Human health and low carbon ag future at risk from anti-meat message

Even first world nations such as Britain face worrying nutrition problems, says agricultural sustainability professor and Irish farmer, John Gilliland.

In fact, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation ranked modifying consumer behaviour to reduce meat consumption as less important to world food and health sustainability than lifting farm productivity and improving animal and plant genetics to help fight the greenhouse emissions war.

Improving animal health and carbon sequestration also ranked higher.

Professor Gilliland, also an advisor to Britain's Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board, told a big gathering of farmers and agribusiness leaders at Beef Australia in Rockhampton how socially influential proponents of less meat consumption had ignored nutritionists' advice on human diets needing micronutrients from livestock products.

Despite what consumers were learning from social media, livestock products were vital to human health.

The nutrition and greenhouse gas emissions discussion had to be about much more than calories, he told the Woolworths breakfast event.

While the UK government's general position on combating climate change included a 20 per cent to 30pc reduction in red meat, research initiated in Scotland revealed the Scottish diet was already so poor Edinburgh's food standards authority would not support encouraging less consumption.

He also noted, despite their environmental sustainability concerns, consumers in the UK and Australia voted in the supermarket to give more priority to their own health needs than climate issues.

Getting value from their food budget, particularly during tough economic times, ranked as their first priority.

The FAO said it was imperative to tackle unhealthy human diet patterns.

It believed the looming hidden cost to human health was three times higher than the environmental health cost and livestock would be a crucial part of the solution, while also mitigating agriculture's greenhouse emissions.

"This journey is about having the right knowledge - and knowing your own farm numbers - not being dictated at," he said.

Professor Gilliland's own on-farm research had highlighted how livestock-based farming enterprises were invaluable to capturing and managing carbon in the soil.

Trees, frequently promoted as more environmentally beneficial than livestock, were responsible for less than 20pc of the carbon sequestered on the mixed farming enterprises involved in the Northern Ireland research.

The landholdings produced beef, meat sheep, crops and timber from woodlots.

In just one year, after changing pasture sward diversity to include more legumes and deep rooted pastures, Queen's University researchers from Belfast found livestock daily weight gains of 20pc and a 65pc reduction in nitrogen fertiliser.

Rainfall infiltration improved 14pc, earthworm numbers were up 300pc, with other soil microbial activity gains, too, and greenhouse gas emissions per kilogram of meat produced fell 26pc.

Farm profits were also up.

Switching from monoculture pastures to multi-species, including silvopasture grazing under appropriately spaced tree plantings, laid down more carbon, deeper in the soil and promoted more bacteria activity.

Having animals graze the pasture was also critical to helping soil bacteria.

"The soil thrives on fungi and manure is gold dust to fungi," Professor Gilliland said.

"If you get rid of animals, you're stuffed.

"This story is not being told - it's up to farmers to use the research and gather their own data and tell it as it is."

The research results gave promising support to the FAO's goal for achieving sustainable agricultural development without exceeding a 1.5 degree rise in global temperatures.

By 2030 the UN body wanted annual increases in livestock and grain productivity of 1.7pc and 1.5pc respectively.

"That's a really interesting message given until now I've been hearing from concerned citizens that livestock production is supposed to be a sunset industry," he said.

"Why is the FAO saying we need to increase the focus on livestock production more than crops?

"Because livestock production and health and carbon management are joined at the hip."