British farmers are not to blame for the nation’s poor nutrition

When he is not blasting off into outer space, Virgin boss Richard Branson is a committed environmentalist. 

The rocket-propelled tycoon has decided to give up beef, writing on his blog that he has changed his diet to be more environmentally friendly. Rearing cattle and meat consumption, in general, contribute to global warming and use up too much of the world’s natural resources, he said, after touching down from his away day to the moon. 

It took a Scottish farmer and butcher to put this into some perspective: “Come back to earth”, tweeted Macbeths of Moray, which produces Scottish Highland Shorthorn from its own farm. Macbeths pointed out that Branson’s Virgin Galactic jaunt would have gobbled up 7.5 tonnes of CO2 on fuel alone. That’s enough to produce 200kg of beef which would feed at least 800 people a decent meal. 

It’s annoying for everybody when the elite play by their own rules but particularly galling for those who bear the brunt.

With his high profile and big mouth, Branson’s dietary choices could well have an impact on overall consumer trends. British farmers are already threatened by voguish veganism, the growing momentum of the synthetic meat sector (supported by, among others, the deep pockets of Bill Gates), and by competing demands on the land.

A government-commissioned food report, published this week, calls for a 30 per cent reduction in meat-eating to tackle the country’s obesity crisis. It also recommended better use of the land, with payments to help farmers “transition”.

The goal, outlined in “food tsar” Henry Dimbleby’s National Food Strategy, is to address flaws in our food system in order to improve our poor diet, exposed by the pandemic, and help the UK meet its climate change targets.

No one would disagree that British obesity rates contributed to the country’s high Covid death toll. What’s more, the focus on protecting healthy people from coronavirus while neglecting unhealthy people with chronic issues has been a bad use of the NHS and a disastrous, in the long term, distortion of public health priorities.

But though our farm practices may be in need of modernisation, British farmers are not to blame for the nation’s nutrition. They are being scapegoated by well-connected environmental missionaries, typically drawn from the privileged classes.

A relatively small operator like Macbeths, which says it is trying to do better, developing carbon-neutral beef and undergoing annual carbon audits, does not have the platform (Twitter excepted) to call out the double standards of the likes of Branson. 

There should be a rule that those who preach about cutting emissions and saving the planet should first check their own carbon footprint.

Al Gore, a pioneer in climate politics, was caught out when it was revealed that his 10,000-plus-square-foot home in Tennessee guzzled more electricity in a year than the average American family uses in 21 years. The electricity used to heat his swimming pool would power six homes for a year. Gore, like many jet-setting environmental campaigners, now insists he offsets his massive carbon consumption, a convenient, but scientifically meaningless, guilt assuaging get out clause.

In Britain, we have our own climate change royalty in Prince Charles, an even earlier adopter than Gore of eco causes and a veteran conservationist.

I once attended a black-tie do in Edinburgh where Charles was speaking. I remember he told us to make sure to turn our televisions off at the wall and not leave the lights on in our bid to avert a climate catastrophe.

En route to the event, we had followed his fossil fuel belching cavalcade and heard later that he had flown in specially from Aberdeen for the night. It’s not really fair to pick on him because he needs his security and they need their Range Rovers, but there are trains from Aberdeen to Edinburgh.

Charles is passionate about farming so long as it is sustainable or, better still, organic. He has been on the radio this week warning of the dangers to small farms from industrial agriculture. The “heart will be ripped out of the British countryside” if independent, family-run farms are allowed to go out of business, he said. 

But the bigger threat to farmers comes from those who want to take over the land for other projects, unconnected to food production.

Dimbleby’s food strategy, which is the second instalment of a study on the future use of the land (the first was unveiled last year), suggests that the least productive 20 per cent of UK agricultural land be handed over to tree planting and other biodiversity measures, Farmers Weekly reported.

The other “biodiversity measures” are understood by farmers to mean rewilding, which the Save British Farming lobby claims would “decimate domestic food production” while allowing food to be flown in from the other side of the world, which is worse for our carbon footprint.

British farmers are understandably perplexed by government thinking that approves imports of beef from, say, Australia in post-Brexit trade deals but seeks to curtail the local sector.

Ministers will now consider the new food report but they must not allow their war on obesity to morph into open season on our British farmers, nor let anti-farming zealots hijack the food debate in an eco land grab.