Farming Talk – January 10
We have seen a serious lack of balance in some recent TV documentaries about red meat and food production, with British farming portrayed in a way that’s far from representative.
The NFU is looking at ways to right these massive wrongs.
Those showing intensive production in America and South America though, have actually been great adverts for the merits of buying British, particularly meat.
In Shropshire, our farm-to-fork approach delivers not only some of the most robust levels of food safety and traceability in the world, but also animal welfare and environmental standards that we believe should serve as a model for food production globally.
This approach gives shoppers a level of trust and pride in British food that is not replicated in other food systems. Grass-fed British ruminant animals are the very definition of sustainable farming as they perform the miracle of turning cellulose (grass), which humans can’t eat, into high quality, tasty, nutrient-dense meat.
Hopefully people will really question the provenance of the food they eat, safe in the knowledge that they can choose food from UK farming systems, knowing they are more sustainable. We should also not be doing trade deals with countries that have lower environmental or food production standards than us.
Oliver Cartwright, NFU Shropshire
