Post by Sustainable Food Trust

❓ What kind of food system are we building in the UK? Over the past week, two high-profile articles have highlighted the environmental and ethical consequences of the continued shift toward industrial livestock production in the UK. One investigation for The Guardian revealed the rise of permanently housed “battery” dairy systems in the UK, as economic pressures push farmers toward larger-scale industrial models: https://lnkd.in/e28s4BFX In his contribution to the article, Patrick Holden of the Sustainable Food Trust said: “The euphemism of ‘fully housed’ should be replaced by ‘battery dairy cows’. We managed to ban battery eggs, why not battery cows?” Meanwhile, a separate investigation by Rosa Silverman for The Telegraph examined the impact of industrial poultry production on Britain’s rivers, raising concerns about the concentration of manure and nutrient pollution linked to intensive farming systems. In the article, Patrick Holden highlights that while chicken was once considered an “occasional treat”, it has now become a staple in many households and production has increased significantly. 🔗 These stories are connected. Farmers are being squeezed by a system that rewards scale, specialisation and cheap production, while the true environmental, social and animal welfare costs are pushed elsewhere – onto rivers, soils, ecosystems, rural communities and, ultimately, the public. This is not an argument against livestock farming. It is an argument against a model of farming that disconnects animals from the land and treats food production as an industrial process rather than a living system – an approach that is now having devastating consequences for our health.   As highlighted by Lucy Williamson in her recent article for the SFT, “Human health does not exist in isolation. It’s shaped by the health of our soils, our food systems and the environments we are part of. If we want to improve public health, we need to reconnect the system from soil to gut.” That means a future in which we build regenerative, mixed farming systems that work with nature, not against it - a vision that we outline in our 'Grazing Livestock: It's not the cow but the how' report: https://lnkd.in/ggiCnnHj To stay up to date with the latest stories in sustainable food and farming, sign up to our Daily News Digest and monthly newsletter at https://lnkd.in/egMCkbbQ