The Myth of Cheap Food

Before Christmas on the BBCs Farming Today, I heard a discussion about the fall in prices that hill farmers were getting for their lambs. The reasons for this are a complex collection of problems, but while I risk over simplifying the factors, they are; the increased cost of feed, the oversupply from imports, and the restrictions caused by the outbreak of Foot and Mouth.

With the restrictions on movements that the outbreak of Foot and Mouth caused, farmers were not able to move the lambs off of the hills, even when the sheep had eaten all the grass. Some farmers were able to provide supplementary feeding, but this was not always possible either due to cost or lack of feed. For these hard-pressed farmers the cost of feed was and is important as lambs are only selling at market for five pounds (Eight Dollars US) in extreme cases. The average price has been lower from twenty-eight pounds (Fifty Dollars US) per lamb to fifteen pounds (twenty-eight Dollars US) per lamb. That obviously reduces the income of farmers who are making very little to start with. Incidentally we also had two hundred and fifty thousand lambs slaughtered in what the government called a welfare cull. An oxymoron if ever I heard one.

So with falling prices at the market we the consumers are getting cheaper meat? Using misinformation the major supermarkets increased prices for lamb. This brings me to what I heard on the radio. One of the farming groups looked at the price of the cuts of meat from the lamb and by reconstructing a lamb from the cuts of meat they worked out that the average price of the meat was about five pound fifty per kilo, ten times the price the supermarkets were paying for the carcass. That also represents an increase of nearly twenty percent on the price that consumers are paying.

So I carried out the same exercise and again after Christmas to ensure that it was not just a hike in price for the holiday season. I found the same prices myself.

Environmentally, this is a disaster. If farmers can no longer stay in business we lose the custodians of our landscape. The countryside only looks the way it does because of the way those farmers manage the land. Further, particularly on the hills, it is only because of grazing that the habitats for much of the wildlife exists.

In the past and I am only talking ten to fifteen years ago, subsides meant that farmers could only afford to farm the hills by overstocking the hills, this lead to large-scale erosion and environmental degradation. Fortunately the way support was paid was changed and this dramatically improved the situation and reversed the problem. What the supermarkets are doing will destroy ten years of hard work.

Additionally the way that the supermarkets protect their margins by dictating to farmers the price they will pay for meat, means that farmers can only make farming pay by increasing the number of animals on any farm and reducing the welfare standards for the livestock. Most farmers do care about their animals, but farmers are often forced to cut corners to make farming pay. The supermarkets know this but hide behind systems that are supposed to ensure welfare standards.

If we look at chicken as an example, where the birds are regularly feed antibiotics to grow faster and fatter, this practice has caused antibiotic resistance and has major implications on human health. Further, having large concentrations of any animal in a small area creates pollution. Farming always used to be exemplars of recycling, as nothing was waste it all had a use on the farm.

Had farming and particularly factory farming had to pay for the pollution it created, then food prices would double at least. Yet we still have to pay for this, indirectly by higher water bills and higher taxes. Also as the supermarkets will utilise anything that can be considered food, take the example of mechanically recovered meat, while they make billions in profit, they are poisoning our children and us.

While that trolley may be full of cheap food from the supermarket there is a hidden cost.





My gratitude to Fran Purdy for the kind permission to use her magnificent picture of the Ewe and Lamb taken on the Yorkshire hills, her website can be found at www.pbase.com/jenga

Selenium A New Hope

Hope is what the New Year brings. This is not just an emotional feeling but as the New Year starts just a couple of weeks after the solstice, the longest night, we can all look forward to what this New Year will bring.

I know that for some people today they will just be looking forward to that hangover going. Fortunately that’s not something I am suffering from; in fact it was the eve of Bah Humbug day when alcohol last passed my lips. Part of reason for this has been my need to keep a clear head. Locally there has been, in the past, problems with Badger Baiting, therefore I have been helping others who are protecting and guarding the Badgers. Fortunately, unlike previous years, there were no incidents of this illegal activity. Therefore I can look forward to a whole year of occasional badger watching.

However, as well as seeing the Badgers, I also saw some other human activity that would not have been out of place on the Discovery channel.

I am also looking forward to what the government decides regarding a Badger Cull. To explain to those that don’t know, in the UK we have a serious problem with bovine tuberculoses and for years farmers have been blaming badgers for spreading the disease. The government will be deciding if they will authorise a cull in late January or February.

While it is true that Badgers do catch bovine tuberculoses and they can spread it, they are not the cause of the problem. This was proved when farmers restocked following the major outbreak of Foot and Mouth. Areas that had previously been free of bovine tuberculoses suddenly suffered outbreaks, even though the new stock was supposedly coming from sources that were free of bovine tuberculoses.

While I understand the need to control this disease, a disease that can infect humans via milk, killing off badgers is not the answer. The rational for the cull are based upon assumptions and not the facts. Further, the reasons for farmers wanting this cull are an economic one. It will not eradicate the disease. As the bovine tuberculoses is within the cattle, killing off the badgers in any one of the disease hotspots will only create the illusion of removing the disease.

Because of fact that in the cattle there will still be a reservoir of the disease, all that will happen will be a reduction in the rate of spread. Paradoxically it will increase the area where the disease is prevalent. This is because when the badgers are cleared from these areas, badgers from other setts and territories will come and start exploring these new territories. These Badgers will then pick up the bovine tuberculoses from the cows and take it back to their sett. This will infect the other Badgers and as they go out foraging they will infect other herds thus spreading the tuberculoses further.

As I said this cull is an economic one, as DEFRA (Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) spends over twenty percent of its budget, four hundred million pounds, on bovine tuberculoses. Yet the measures taken thus far have done nothing to stop its spread, and since 2001 it has increased. Yet DEFRA has failed to take other action to help stop the spread of the problem like insisting that infected cattle are properly quarantined and housed in shelter where badgers cant get in.

The numbers of badgers that will be culled is staggering, as around each of the disease hotspots the government are talking about clearing an area of twenty-five square miles. That will mean that millions of Badgers would be killed. Also what is more disturbing is that the farmers will be allowed to do the culling with no supervision or any Government money. While most farmers will not want to see the badgers suffer, there will be a few that will use illegal snares and other methods that will impact other wildlife.

While this is all something for the near future, I hope that the government doesn’t go down this road, it may win them votes with some farmers, I suspect that it will loose them more votes when the public see their badgers disappear from the countryside.

As this posting is about hope, there is one Farmer in East Anglia, one of the disease hotspots that may have stumbled upon the solution to bovine tuberculoses. As farmers have been increasingly feeding Corn (maize) to cattle they discovered that it suppressed the immune system of the cattle. The solution was to add selenium to the diet in the form of a salt lick. This farmer discovered that his cows when fed the selenium became free of TB. So he placed these salt licks all over his farm. Then he discovered that the badgers were taking the salt as well, this lead to him discovering that his neighbours were suddenly free from TB.

The hypothesis, not proof, is that if Badgers were provided with selenium salt they can then fight off the bovine tuberculoses. While the observations may not be direct cause and effect there is real science behind the hypothesis as when salt licks were first introduced to farming in the 1930s a whole range of health problems in farm animals were eradicated overnight. It could be that the Badgers are catching this non-natural disease simply because they lack the minerals to fight off the infection. As it is such a cheap option it should be trailed at least to see if it works. As well as helping to prevent a mass slaughter, it could be the first step towards finally controlling bovine tuberculoses once and for all.

A call for a Badger Cull

Having been out on the last two nights watching badgers, it was very disheartening to hear that Sir David King the UK Governments chief scientist is calling for a cull of badgers.

The reason for this cull is to stop the spread of bovine tuberculosis within cattle in the UK. And while it is true that badgers are part of the reason why tuberculosis is spreading this cull will not do anything to prevent it remaining in the cattle and returning at much higher levels of infection in years to come.

Following the foot and mouth outbreak, when farmers were restocking, areas that had previously been free of bovine tuberculosis became infected. This was because simply that the cattle that introduced had the disease. Further, this restocking proved a long held theory that it was the cattle that were infecting the badgers first and not the other way round.

The real problem is one of intensive farming, the larger the heard the faster that any disease will spread. With herds of two and three hundred cows, it takes no time at all before something like tuberculosis becomes a latent infection within that population. Further, because of the size of the heard, it becomes impossible to isolate any infected or suspected animals.

In the past when a stockman had only a heard of fifty cows, he (or she) knew the individual beasts well and were better able to spot any problems earlier. Now it can take days before a stockman has the time to notice any change. This is not neglect, it is just that the more mechanised and intensive a farm is, the fewer people there are to watch and spot a change.

For example in a dairy heard one of the biggest problems is mastitis, where an udder becomes infected, this raises the bacterial count in the milk. In the old days it was via good hygiene and management that this would be spotted. Now there is reliance upon laboratory tests to show what is know as the Cell Count. This is why it is technology, mechanisation and intensification that are causing problems like tuberculosis in cattle. The cure is not killing off large populations of wildlife but reducing the heard sizes and ensuring infected and suspect animals are properly isolated.

This call for a Badger cull is not a scientific solution, but an economic one based upon politics.

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A Judge provides legal ruling on science!

Back in 1977, I read a book that was a scientific critique of the then Common Market and European Food and Farming Policy. It explained the reasons why following the Second World War we in Europe needed to greatly expand food production and how we got ourselves on to an economic tread mill. Unfortunately, the vested interests still remain in force and are increasingly damaging our environment.

However, it was one tiny part of this book that highlighted a practice that alarmed me and because of this practice, I became a vegetarian. The two authors talked about the way that cattle were being feed the remains of dead sheep to boost protein in the cattle feeds. They quite rightly argued that the dead sheep used for this would not be anywhere near the prime stock, but the diseased animals that could not lawfully go into the human food chain. As an example they chose the disease Scrapeie, as this was at the time the most common killer of sheep. They argued that using these diseased carcasses to feed cattle was a really bad idea, as we had no way on knowing what the consequences would be for human health.

It was this head in the sand attitude of we will deal with that problem latter that made me decide to become vegetarian, as I didn’t know what the providence was of any of the meat I was eating. Therefore I was not surprised when a new disease emerged, that was Mad Cow disease or to give it its true name, Bovine Spongiform Encoplepathy BSE.

What was even more alarming was that when this practice of feeding cattle dead diseased sheep was introduced, regulations were drawn up to try and prevent disease transfer or transmission. Thus, governments knew there was a serious risk but still allowed it to happen. The problem was that it was seen as an economic solution to keeping food cheep and disposing of fallen livestock.

That was a bad idea and if people had known of it I suspect that people would not have wanted it to occur. When I tried to talk about it then, I was told I was talking rubbish, well I was told I was talking out of the wrong orifice, or other less polite comments.

The same attitude was there then if I ever spoke of Climate Change. Here though the reaction was very different, as within peoples living memory they could remember colder winters, more snow, but had the attitude that it must be a good thing as we would have better weather.

It has taken a long time to even get Climate Change on the agenda, but even now the economic vested interests are not so much keeping their heads in the sand, but using their economic muscle to try and stifle education of the facts and consequences of Climate Change. Here in the UK, we have just had the ridiculous situation of a Judge in a law court, making a ruling about the validity of scientific evidence.

To update those that don’t know, the documentary film the Inconvenient Truth, is to be shown to all schools in England and Wales, to educate the coming generations of the effects and impacts of Climate Change. However, one individual, backed by money from mining companies, oil companies etc decided that this was political indoctrination and took the government to court to try and stop the film being shown.

While it has now been decided the film can be shown, the judge also states that the film has nine errors. However it is the judge who is factually wrong.

U.K. Judge Rules Gore's Climate Film Has 9 Errors [Washington Post]

But he also said Gore makes nine statements in the film that are not supported by current mainstream scientific consensus. Teachers, Burton concluded, could show the film but must alert students to what the judge called errors.

The judge said that, for instance, Gore's script implies that Greenland or West Antarctica might melt in the near future; creating a sea level rise of up to 20 feet that would cause devastation from San Francisco to the Netherlands to Bangladesh. The judge called this "distinctly alarmist" and said the consensus view is that, if indeed Greenland melted, it would release this amount of water, "but only after, and over, millennia."

Burton also said Gore contends that inhabitants of low-lying Pacific atolls have had to evacuate to New Zealand because of global warming. "But there is no such evidence of any such evacuation," the judge said.

Another error, according to the judge, is that Gore says, "A new scientific study shows that for the first time they are finding polar bears that have actually drowned swimming long distances up to 60 miles to find ice." Burton said that perhaps in the future polar bears will drown "by regression of pack-ice" but that the only study found on drowned polar bears attributed four deaths to a storm.

The most recent data from the artic about the sea ice shows that the rate of loss of the sea ice is accelerating. Once below a critical mass the warmer sea temperatures will encourage and speed the melting of the Greenland Ice shelf. Even the most conservative scientific predictions say that this will happen in a century not millennia, as the judge asserts. This is not alarmist, as the Greenland Ice sheet is already starting to melt and we already have 30 centimetres of sea level rise as a result of Climate Change.

Also the assertion that judge made that loss of sea ice and the loss of Polar bears was in error is plain stupid and ill informed. If we destroy any habitat, the flora and fauna that is specially adapted to that habitat will be lost too.

From my perspective it was like the Judge trying to make ruling that the laws of gravity have no place in his court.

At least the coming generations will at least know who to blame for the mess that we have left our home planet in.

The timing of this hearing was apposite as it came in the same week that Al Gore has been awarded, with the UN IPCC, the Nobel Peace Prize.

Fighting Climate Change is actually far more important than any war, or other political or economic considerations. In a friends on line Journal, after posting a link from Al Gores Web site, she asks when Al Gore calls for the US Government to enact legislation to cut greenhouse gases by 90 percent what does he know that we don’t? The answer, and my answer is nothing new, it is just that he can see what the science is telling us.

Just as BSE could have been prevented if we had not done stupid things for economic reasons, then Climate Change and the destruction of our home would not have occurred if we had not been driven by greed.

The next five years are critical, this will be the last generation that will have material wealth, as once the seas do rise we will be forced to live in harmony with the land that remains.

Returning to the meadow

A comment on my previous posting regarding the wild flower meadow, made me realise that I had not fully explained the way that managing the meadow benefits the wildlife that inhabits it. So I am grateful that this was pointed out to me. Sometimes it can be difficult to know if by assuming some knowledge or experience, I am going over the heads of people. Or worse still by over explaining I know I risk sounding condescending. Therefore I do welcome comments and questions, I may not know the answer mind you as I am only a simple mouse.

It is true that by cutting the vegetation off of a flower meadow will open up the area to some predators, especially airborne ones, but the overall effect is much more positive. In the winter a lot of the vegetation would die back anyway exposing the voles, frogs, mice etc to predators. However, by cutting now, the small creatures are able to relocate from breeding areas to what will become their winter quarters sooner. Over the many centuries of cutting meadows for hay, there has been an evolutionary behaviour shift that allows them to cope with this. Also by cutting down the vegetation, some will inevitably get left in the field, this becomes food for the insects and the insects become the food for the frogs and toads. Further, by cutting the meadow, more seed from the wildflowers drops to the soil. Some of these will be eaten by the mice, voles and shrews, some will be eaten by birds, some however will have the chance to spread to fresh ground via wind dispersal, or passing through the guts of birds, complete with their own manure package, or on the feet and paws of other larger animals.

The tricks of old agricultural practices often did have a beneficial effect upon the wildlife. That is one of the problems with modern chemical and industrial methods; they leave little or no room for the wildlife. Therefore to protect crops from insect damage, crops have to be sprayed, as the absence of wildlife means that there is nothing to stop the insects from eating its way through a crop. Sometimes we forget that while yields were lower in the days before chemicals, it was the wildlife that did most of the protecting of the crops. It was not perfect but it worked well for nearly two thousand years.

Incidentally, in recent years farm subsidy payments have been encouraging farmers to take better care of the wildlife by creating wildflower strips and beetle banks etc, and the farmers that have done this have needed to spray less frequently. Thus reducing their costs of production. There is obviously a lesson for us all to learn here.

The Image is of a Greenbottle Lucilia caesar