sustainability

Culls, Cows and Carbon

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

It could never be anything other than emotive. The culls that have resumed this autumn are expected to wipe out between 930 and 1800 badgers, though last year’s culls fell far short of their target, which only undermined their already highly dubious prospects of effectiveness. It’s pitted farmers against pro-badger campaigners and there’s no getting round the fact that TB is huge problem for dairy producers with some 26,000 cattle affected in 2013 alone. However you look at it, it’s an appalling situation and one which is only exacerbated by the very real emotional distress from both sides concerned with animal welfare.

It has been said that culling badgers will have no meaningful effect on TB in cattle, where new badgers will move into culled territory thereby only spreading the disease. But even if every badger in the country was killed, it’s been estimated that this would reduce bovine TB by only 16%. An independent panel appointed by DEFRA last year concluded the culls were neither effective or humane. But perhaps the most telling remark came from Natural England’s Chief Scientific advisor when he said that they have been “an epic failure”.

Prospective vaccines for TB in cattle are complicated by the inability to differentiate between infected and immunised cattle and the implications of this on exports. There are echoes here of the foot and mouth epidemic where mass culling took place as the viable vaccine would have affected overseas trade. The subsequent mass movement of cows in restocking was a major factor in the spread of bovine TB. But vaccines alone aren’t the answer; there are very real structural problems within the dairy industry that have huge ramifactions for the ability of cows to withstand infection. It has implications not just for TB but the emphasis of our general farming itself and even for our potential to lock huge amounts of Co2 back in the soil.

One problem is the lack of genetic diversity in dairy herds, a factor which severely limits their ability to fight off infection in general and TB in particular. The use of artificial insemination to help boost milk production is key in reducing genetic variation and production of antibodies and may have been instrumental in the rise of BSE itself. And TB in humans is notorious as having thrived in communities marked with the stress of poverty – this is mirrored in modern dairy cows where milk production from the average cow has doubled in the last forty years, from 4,000 litres in 1970 to 8,000 in 2010. Modern herds are under a huge metabolic strain that can only add to their susceptibility to disease.

Another problem is that so many herds are raised on grains – a development that took root when the production of cereals soared due to the hugely increased productivity of crops in the so-called ‘green revolution’ of the ‘60’s and 70’s. Short-stemmed new varieties of high-yield wheat and rice made food scarcity of the 50’s a thing of the past. This made grain so abundant and cheap that the practice emerged of feeding half of it to livestock.

Cue cows in sheds and a huge rise in the use of energy-intensive chemical fertilisers and pesticides while more and more land is put under the plough to farm rice, wheat and maize. While few cattle are kept indoors to the extent seen in the 60’s and 70’s, it’s much healthier for both cattle and those consuming their milk or meat when cows are reared exclusively on pasture. For one thing they are free to move around, growing healthier and stronger than cows spending more time under a roof. And grain-raised beef contains more saturated fats and less of the beneficial omega-3 fats. Herb-rich pasture also contains the cancer-fighting compound CLA which is totally absent in beef fed from cereals. There is also no need for nitrate fertilizers in clover-rich pastures and no need for the tractors and harvesters and all their oil endemic in conventional crop rearing.

Far from a pie-in-the-sky picture, advocates of pasture (including Graham Harvey, author of ‘The Carbon Fields’) seek a return to mixed farming where grain production took its place alongside the use of our grassland. This after all is how it’s been done, in some shape or form, since the rise of farming itself. It carries the huge benefit that, when pasture is ploughed up, it’s full of the natural fertilizer the animals provide and can later be re-sown with grass in a timeless, self-sustaining cycle.

And there’s another very big factor in favour of pasture. All soils contain carbon as organic matter. A healthy soil can contain 10 per cent of its mass as organic matter in roughly the top thirty centimetres – about four hundred tonnes of organic matter every hectare. Continuously cultivated soils contain less than forty tonnes per hectare. A thirty-year study showed that soil under pasture was not only in a generally better state than the cultivated tests but that it increased its store of carbon by a tonne every year per hectare. In other words, soil under pasture doesn’t just lock in carbon – it can help take it out of the air.

There is the factor of methane produced by ruminant animals to be accounted for, but this is more than compensated for by the lessened emissions of pasture fed animals, together with the gains of the carbon locked in the soil. And cows fed on grains produce methane anyway, with all the extra emissions mechanised agriculture entails. Grass is apparently susceptible to drought, but a pasture with deep-rooting herbs is far more resilient in this respect than cereal crops.

If pasture is such an obvious boon, why was it ever abandoned to the extent that it was? The economy of cheap grains is one obvious answer, though with the rising cost of their production that could all change. Maintaining good pasture is also more of an art than the relatively simple mechanics involved with cereal production. But the massive industries involved with the production of grains, fertilizers and pesticides, without even getting onto modified crops, appear to still hold a huge sway.

It’s clear that the very basis of our agricultural economy has been way off kilter for quite a long time. The TB crisis and the appalling culls it has engendered are the presenting symptoms of this general malaise. Only a humane approach to cattle rearing and a return to the husbandry of mixed farming can bring any kind of lasting solution. Though the promise of pasture for the atmosphere itself ought to focus attention.

Until then the words of Richard Manning in his book on the American prairies – that most productive of pastures – are more timely than ever: “A centuries worth of work, warfare and technology replaced fifty million bison with forty-five million cattle whose meat is fattier and higher in cholesterol. One wonders what progress is for.” And when our government ignores expert advice to inflict such suffering on a protected species for no tangible gain, it’s a lot more than progress we all have to question.

There is no ‘Away’ in ‘Throwaway’

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

You can see it towering up like a kind of colossal ark against the backdrop of the sea. Cranes stoop around it like some kind of gang of gangling ministers. It is already now a living symbol of failure of vision, or something more complicit. Soon a fleet of lorries will transport daily more than 500 tonnes of waste to be burnt up in Newhaven’s new incinerator. The ash produced and the toxins it contains – whether caught in the filters or the bottom ash that constitutes around a third of that which has just been burnt – is to be deposited in ‘land raise’ sites around the county.

Here, that means that out on the flat land that runs down to the Pevensey levels, previously tranquil country lanes will be full of dumper trucks and the ash – rich among other things in heavy metals – will sit, semi airbourne, mountains in the making as a toxic realisation of what miopic local government can look like. The truly disturbing thing is that they want to use the stuff as a construction material, thereby increasing the danger of the stuff seaping into groundwater, never mind the health effect for anybody living and working in the buildings they intend to build with it.

Officials insist the risk to health is minimal, that incineration is a valuable source of power as well as a solution to the problem of our running out of landfill sites. And there is no doubt that the problem of the amount of waste produced in the UK is huge – some 434 million tonnes every year – enough to fill the Albert Hall every two hours. Some 30 million of these tonnes are produced by domestic rubbish.

But there have been great changes, not least an increase in recycling from 4% to 40% since 2000, with a target of 50% by 2020. The tragedy of the proposed move towards more incineration is that such changes are halted if not put into reverse. In fact, local authorities who’ve forked out for incinerators will be induced financially to source waste from outside their area, particularly if the incinerators are linked to providing a set amount of power. This creates the use of more trucks on the road and erodes the growing aspiration that we should be getting away from waste per se, should be encouraging more compostable products, better collection of compost itself and greater use of anaerobic digestion. Incinerators lock us in to the mentality whereby we do not think of what we throw away. The binmen do their rounds and we are all conditioned to forget.

In her recent book ‘The Secret Life of Stuff‘ – Julie Hill spells out the nature of the problems of our relationship to the stuff we consume and throw out. A large part of what we’re faced with is the effect of the ‘linear economy’ whereby we make stuff, use it, then throw it away – reintegrating any of it back into the system still takes place much less frequently. Just look at aluminium – ubiquitous because it’s so useful; light, flexible, even barely toxic when used as packaging, it is smelted in inferno-like conditions whereby a single plant can use as much electricity as a city of a million people. Transported huge distances during its manufacture we use 900,000 tonnes of the stuff in the UK every year. While around half of that used in packaging is recycled every year, that still leaves a vast amount going to waste.

Or take a look at the half a million tonnes of clothes and textiles buried in landfill each year, along with an extra half a million tonnes of carpet, 8,000 tonnes of which are laid for events lasting only hours or days. Changing our clothes and furnishings regularly irrespective of whether they still have life in them has become symptomatic of modern life – once people made patchwork quilts and rag rugs, repaired things, bought them in the expectation they would last. A hundred years ago, household rubbish mainly consisted of ash and cinders and maybe food waste if there wasn’t a dog or pig around, back in a prewar world before consumption gathered pace and where salvage was still part of the scenery.

We need to start a greater shift back to such sensibilities along with working towards solutions such as designing products for durability and for recovery of their constituent materials along with returning nutrients from food and human waste to the soil. Reforming how we reduce waste and set about its management is undoubtedly a long, hard grind and incinerators hold out the promise of a seemingly quick fix. The environmental cost of the production of the waste that they burn, to say nothing of putting elements of it back into the atmosphere shines an uncomfortable light on such a promise, or policies of here-and-now convenience.

There are now 81 incinerators planned around the country. It has been calculated they produce twice as much CO2 as fossil fuelled power stations, making the plan for more incinerators look doubly perverse. Meanwhile those living under the prevailing wind will have to deal with a legacy of increased likelihood of cancers. The extent to which dioxins produced represent a significant risk is still controversial, though their output during the start up and shutting down of the furnace has not been properly monitored in the UK. Meanwhile the filters do not catch nano particles which can infiltrate the lining of the lung and cause internal inflamation, damaging organs and even unborn children.

At Newhaven now and anywhere downwind we have to live with a leviathan that may well set the county back by decades. The building looms as a testament of how not to do things, of what can happen when councils bite the bullet of an out-of-sight-and-mind mentality that sums up our modern problem of waste production itself. The facts that the way in which the councils involved have acted here has been described by the local MP, Norman Baker, as ‘amateurish and slipshod’, that the very legality of the deal with the construction firm has been called into question are somehow depressingly unsurprising. If anything can be drawn from such a sorry story, it should be that many other places in the country still have a choice about whether to meet the future of waste management with an attitude fit for this century, not some all too easy, corporately financed non-solution that creates more problems than it claims to bring an answer to.