BEEF producers are fighting back against claims by "misguided" campaigners that cattle are bad for the environment and therefore the public should eat less beef.
The National Beef Association (NBA) spoke out in support of domestically-produced beef and insisted it – along with grazing sheep, blackberries and field mushrooms – had a lower carbon footprint that any other food sold or eaten in the UK. It says alternatives to beef production, such as ploughing up grassland to plant crops or intensive pig and poultry farming would release huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere when the turf was broken.
NBA chairman Christopher Thomas-Everard said: “The message that cattle, and their beef, are bad news for the planet is both misguided and wrong.
“Assertions that grazing cattle are a long-term threat to humanity must be challenged before more misinformation sinks into the public’s consciousness and irreversible mistakes are made about the long-term value of the UK’s herd.
“Some 75% of the UK’s agricultural area is moorland, rough grazing and grassland. If cattle numbers are reduced even further and the small ploughable part of grassland is ploughed up, then climate change would be accelerated.”
The NBA is attempting to get its message across to the Government and what it called “misguided celebrities”, who have argued against eating beef as part of the battle against climate change.
But Mr Thomas-Everard said that turning more of the UK’s agricultural land over to grazing pasture would actually pay dividends for the environment.
He said: “A useful way to lock up more of the UK’s carbon would be to convert just 1% of arable land to pasture, because once a sward thickens, and develops, it acts as a long-term, potentially permanent, carbon store.
“This positive result can be achieved within three years, compared with 30 years after planting conifers, while the time taken to initiate carbon storage by broadleaved trees would be even longer.” He also pointed out the environmental benefits of British beef over imported. British beef cattle graze out all summer and those housed over the winter eat hay, silage or straw.
“Beef cattle are eco-friendly animals which can convert otherwise useless rough grazing and by-products (such as straw) into highly nutritious, carbon neutral food for humans while at the same time assisting a process in which harmful carbon can be locked up, if desired permanently, within environmentally friendly and visually extremely pleasant permanent pastureland,” said Mr Thomas-Everard.