Dave Goulson is Professor of Biology at the University of Sussex. Modern, intensive farming systems producing pesticide-laced foods at scale, he says, are bad for us and bad for the planet. He believes that it is time to change the way we produce food today, making the case for sustainable agriculture. In 'Eat the Planet Well' he argues that consumers can lead this change, even where governments fail to act.
Go for a more biological route, says Minette Batters.
Minette Batters was the first female president of the National Farmers’ Union. Born and raised on the family farm that she took over running, she became a committed advocate for the UK farming industry. UK agriculture has faced challenges from Brexit, Covid as well as international conflict and energy crises. Her new book, Harvest, part memoir and manifesto, makes a case for how and why we must rally to support British farming and rural life.
17% live in rural areas in Britain, said Minette.
"We produce enough food to comfortably feed 10 bill people. The pop of the globe is over 8 bill. Yet many people are starving, 9% are undernourished, 30 to 40% of food is wasted. What is going wrong?
"The current world food system is incredibly inefficient. The industrial farming model is the biggest driver of global biodiversity collapse. We are in the sixth mass extinction event, right now. It contributes about 30% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. It damages the world soils and 40% are badly degraded. And the whole system is really wasteful. About a third of the food we produce gets thrown away, a third is fed to animals rather than directly to people which is an obscenely inefficient way to feed the world. And on top of that the food we eat makes us ill. We are eating the wrong stuff or eating heavily processed food, which is fueling an obesity epidemic around the world and diabetes. So it is a shambles and we could be doing a lot better.
"My book is a guide as to how people can eat food with a lower footprint and more nutritious food rather than some of the junk that is available to us.
"There are 300,000 edible plant species/vegetable but we basically eat three: rice, wheat and maize.
"There is a joy to be had in growing and cooking your own food/meals. More than 60% of the food we consume is ultra processed junk. Too much of the food we produce is cheap, heavily processed and based on a tiny number of commodity crops rather than exploiting the amazing diversity of fruit and vegetables that we have available to us.
"We are part of nature so we need bees to pollinate our crops, healthy soils with earthworms to grow our food. We need nature but most people don't appreciate that.
"We need farms to support biodiversity and farming in tune with nature.
"Beef accounts for a disproportionate part of the problem. Globally speaking, the figures suggest that beef is one of the most environmentally damaging of products. Its overall footprint is about 100 times that of growing vegetables. As a way of feeding people it is not particularly efficient. We shouldn't have 1.5 billion cattle in the world. The methane gas emissions associated with that is a massive contributor to Climate Change. They take a lot of land, a lot of feeding and GHG emissions from both ends.
"Our beef and dairy farming is based on grass to eat.
"In fact, grass fed cows are worse than grain fed. It depends how you weight the area of land used, so cows do require a large area of grazing land to feed them, so if you count that as a negative in terms of amount of land used per unit of food produced, then grazing them outdoors is worse than having them indoors. But outdoor cattle can be beneficial to the environment. They are often used in nature reserves as a grazing tool to help promote biodiversity.
"Fertilisers can be devastating when they leach into waterways. They cause eutrophication where you get algal bloom which is highly toxic and highly damaging to biodiversity. So minimise the use of synthetic fertilisers and use livestock in a managed rotation to boost soil fertility and to build soil health.
"Allotments are essential for all to grow their own low carbon, sustainable food to promote biodiversity."
