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

Save the Cow, Save The World

Recently the militant vegetarian organisations, Viva, were saying that the way to solve Climate Change was to stop eating meat and to switch to a completely vegetarian diet.

As I used to be a vegetarian I wanted to look at the data, as it seemed that if what they were saying was correct then I may have missed something. However, while I some sympathy for what they are saying, I do feel that we do eat to much meat, the science is not only flawed it is wrong. Further, they are trying to push their animal rights agenda on the back of climate change. Also while anyone changing their diet to a vegetarian one will not do themselves any harm, the organisation, Viva, will harm the environment as anyone following their agenda will be distracted from the actions that really need to be taken.

At the heart of their claim is the myth regarding the methane that cattle and ruminants produce. More than once in the media here in the UK, mainly the tabloid press it has to be said, Climate Change has been blamed on farting cows. While it is true that bovines produce methane as part of their digestive process, most of it is released via belching. Further while methane is twenty times stronger as a greenhouse gas than Carbon dioxide, it doesn’t stay in the atmosphere.

If this was the cause for Climate change then when the buffalo herds were slaughtered in the North American plains then we should have suffered a global cooling. Also we used to use horses as the main form of motive and agricultural power and again they produce methane too. The simple fact is that while there is to much methane released into the atmosphere, it is not the cause or a major contributor to climate change. Any methane released today will be lost to the vacuum of space in five to ten years.

The difficulty with the approach that Viva want is that if everyone did stop eating meat, there would then be sixty billion animals extra to feed. That’s how many are killed for food each year. I suspect that if there was a great change in diet from meat that these animals would suffer. Also good traditional agricultural practice needs the manure and waste from livestock to fertilise the land to produce the vegetated crops. Without animal fertilisers then more polluting artificial fertilisers would be used.

What I find frustrating with so many of these organisations that are trying to push their agenda is that they miss the point. We all need to drastically change what we do. These organisations fool people into thinking that if they just do that one thing they will be doing all they can. However, we all need to do many things. We need to always think about the environmental impact of everything we do.

Also we do need to be cynical about the companies and businesses that are trying to “sell” us their product(s) as the solution. Nor should we allow ourselves be fooled by green-washing, companies that claim to be acting environmentally but are only doing what looks good. Its like Airlines who claim they are carbon offsetting, while planting trees and taking other measures to mitigate the carbon dioxide is useful, it is not the solution. The only real solution is to stop adding to the CO2 in the atmosphere by stopping consuming and only travelling when needed.

A Planet fit To Live On

I am well aware that most people think that this mouse is being alarmist by talking of the complete destruction of our planet and of the human race, but this new report by the UN Environmental Programme (UNEP), demonstrates that this is a reality and not some doom leaden fantasy.

We are stripping our home world of resources faster than they can be renewed naturally and we seem hell bent upon despoiling what we leave behind. If we take water as the key resource, which it is, humans seem to have lost the understanding that we need to keep our water clean.

Globally we are pumping out billions of tonnes of Carbon Dioxide into our atmosphere, plants will absorb some, and some will be absorbed by the oceans and seas. But in doing so, the seas change their ph value and become more acid. If you dissolve CO2 in water you get Carbonic Acid. Quite simple school level science, as has been discovered recently, our oceans are now saturated with CO2, they are not absorbing any more by natural means. Therefore, we have polluted our seas so much that the fresh water they release, in the form of clouds and rain is no longer pure.

As well as speeding up the degradation of our environments, it makes it much more expensive to purify the water. In the Western developed world we can at least throw money at the problem and produce clean water, but in the developing world we are condemning these people to illness and disease.

Not just directly from contaminated water, but impure water will effect the ability of the crops to grow thus reducing yield for peoples that are eking out a subsistence level of living anyway.

This is why this mouse doesn’t like the idea of crops being flown around the world. Its not because of the carbon footprint they leave, but because a water rich west is importing water from water poor areas. As vegetables are mainly water, each crate of vegetables is taking water away from the people who most need it. This is all speeding desertification especially in Africa.

It is the individual choices that we all make that add to this global disaster. None of us seem to be prepared to make do with what we have we all seem to want more and more. But beyond being well fed, adequately housed and warm, we don’t need most of the consumer goods we buy. While I hate to mention it, Christmas will soon be upon us, an orgy of consumerism and I can guarantee that in the rubbish of most homes will be last years must have items.

The more we consume, especially in the developed world, the more damage we do to our environment. But what use will any of those toys be when we no longer have a planet fit enough to live on?

You can find a copy of the report to down load via this link. Not bedtime reading I know and at nearly six hundred pages long not an easy read either, but if you really want to know what we are doing to destroy our world…

Mass Extinction and Climate Change

When I saw the headline of this story on the BBC web site, I thought this is not news, the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) have already reported that we will have up to a forty percent loss of species as a direct result of this man made pollution we call climate change. However, this research is new and marks an important change in the attitude of scientists. Previously the language used “Hedged the Bets” and spoke of what was theoretically possible rather than what was actually happening.

Part of the problem in dealing with the man made pollution that is climate change, is a psychological one. In the past we have seen pollution as localised, and no matter how bad it got, when action was finally taken, the environment improved and the problem dissipated. Even with acid rain as that was a regional problem, in Europe for example, when Europeans acted collectively the situation reversed. And while there still is some sulphur pollution that is causing acid rain, it is relatively negligible.

With Climate Change, we can not see (or at least some can) that there is anything we can do, as we psychologically assume that there is no point as China or India or what ever other country we want to use as an excuse, are not doing the same. What is needed is leadership, and that should be coming from America and Europe. As the USA is the biggest polluter, producing 24 tonnes of CO2 per head of population they should be taking the lead here.

But the problem is that everyone is hoping for that technological fix, that mythical grail of pollution free energy. As a planet we have squandered our energy resources. We have allowed a culture that is so reliant upon oil to develop that we are prepared to fight wars for access to it, and allowed our whole way of life to become dominated by the automobile. The problem is that to power our way of life we are burning billions of tonnes of oil and releasing all the carbon dioxide that the planet sequestrated away back into the atmosphere.

What this new research shows is that while climate change has naturally occurred in the past, and effected the biodiversity of our planet, our current man made driven warming of the globe could wipe out most of the life on our home world. That as I am sick of having to point out includes us.

If we lost important pollinators like bees how long would we last? That’s not a rhetorical question, but fortunately minds far better than mine have already done the research and tell us that we would last only six years. We would loose our ability to grow over ninety percent of our food. That is what mass extinction will do to us.

Even now when there are clear signs of the effects of Climate Change in the forest fires in California, we still do nothing. Unless we act now, if we survive, we will become the most hated generation of humans within our children’s history.

The BBC Article

Learning Lessons from the Great Storm

When the Great Storm of 1987 hit the UK, my now ex-wife and I had not long moved up to the Northeast. It troubled us greatly as both our families were down in the area devastated by the hurricane and of course the telephones were out of order. Fortunately, none of our kin were hurt in the storm, but with reports of deaths it was an anxious wait for news.

For me though the most memorable part of the events of that time was that it was the first time that I was able to have a sensible discussion with “Non Environmentalists” about global warming. Until that event, everyone I ever spoke to always dismissed it by saying “Great we get better Weather” or some other nonsense.

While that particular storm may not have been caused directly by climate change, the simple principal of a warmer planet does mean that there is more energy put into the atmosphere to drive the weather systems. This brings me to an article on the BBC web site talking about the lessons that the met office learned from the storm, and the improvements that new and improved technology now plays in more accurate forecasting.

You can read the article here http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7044050.stm

However, it’s a quote from Ewen McCallum that really caught my attention.

"It is like if we have a big storm tomorrow, you'll get the same answer out of places like the Met Office, where they will say that it certainly fits with the [future] scenarios, but to blame any one event on climate change is facile.

"It is only when you look back over time and you look at global trends, can you make comments like that."

While what he says is scientifically accurate, the greatest obstacles to persuading people to stop polluting our planet is the lack of leadership from people like him, who could get people to take notice. The science is now clear that Climate Change is happening and that it is man made. Therefore with that extra energy in the atmosphere, the changing climate must be substantially at the root of any dramatic weather occurrences.

The trouble is that there are still far to many people, politicians and scientists among them, that are looking for that magic single bit of data, that single event that can only have happened because of Climate Change, before they will commit themselves. Yet if we wait for that single event proof, we will already have destroyed our home world and our species will be facing extinction.

Even if we stop burning all fossil fuel tomorrow, it will take more than one millennia for our planet to get back into equilibrium.

Digital Wildlife Photography

One of the main reasons that I started this on line journal, was that when I moved to the village, I started encountering some remarkable wildlife and I was having some really great experiences. It was in fact my excitement at these close encounters with the natural world that made me want to share. However, I didn’t want to just post up some geeks list, even though to many I am a geek, and I wanted to try and make the postings interesting. (One of the people that knows me said that it’s like reading your soul.)

I quickly realised that images were going to be important. While I had and still have some good film cameras, what I really needed was a digital camera if only to share what I was seeing at the time and not weeks later. The one I had at the time was not that good. Having worked in the professional photographic industry, image quality has always been important to this mouse. However, the cost of going digital appeared to be out of my league, so I compromised and got a reasonable compact digital camera, and many of the images here were taken on that. A Fuji A350 for all those geeks (like me) out there.

However I had expected to use my film cameras to do most of the wildlife photography. Yet this created a paradox, often it was the unexpected occurrences of an animal, bird or insect, which seemed to make some of my posts more entertaining. Therefore I was finding myself weighed down with equipment, or I just would not have the right lenses with me.

Further I was starting to rely on the digital camera much more. I have to say that I am now becoming a convert to digital photography. It does have its limitations, for example anything high contrast it doesn’t cope with well. But that may be the nature of the model of camera I have been using. Also it may be that unlike film we need to know more about the chips used in the cameras. But I was never that much of an anorak about film cameras so I don’t particularly want to waste my time, or fill my head with technical rubbish about what’s best this week. Apart from anything else, it goes against my non-consumerists grain.

But I have started looking seriously at what’s out there and what fits my needs. I decided I would look at older second hand cameras and found a Dimage Z1 on an internet auction site. While not anywhere near the resolution I would wish for, I thought I would see if this was closer to what I needed.

While I do want to take decent images, there are times when just being able to say that today I saw this bird and here’s the picture was becoming just as important as not being laden down with heavy and cumbersome equipment.

Well here are the results of me playing with my new toy. I could see be becoming a convert to digital. Further as it will reduce my pollution levels as I will not be causing a lot of nasty chemicals to be used, it will ease my guilt about despoiling the earth while trying to save it.