not more, manure than conventional equivalent livestock farms because they have slightly lower stocking densities and they feed their cows less protein, and less intensively overall. While a dairy farmer, organic or non-organic, might be induced to spare a load or two of manure for a local organic horticulturalist to turn into compost, the amounts they might part with would be very small, since spreading the manure back on their own land reduces their need for expensive fertilisers.

Carbon footprints

Monbiot also cites a number of papers which find that organic foods generally have a similar or even worse carbon footprint than those that are conventionally produced, when measured per kilo of product. Again, however, this picture changes when we look at the emissions from organic production on a per hectare basis, and when they are compared in this way, organic foods generally come out better. Of course, for this comparison to be relevant, a major shift in diet and other major changes in production practices and land use need to be achieved, otherwise a shift to lower-yielding forms of agriculture would result in more land being required overall. But this is possible: a recent study by the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission showed that a nationwide transition to agroecology, accompanied by changes to what we eat and an end to biofuels production, would enable the UK to reduce its agricultural emissions by 55-70%.

It’s also worth pointing out that many of the studies into the carbon footprints of conventional versus organic foods, do not take into account carbon sequestration which is generally higher on organic farms. In addition, organic foods also tend to have lower energy use footprints, and in a future where we must wean ourselves off fossil fuels and consume much less energy overall, this is a key difference to keep in mind.

Extensive livestock production

Monbiot’s focus on yields (and therefore land use) as the key metric of sustainability also partly explains why he is opposed to all livestock farming, and to extensive, organic, grazing livestock, in particular. He states, ‘‘There might be no more damaging product than organic pasture-fed beef.”

But one has to wonder why he is so opposed to the production and consumption of organic beef, especially when it is produced off grasslands unsuitable for crop production or cropland that has become degraded through continuous arable production. A 2018 review paper found that producing meat, milk and eggs in this fashion, (i.e. by rearing livestock in high-welfare, pasture-based systems where animals are fed on grass and other human-inedible feeds), often on land unsuitable for crop production, would deliver multiple environmental benefits (including a lower arable land requirement than an entirely vegan scenario). While this approach would produce considerably less animal-sourced food than today, it would still provide the world with 9-23 grams of protein per person per day (20-50% of requirements), as well as 10% of our energy and iron needs, 20% of our calcium and zinc needs and a massive 75% of our vitamin B12 needs. Other studies have also found a superior micronutrient content in grass-fed compared with grain-fed beef, indicating the nutritional importance of even relatively small amounts of these products in our diets.

Livestock and greenhouse gas emissions

Monbiot cites studies that find that the greenhouse gas emissions from organic livestock products are similar or worse than those of conventional equivalents. This is a valid claim only where one looks at global averages or studies which include a wide range of different farming systems where the carbon footprint of beef, for example, can range from less than 10 kg to 700 kg of CO₂ equivalent per kilo of meat. Claims of this sort also use GWP¹⁰⁰ to calculate the CO₂ equivalent of ruminant methane which needs to be assessed separately using GWP* because it breaks down after a decade or so, while CO₂ once in the atmosphere can stay there for thousands of years.

Climates, soil types, land topography, indigenous and most appropriate crops and breeds of livestock, access to capital and inputs, cultural traditions and nutritional status of local people, vary so greatly between countries – and even regions within countries – that no single solution is even vaguely appropriate for all situations. If we consider the UK, which is the focus of at least some of Monbiot’s claims, there have actually been very few organic versus conventional beef studies. However, what may possibly be the only detailed study of organic versus conventional beef in the UK found, in contrast to Monbiot’s claims of a higher carbon footprint for organic beef, that it was actually lower, 13.46 kg of CO₂-equivalent per kg of meat at the farmgate, compared with 15.028 kg for conventional beef.

Nevertheless, Monbiot can hardly be blamed for highlighting the issue of greenhouse gas emissions, which is a hugely important one and which clearly varies between countries and even between individual farms. We would argue that unlike pasture-based and agroecological systems, intensive food production of any kind is umbilically dependent upon the use of fossil fuels – a sector which emits vast amounts of carbon dioxide, as well as nearly as much of the global methane budget as agriculture. Due to the long-lasting nature of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (as opposed to methane, which is short-lived), we believe that weaning ourselves off fossil fuels should therefore be a higher priority.

Grazing livestock and biodiversity

Overgrazing is clearly harmful, but reducing the value of livestock to efficiency in terms of land-use or emissions, plays into the hands of the intensive livestock industry and neglects the many benefits which grazing livestock can provide, nutritionally and for biodiversity, as recognised by Natural England and the RSPB. Monbiot himself acknowledges that low intensity grazing can be vital for ecosystem restoration, as demonstrated by the Knepp Estate, (which has recently announced the development of an accompanying regenerative farm), but important biodiversity benefits are also found with more productive extensive grazing. Grazing livestock have the ability to alter the sward structure of grassland (without the need for machinery) and deposit dung which is vital for promoting plant species diversity and maintaining the many species of dung beetles, which provide a wide range of ecosystem services, including underpinning food chains for bats, birds, badgers and other mammals. Rather than being seen as ‘inefficient’ these types of grassland systems could be thought of as providing sustainable quantities of highly nutritious food while conserving rare and endangered plant and animal species.

Lab-made food and corporate power

One of the central ideas described in Chapter 7, entitled ‘Farmfree’, is the adoption of protein derived from bacteria in laboratories to replace all animal-based foods. While he does not believe that lab-grown meat, involving the growth of real animal cells, will ever be financially viable, Monbiot whole-heartedly supports the concept of a protein-rich flour produced by bacteria. His vision, which champions futuristic companies such as Solar Foods, sees this flour (and eventually more sophisticated types of protein) being incorporated into a range of plant-based products to fulfil the world’s protein demand – especially in poorer countries.

This seemingly simple solution would supposedly free up vast tracts of land for rewilding – the main draw for Monbiot – but would also require approximately 11% more electricity in the UK alone. The belief that this increase could easily be met by investing in additional solar and offshore wind farms fails to recognise the severity of the existing challenge of replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy. There could also be negative effects on marine life and migrating birds.

One of the first problems highlighted in Regenesis, is that many of the environmental and social issues associated with food production have largely resulted from increased corporate concentration within the food and farming industry – an issue which also concerns the SFT.

Yet, it is difficult to see how his proposed ‘brave new world’ solutions – especially the transition to edible microbial biomass as a major protein source – wouldn’t increase, instead of decrease, the hold that corporations already have over the food sector. Monbiot seeks to solve this issue by strengthening anti-trust laws to limit market-share and restricting intellectual property (IP) rights to enable open-access to new technologies. These suggestions are valid and should be implemented across the sector, if at all possible, however, they seem to be at odds with the intentions of most of the players already operating in this field. Many of the companies working on microbial proteins, the vast majority of which are actually focussed on producing livestock and fish feed, have already filed patents on their processes. Even small food start-ups often rely on IP rights to protect their products and make their business viable. Monbiot envisages a ‘hybrid system’ in which the concepts of cultured meat are combined with bacterial or plant proteins, citing soy leghemoglobin, the blood-like protein used in the ‘Impossible Burger’ as an example. Yet unsurprisingly, Impossible Foods is unwilling to share such a lucrative discovery – as demonstrated in a recent IP dispute. The immense and largely invisible lobbying power exercised by food businesses, which Monbiot is rightly extremely critical of when it comes to the meat industry, would surely make it almost impossible for governments to implement such laws in the first place.

The other major innovation in food production which Monbiot endorses is a move to cereal, pulse and oilseed production based on perennial plants, which would remain in the ground for a number of years before they need replanting – dramatically different to the current situation where almost all of these plants are annuals which need planting every year. Achieving this could deliver a number of environmental benefits, particularly in relation to soil health, although as Monbiot recognises, weed problems and a continued reliance on herbicides may be an issue with this approach. Perhaps the biggest challenge, though, is the fact that perennial grain yields (with the exception of a strain of perennial rice, which is already being grown commercially) are currently very low. While the leading organisation behind the development of perennial grains claims that these are increasing rapidly, a recent review of the evidence to date argued that progress on yields has actually been slow, with yields in the second and especially third year of production being essentially uneconomic. In short, perennial grains could be a very positive innovation in food production in the future – but they are one with major uncertainties and no immediate solution to the environmental problems associated with continuous arable cropping.

Food, farming and culture

Microbial and other types of lab-made foods may well have a role to play in future food systems and may be inevitable if the global population continues to increase as predicted. But many food safety and quality issues would need to be considered first, and the suggestion of a complete shift in what we perceive as food, in order to accommodate them, ignores so much of the deeper cultural meaning behind food and farming for many people.

To address the changing nature of food culture, Monbiot uses a quote by food writer Michael Pollan – “Don’t eat anything your great-great-great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food”. In compiling a list of what his grandmother ate and concluding that he would prefer to eat his own diet of muesli, nuts, homemade hummus and crackers, he somewhat misses the point that for the vast majority of people, cheap ultra-processed foods have replaced the whole foods consumed by previous generations, with devastating health impacts. It’s hard to see how enforcing lab food technologies, especially in developing countries, would not favour the rampant ultra-processed food industry at the expense of vulnerable groups and the loss of traditional foods (and biodiversity). Another Michael Pollan quote therefore rings true, “If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t.”

There is also the question of what would happen to farming and rural communities (and in particular, those engaged in livestock production) under the ‘end all livestock production’ scenario Monbiot envisages. He recognises that this would be an “extremely disruptive” change that would require a just transition to ensure that farmers would find better paid work elsewhere – something which “given the dire economics of livestock farming”, he believes “might not be a high bar to jump”.

However, with over 1 billion people engaged in the rearing, processing and sale of livestock worldwide, and more than half of this number reliant on livestock for their livelihoods, characterising the end of all livestock production as something that can be relatively easily managed sounds rather glib. Given the socio-economic importance of livestock in low income countries in particular, (and especially for women), the transition Monbiot envisages carries the risk of achieving the exact opposite of a just transition. And while he is right to point out the enormous harm that intensive livestock farming has caused to many indigenous communities, his claim that the end of all livestock production could allow indigenous people to “reclaim and restore their lands” completely ignores the fact that livestock are key to the livelihoods and identities of many indigenous peoples, especially in dryland regions where crops can fail completely during prolonged droughts – 100-200 million people worldwide are engaged in nomadic pastoralism and transhumance.

In the UK, livestock farming may not be as critical to rural livelihoods as it is in parts of the developing world, but it is still hugely important in many areas. In a recent Guardian article, Monbiot argued that farmers make up only a tiny fraction of England’s rural population. He neglected to point out, however, that in some Welsh counties, over 10% of the population is engaged in agriculture, forestry and fisheries and it’s also the sector with the highest share of Welsh speakers. In Scotland, meanwhile, crofting (where grazing livestock are a key component) is central to Gaelic language and culture, and is carried out by up to 65% of households on the Western Isles, Skye and Shetland.

Rewilding

The UK, like most countries, has lost a vast amount of natural habitat over the last century and it is important that much of this is restored. Where this gives rise to ecotourism opportunities, it could provide an economic alternative to grazing livestock production, in at least some instances – as Monbiot points out, there are various case studies which show higher and more diverse levels of employment following conversion to rewilding. However, rewilding only exists as a few case studies in the UK at present, and it is unclear whether it would provide similar or greater levels of employment when rolled out as the dominant land use across the UK’s uplands as a whole. Rewilding really needs to operate at scale – for ecological reasons, but probably also for commercial reasons (the average size of rewilding sites listed by Rewilding Britain is 1,669 hectares, compared with an average UK farm size of 86 hectares) – and so, it is difficult to see how rewilding and ecotourism could totally replace livestock production in areas of the country dominated by small livestock farms. It is also unclear whether rewilding would offer the same level of ‘hands-on’ land management employment – it may do so in early years following conversion to rewilding, as Monbiot argues, but what about after that? Working the land is absolutely integral to the identity of farmers – it is why they do it – and this needs to be kept front and centre in any discussions around the future of rural communities and the way we manage our land.

Conclusion

George Monbiot begins Regenesis with a section on the vital importance of soil biological and microbial life, something he says he has only just come to understand. This, of course, is the same revelation that was set out almost eighty years ago in The Living Soil, by Lady Eve Balfour, a book that inspired the modern organic farming movement. Despite this common starting point, somewhere along the way, his and the SFT’s analysis diverge significantly.

Getting to the root cause of that divergence is beyond the scope of this review. In summary, though, Monbiot’s position (including his albeit reluctant endorsement of the continuing use of glyphosate – the infamous chemical which has contributed to the corporate control of agriculture – to enable crop production without ploughing) is partly based on his understandable desire to promote production methods that use less energy and make the most productive use of as little land as possible. Yet, many of the solutions he proposes are years, if not decades, away from being possible at scale, and each comes with a number of massive risks and assumptions. Regenesis also overlooks the fact that a shift towards lower yielding but much more environmentally friendly approaches to agriculture is itself associated with lower energy use and does not necessarily mean a larger land and environmental footprint – by changing our diets, taking a different approach to livestock production and using cropland to grow food rather than feed and biofuels, we could achieve a much greater uptake of agroecological and regenerative methods, whilst freeing up some land for nature restoration and massively reducing our impact on the climate.

His antithesis to organic farming inevitably appears linked to his total opposition to livestock production, with most organic farming in the UK, at least, being reliant on the fertility-building ability of grass and clover pastures grazed by ruminants. But just as he is willing to make an exception for glyphosate, here too there is an element of inconsistency. He is happy to endorse organic production when it comes from stock-free holdings producing vegetables and overlooks the fact that 20-30% of the land in any year is not producing food because it is sown to grass, clover and similar crops to build fertility ­– crops that are mechanically cut and mulched, rather than grazed, something which brings down the overall productivity significantly.

Despite these criticisms, Regenesis is a valuable book. It challenges us to think outside the box, presents at least some of the dilemmas with which it wrestles in an even-handed way and introduces us to a technology we may hear more about in future, whether we like it or not. For the SFT, however, it is too often an overly simplified and unhelpfully polarising contribution to the current debate about how to reshape food systems over the next few decades, in ways that make them environmentally sustainable and helps to produce food that reduces the incidence of diet-related disease, rather than allowing this to increase still further.

Neonicotinoids are the most widely used insecticides worldwide and despite being banned in the UK and EU, exemptions are being granted for their use. We also continue to manufacture and export large tonnages of them to other countries and import food crops that have been grown with them. SFT policy director, Richard Young, looks into the facts and draws some sobering conclusions.

Two related news items caught my attention last week. The first was a story in The Guardian claiming the Environmental Protection Agency in the US is poised to permit the use of neonicotinoids for another 15 years, despite recognising the negative environmental impacts this is likely to have. The second was coverage in Farmers Guardian confirming that the UK Government has agreed to allow the use of thiamexotham, a neonicotinoid sold under the brand name of Cruiser SB, to treat sugar beet seed this year.

Neonicotinoids were first introduced into agriculture in 1991. Globally, they are used on 140 different crops including oilseed rape, sunflowers, corn, soyabeans and cotton. They have become the most widely used insecticides, but prior to the EU ban, their principal use in the UK was to control pests on oilseed rape and sugar beet crops. As readers of the SFT newsletter will be aware, they were finally banned throughout the EU in 2018. This was despite concern being raised by PAN UK in 2012. The ban was only achieved after painstaking research and analysis by scientists in many countries, including by Professor Dave Goulson in the UK. Campaigns were also mounted by Friends of the Earth, the Soil Association, Greenpeace and other organisations.

As so often in the case of pesticides, the onus fell on groups and individuals in society to provide incontrovertible evidence of harm, rather than on the manufacturers to prove beyond doubt that they were safe to use. That was no easy task, due to the influence of other factors, but over time the scientific evidence of their harmful effects on honey bees, bumble bees and other important wild pollinators, such as butterflies, steadily mounted. There is also emerging evidence that they affect some insect-eating birds. That said, they appear to be less toxic to mammals and other vertebrates than many other insecticides.

I watched the recent Panorama programme, A Cow’s Life: The True Cost of Milk, which featured disturbing practices on a large-scale dairy farm in west Wales, secretly filmed by a worker, then shared with the BBC.

The programme adds to the bad press the UK’s dairy farming community has been receiving, no doubt increasing the number of people who rightly feel concerned about consuming milk and other dairy products from intensively farmed dairy cows.

During ‘Veganuary’, I’ve been on the farm, and while putting out silage in the JCB, I’ve been listening to Heart Radio, (as you do) and I’ve been struck by the number of advertisements for plant-based milks, burgers and other foods, which seem to dominate the advertising slots between the ‘bangers’, (current jargon for great tunes)!

Everyone’s at it: from Sainsbury’s to McDonald’s, and even companies like Riverford Organic Farmers, now have regular adverts on Heart, implicitly endorsing the switch towards plant-based diets. Before watching Panorama which, as a Welsh dairy farmer myself, I did find pretty depressing, I recorded a podcast with a man called Simon Fairlie, who, in his memoir, Going to Seed, described the dairy cow as the backbone of sustainable food production.

What does he mean by this? His message is that there is no more efficient way of converting the grasslands of the United Kingdom’s landscape than harnessing the capacity of the dear old dairy cow. She is a real marvel – not only producing milk for us and her calves, but at the same time manuring and fertilising the grasslands she grazes, building fertility for subsequent crops of vegetables and potentially other plant-based crops. Then at the end of her life, via a local abattoir of course, she can be eaten too. As an example, we just sold a barren cow to Nate the butcher in London who is preparing dairy cow beef for a dinner of 60, hosted by Jamie Oliver.

Can we, should we, square our consciences with such ‘exploitation’ of this wonderful, domesticated animal? I think the answer is yes, but only if we  ensure that in future, all our dairy farms are designed in such a way that farmers are able to show her the compassion and love that she deserves, both throughout her milking lifetime and right up to the moment of her death as part of a farming system which is human-centric, sustainable and allows her to graze at pasture for at least half the year. I’d argue that to achieve this combination of loving individual attention, sound nutrition and sustainable farm management, it would be difficult, if not  impossible, if the herd size is much more than 200 cows.

This is very far from the reality today. When I started milking in 1973, there were around 3000 herds mostly of 30 or 40 cows supplying the regional creamery in Felin Fach; but today there are just a handful left with many of them numbering 500 or more cows. You can’t blame the dairy farmers for this lamentable situation. It is economics that have forced producers onto this treadmill of intensification, in part due to our apparent obsession with cheap milk. Dairy farmers have become commodity slaves, as have their exploited cows, producing ever greater quantities of milk from increasingly large herds in a rat race to stay viable. The result of this is that today we have industrialised dairy farming, systems which are unethical and unsustainable, in a quest to keep the cost of milk down.

However, in the same way that we have been complicit in the cultural cleansing of the family dairy farm, we have the power to enable its renaissance.

To enable this, we need a set of standards for ethical and sustainable milk production linked to a completely transparent labelling system. The organic system goes a long way towards achieving this, but we need to be even more demanding, in my opinion. I had a conversation with the marketing manager for Yeo Valley some years ago, during which I suggested that it would be a good idea if there was a premium for herds of less than 150 cows, plus an additional incentive paid to farmers with native breeds. In my future conversations with Arla and other dairy co-ops, I’m going to argue that they should do exactly that. At the moment the opposite is the case – the dairy co-ops reward farmers with larger herds and high yielding cows, justifying this through a combination of lower collection costs and so-called increased carbon efficiency! This has to change.

One last point – we should resist any temptation to demonise the dairy farming community, it’s mostly not their fault. They have become victims of this relentless drive towards industrial dairy farming, encouraged by successive Governments, which has led the virtual elimination of small dairy family farms, because few of those with less than around 100 cows have been able stay in business. The only reason that we are not one of those statistics at Holden Farm Dairy, is because we are making cheese, which adds value – and I have a day job. 

This is not an acceptable situation. We have to find a way to properly reward dairy farmers who move towards smaller, more ethical and sustainable systems of production, and penalise practices which cause environmental or welfare harm. 

If the end result is higher milk prices, we should pay. And if this higher priced milk is unaffordable for lower income groups, then the Government should step in. Everyone should have the right to high quality, health promoting milk from ethical and sustainable dairy farms.