Where's The Beef?

So you always buy free range chicken and you make a point of selecting outdoor reared pork.  Looked at from any angle naturally produced meat is better for the environment, creates higher standards of animal welfare and produces safer, more nutritious food.  But beef is beef right?  After all Cows eat grass don’t they?  We have all seen them cheerfully grazing in fields of lush pasture or lying contentedly chewing the cud in the shade of an old sycamore tree.  Surely beef is one meat that is almost by definition ‘free-range’?

Well yes and no.  In most of Europe open grazing is still overwhelmingly the model used for beef production.  But in North America 95% of beef is produced using an intensive farming system called a ‘feed-lot’.    Typically cattle are pastured until they reach their ‘entry weight’, about 300kg.  This occurs shortly after weaning at anything from 6 to 12 months.  At this point they are moved to a confined animal feeding operation known as a CAFO or more colloquially a feed-lot.

Basically that means a pen containing dozens, hundreds or even thousands of cattle.  Here they are fed a specialised, high calorie diet of mainly grain, but with vitamins, minerals and a regulated dosage of growth hormones included.  This diet causes the beast to deposit fat which gives a desirable marbled character to the beef, but above all the animal gains weight.  In only three or four months in the feed lot cattle will add an extra 180kg, greatly increasing their value on the fat stock market.  This system produces the greatest quantity of beef in the shortest possible time, but there are consequences

First of all the beats are kept in high density pens, knee deep in mud and their own effluent without sight of grass. So forget those bucolic images of happy grazing cows.

In the feed-lot they are fed grain, lots of it.  A diet of maize, barley, soya beans or other grain help the beasts to gain up to three pounds (1.5kg) per day.  But since it takes roughly seven pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef that adds up to an awful lot of grain.  And guess where that grain comes from?  Increasingly it is imported from developing nations. Often it is grown on virgin land cleared from primal forest or bush.  Next time you hear a statistic that an area of rainforest the size of Belgium is being lost every year, remember all those burgers you ate last year.

So it’s bad for the cows and bad for the planet but wait, it’s also bad for you.

Corn fed beef is much fattier than grass fed beef, and therefore more calorific.  On a 6oz steak the difference is around 100 calories.  Since the average American consumes 67lbs of beef each year, that adds up to a whopping 18,000 calories per year.

Grass is rich in Omega 3 fatty acids.  Omega 3s are essential for healthy bodily function and cannot be synthesized.  That is they only come from our diet.  Grass fed beef contains up to four times more Omega 3 fatty acids than grain fed beef.

On the other hand a high ratio of Omega 6 fatty acids to Omega 3 is linked with an increased risk of cancer, cardiovascular disease, allergies, depression, obesity, and autoimmune disorders.  Ideally the ratio should be no more than 4 to 1.  In grass fed beef it is typically 2 to 1, but in corn fed meat that rises to around 14 to 1.

I could go on.  Grass fed, as opposed to corn fed beef, is much richer in Essential B and E vitamins, in beta -carotene, in minerals including magnesium, calcium, potassium and in health giving “conjugated linoleic acid” or CLAs, and more.  But you get the point.

So why do I care?  What exactly, if you will pardon the expression, is my beef?  Here in the EU we don’t import much beef from the USA .  All those growth hormones and antibiotics used in American feed-lots are banned in Europe in meat for human consumption.

Well to my surprise, only a few miles from my current home in Louth, Lincolnshire, there is one enterprising farmer who is adopting the American feed-lot system for beef production right here in the UK.  On a disused air field at Manby, behind high walls of straw bales (no planning consent required) almost 3,000 head of cattle are being fattened up as we speak.

Local residents have complained about the ‘foul stench’ and worry about the impact all that effluent is having on the local water table.  (The area is prone to flooding.)  East Lindsey District Council admit they have had dozens of complaints.

The animal welfare charity, Compassion in World Farming, which campaigns against factory farming,  has called for a thorough investigation of the site claiming that the animals have nowhere dry to lie down..

But it seems there is nothing illegal about keeping cows this way, or selling the beef produced there.  Responding to a BBC reporter, the owner pointed out that they are regularly inspected by DEFRA, the Trading Standards Authority and others, even including the Red Tractor certification authority.

I have nothing against the individual farmer, who has recently applied for planning consent for a large expansion of the feed-lot.  But surely this kind of factory farming is not the way we want European agriculture to develop?

At the very least consumers should be made aware of what kind of beef they are getting.  The evidence shows that, when given a choice, a significant proportion of consumers choose free-range produce from farms that adopt high standards of animal welfare.  But as things stand there is no way to tell exactly where your steak came from.

That is why I have started this E-Petition to demand that factory farmed beef is labeled for what it is, and to let producers identify free-range beef in the same way that chicken or eggs are classified.  Please sign it if you agree and pass it on.  Consumer power only works with the free flow of information.

Stop this pointless cull

On 14^th December last year the Environment Secretary, Caroline Spelman, announced to the House of Commons that the government would run two pilot schemes to cull badgers in England.  The pilots will assess the viability of addressing the problem of bovine tuberculosis (bTB) in beef and dairy cattle by shooting wild badgers, which are known to be carriers of the disease.

Two areas have been chosen, one in West Gloucestershire and one in West Somerset, both hot spots for bTB.  The pilots are expected to last six weeks beginning in August or September this year.

The cull is naturally controversial. It’s opposed by the RSPCA, The Wildlife Trust, The Badger Trust and by roughly 60,000 members of the public who responded to the government’s own consultation exercise.  A poll conducted by GfK NOP for the BBC last summer indicated that 63% of the public opposed it too.

Caroline Spelman
Minister for Environment, Food
and Rural Affairs

But in the words of Ms Spelman, ‘Doing nothing is not an option’.

bTB is rife throughout South West England and Wales and is spreading steadily to other parts of the country.  Badgers are known to spread the disease through saliva and urine.  The government’s response is to enforce compulsory skin tests for all cattle every 60 days and to slaughter infected beasts.  In 2010, 25,000 cattle were slaughtered in England alone, costing the taxpayer £91m in compensation for farmers.  Farms under TB restrictions are not allowed to export live animals.

These policies hit dairy farms particularly.  Although the government pays a market rate for slaughtered cattle, the farmer receives nothing for lost milk production and they have no option but to shoot male calves which might otherwise be sold for rearing elsewhere.

Although badgers are protected in the UK, many farmers have already taken the law in to their own hands and many badgers have been gassed in their sets, yet still the disease spreads.

The trouble is that culling does not work.

DEFRA says that the culls will be ‘science led’, but as Natural England, the government’s own wildlife advisors, have pointed out, it has been tried before, in the 70s and the 90s, and it proved ineffective at holding back the spread of the disease.

Moreover, an official £50m, ten-year study conducted for the government by a specially formed Independent Scientific Group (ISG), found that culling was ineffective at controlling the disease, and in fact caused it to spread more rapidly as surviving badgers scattered throughout the countryside, an effect known as ‘perturbation’.

Prof Lord John Krebs of Oxford University, who instigated the study, concluded in July 2011 that a four-year intensive cull which eradicated around 70% of the badger population might reduce incidence of the disease in cattle by 12 to 16%.

This is the reason that the previous Labour government rejected the proposals for a cull and also why similar plans were shelved last year by the Welsh government.

So what is the answer?

Well in the first instance let’s get this problem back in perspective.  The reasons that the government insists on slaughtering animals are:

·         To protect public health

·         Animal welfare

·         To protect Britain’s export market

But let’s take a closer look at these arguments.

Work by two senior zoologists, Prof David Torgerson of York University and Prof Paul Torgerson of Zurich University, has shown that there is little or no danger to public health posed by bTB provided milk is pasteurized.  In fact meat from infected cattle slaughtered under the government policy is currently sold for human consumption, so obviously the government agrees.

They also point out that most cattle exposed to the bacterium will not fully develop the disease within the time of their normal commercial life, and many won’t develop it at all.  In other words, the government’s policy which has been in place for 60 years is probably excessive and largely unnecessary.

The claims on animal welfare are clearly absurd.  Slaughtering animals because they might develop a disease to which a vaccine is available cannot be represented as concern for their welfare.

Trade with EU countries is often cited as a factor.  Well EU laws in this area only concern live animals.  In the last 20 years Britain’s exports of live cattle have never exceeded £3.3 million in annual value which hardly justifies annual control costs of almost £100m.

So should we do nothing and simply accept a level of TB in our cattle herd?

Well no.  What is rarely mentioned is that there is a viable vaccine for bTB.

Vaccinating cattle is currently seen as a non-starter because it is outlawed by EU law.  The current skin tests do not differentiate between an immunised cow and an infected one.  Further, DEFRA argues that “Not all vaccinated animals would be protected from TB and therefore vaccination alone will not be sufficient to demonstrate disease free status… and allow trade in those animals”. This is a disingenuous argument, as use of the skin test is also imperfect.  Currently it is estimated that one in five animals slaughtered under government guidelines is actually a false positive.  Similarly the test misses around 20% of infected cattle which may then be transported quite legally.

Would we reject vaccination of children against polio on the grounds that it’s not 100% effective?  Of course not.

Vaccinating badgers is also ruled out because of assumptions about cost and difficulty.  But another of DEFRA’s own agencies, The Food and Environment Research Agency, FERA, recently completed a badger vaccination project over a 100km² area near Stroud in Gloucestershire.  In a report published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society they concluded,

“In a clinical field study, BCG vaccination of free-living badgers reduced the incidence of positive serological test results by 73.8 per cent. …BCG vaccination of badgers could comprise an important component of a comprehensive programme of measures to control bovine TB in cattle.”

In fact, the Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust, which has conducted its own trials, estimates that badger vaccination is a viable alternative to culling without the drawbacks, and could be carried out for only £51 per hectare.

Only two diseases have ever been eradicated in the world; smallpox and rinderpest, the latter being a cattle disease. Both were eradicated using vaccination.

What DEFRA should do is as follows:

• stop slaughtering infected cattle immediately
• allow farmers to vaccinate their cattle at their own discretion
• initiate a programme of vaccinating wild badgers

It will still take years but this is the only approach that will ever eradicate bTB from our shores.

Government ministers of all hues often feel obliged to be seen to do something, even when it makes no sense.  The Conservative party moreover has always been the traditional party of the countryside and the farming lobby, so the pressure to do something dramatic is commensurately greater.  But killing badgers will do nothing to eliminate bovine TB, it may even exacerbate the problem and it will do immense damage to our wildlife.  Far from being science led, the decision to cull badgers looks like a purely political one.

Under these circumstances the proposed cull is pointless, barbaric and just plain wrong. Our wildlife should not be treated as a political prop.

I will leave the last word to the Badger Trust which has raised a legal challenge to the cull and which summed up the situation concisely.

“Badger culling, if it comes to pass, will represent a triumph of prejudice over science, a triumph of the feel-good factor over commonsense and a triumph of political expediency at the expense of a gullible industry.”

Crying fowl.

As the bells chimed midnight on December 31^st the law changed right across the EU.  With the adoption of European Union Council Directive 1999/74/EC conventional battery cages for chickens are now banned from the EU and it is illegal to sell battery eggs.

It is still legal to keep hens in cages, but from now on they have to be the new so called Enriched or Colony Cages.  These allow the birds more space and head room and also provide features such as a nesting area, a scratching area and perches for roosting to enrich their lives.

Replacing every battery cage in Europe has been a big project.  Farmers have had 12 years notice in order to comply and in the UK alone the industry calculates that egg producers have spent £400m on converting cages. Nevertheless as the deadline drew near it became clear that many countries would miss the target.  In fact only 13 out of 27 countries were fully compliant by January 1^st.  Across the whole of Europe it seems about 14% of producers have failed to comply with the regulations accounting for some 46 million chickens. In the worst lagging countries, Belgium and Italy, fully one third of hens are still in battery cages.

Understandably the British producers, led by the British Egg Industry Council were increasingly concerned about the apparent unfairness of this situation.  Even though the UK is about 85% self sufficient in eggs, BEIC has called for a ban on imports and in fact began legal proceedings against the British government to force it to take action against other countries in the European institutions.  Compliant producers, they argue, have absorbed huge costs already and there is an increased cost of production associated with the enriched cages.  Foreign farmers who have broken the law, they argue, should not be able to benefit by undercutting British producers.

Their righteous indignation took something of a knock when it emerged last week that the UK was among the delinquents.   According to DEFRA, 30 British farms have failed to meet the deadline.  BEIC estimate 150,000 birds may be affected, DEFRA say 1% of the UK flock, which would be more like 350,000.  Either way, the government says they must either comply or cease production by the end of January and the European Commission says 1% or 30% it’s all the same, the UK will be among the fourteen countries receiving letters outlining likely remedial procedures later this month.

I think British indignation is misplaced.  Now I accept that animal welfare is generally better in the UK than many other parts of Europe and British farmers are as good as anyone at implementing EU regulations.  I also accept that the Enriched cages are an improvement on the traditional battery cage.

The old cages had a minimum statutory height of 40cm.  Birds typically stood on a wire floor about 5 to 10 in a cage, each with a minimum 500 cm² space, about the size of a sheet of A4 paper.  They didn’t have enough room to turn around or to stretch their wings properly.  They lived their whole life indoors in artificially regulated light to maximise laying, in sheds which reeked of ammonia from piled up excrement.  The cages were associated with increased incidence of ‘feather pecking’ where birds literally peck each other to death, and the farmers’ response ‘beak trimming’ where young birds actually have their beaks cut off to prevent pecking.  Cages cause stress, disease, high mortality rates and cannibalism.  Surely anything has to be better than that.

The Enriched cages, great name by the way, increase the headroom to 50 cm.  Each cage can now accommodate 60 to 80 chickens, that’s where the word Colony comes from, with each bird allotted an extra 250 cm², one and a half A4 sheets!  The birds usually stand on Astroturf, not wire, and by having specified laying, perching and scratching places the guano problem is dealt with more effectively.  It’s still not exactly the Hilton is it?

Does any of this matter? I mean these are the creatures who famously continue to run around even if you cut their heads off.  How great exactly is their capacity for suffering?

Well yes it does matter, I am not a vegetarian but I respect the animals that feed me.  I believe any amount of needless suffering is too much.  I also do not want my food to be associated with stinking, torture chambers.  I believe that healthy food comes from healthy animals.  Remember this is the system that has given us eggs containing listeria and salmonella.

Thankfully I am not alone.  About 50% of the shell eggs sold in the UK nowadays are ‘free-range’, where chickens actually get the chance to wander outdoors and walk around in the fresh air.  If you consider that commercial purchasers, hotels, schools, hospitals etc. are more likely to buy on price and therefore to buy cage eggs, I would argue that the majority of eggs bought directly by the public are free-range.

Free-range eggs do cost more.  Producers estimate it costs about 22p to make a free-range egg compared with 11p for a battery egg.  The classic argument is choice; let the consumer decide how much animal welfare they want to pay for.  Well I think that the public has chosen.  It is notoriously hard to influence indirect purchases.  Who knows what kind of eggs go in to a Sarah Lee cake or a Tesco quiche?  But when people buy eggs they buy free-range.  Also, why should the public have the right to choose inhumane living conditions for animals in order to shave a few pennies from the family’s grocery bill? What gives us the right to make chickens pay the price so that we can buy an extra packet of fags or half a pint of beer?

Spot the difference - Free-range chickens

Germany got rid of its battery cages five years ago. This year, as the rest of the EU was switching to enriched cages, Germany moved further ahead to be totally cage- free.  It can be done, it’s what the public prefers and it is the future.  I don’t blame British farmers; they operate in a commercial environment and have to be cost conscious.  It’s up to the regulators to set minimum standards and these should be humane, in line with public attitudes and fit for the current era not the 1950s.  We don’t have to wait for the whole EU to agree on this. As Germany has proved you can chose to unilaterally exceed the minimum standards.

Perhaps when all our chickens are free-range, or as the RSPCA put it in their Freedom Food certification, when “every animal reared for food has a happy, healthy life…with an environment that meets their needs…providing a stimulating environment that enables the animals to exhibit their natural behaviour”, then we might have room to be sanctimonious.