The true cost of cheap meat

In an extract from his new book Farmageddon, Philip Lymbery laments the ever-expanding problem of cheap meat, and asks us to reconsider how we feed the world.

Mega-dairy madness 

In the United States, while researching my new book, Farmageddon, I stood among thousands of acres of almond trees, all in perfectly regimented rows, breathing in air so heavy with chemical sprays that it smelled like washing-up liquid. There was not a blade of grass, nor butterfly, nor insect, to be seen. 

In the distance was one of the many mega-dairies in the state. Thousands of listless cows with udders the size of beachballs stood in the mud, waiting to be fed, milked, or injected with drugs. There was no shortage of land; no logical reason for them not to be on grass. The system wasn’t even working for the farmers themselves. At a livestock market in a nearby town, a farmer wept as he told how a friend’s mega-dairy had gone out of business and the despairing owner took his own life.

Luminous pollution 

In Argentina I stood in a field of genetically modified soya as thousands of mosquitoes swarmed around my head. There was no stagnant water nor any of the conditions normally associated with such high numbers. Something was wrong. 

In Peru I saw a malnourished child, covered in sores associated with air pollution from the fish-processing industry, hearing from doctors that she could be healthy and well fed if only she were given the anchovies destined for animal feed in Europe’s factory farms. 

In France we talked to the family of a worker who had succumbed to toxic fumes as he cleared luminous green algae from a once unspoilt beach. The gunge that now blights the coast of Brittany every summer is the highly visible face of pollution from the region’s mega-pig farms.

In Britain, I helped campaign against the establishment of the country’s first-ever mega-dairy of 8,000 cows. It was a battle we won – but for how long?

Cheap as chicken 

There is a widespread and deep-seated assumption that industrialising farming – treating the delicate art of rearing animals and working the land as if it were any other business, like making widgets or rubber tyres – is the only way to produce affordable meat. For too long, this basic premise has gone almost entirely unquestioned. Governments have rushed to create the conditions in which shoppers can buy a £2 chicken, thinking they’re doing everyone a favour. Yet the reality behind how cheap meat is produced remains hidden. 

I want to explore the unintended consequences of putting profit before feeding people, and ask how something with such good intentions as feeding nations could go so wrong. 

I want to know what is efficient about cramming millions of animals indoors, giving them antibiotics to survive, then spending vast sums transporting food to them, when they could be outside on grass. 

I want to question what is space-saving about a system that relies on millions of acres of fertile land to grow animal feed on estates often hundreds of thousands of kilometres from the farm.

The inevitable 

What is smart about having to remove mountains of manure from concrete floors, and then trying to find a way to get rid of it? When if animals were in fields, their dung would return to the earth by itself, enriching the soil in the process, as nature designed. 

Does it make any sense to encourage people to eat a lot of cheap chicken, pork and beef from animals specifically selected for their ability to grow so big that they produce fatty meat? Finally, I beg the question, is the Farmageddon scenario – the death of our countryside, a scourge of disease and billions starving – inevitable? 

Philip Lymbery explores the issue of cheap meat in his new book Farmageddon, written with Isabel Oakeshott. You can buy it here.

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