The meat, dairy and fish industries are under threat so are desperately lashing out and it isn’t pretty. There is nowhere for those with vested interests to hide, given the science is now so clearly stacked against them. So they are going on the offensive. All 10 largest meat and dairy companies in the USA “have contributed to efforts to undermine climate-related policies” (Lazarus et al., 2021).

In an interview published on Boxing Day in The Guardian, a Spanish government minister, Alberto Garzón, in charge of consumer affairs, explained that factory farming is damaging the environment and leading to the export of poor-quality meat. Mild stuff and clearly factually correct. 

The backlash has been furious, from the meat industry and politicians, forcing the government to distance itself from his comments.

Fortunately, Garzón has stood his ground. In a subsequent radio interview he said: “I’m not saying anything new. I’m just relaying what scientists say. Everyone knows that the factory farming of meat causes pollution … and emits greenhouse gases.”

In the UK this month, the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) has launched a £1.5 million campaign featuring an inquisitive little girl ‘Nancy’ along with her grandad. Being broadcast on Channel 4, ITV and Sky as well as on-demand services, the new TV advert focuses on the supposed goodness within red meat and dairy. Poor ‘Nancy’.

The AHDB describes itself as “a statutory levy board, funded by farmers, growers and others in the supply chain to help the industry succeed in a rapidly changing world”.

“Survive” might be a more appropriate word than “succeed”. The rapidly changing world is what scares corporations that for so long have trashed the environment, contributed massively to the climate crisis and put out disinformation, while making huge profits and raking in massive taxpayer-funded subsidies. 

That misinformation is nowhere better epitomised than in the Red Tractor consumer logo for pork and pork products. It is not hard to understand the problem when you know that the “standard” behind this logo is from the British Meat Processors Association (BMPA). Talk about marking your own homework.

For mass misinformation under one roof, you can’t beat the industry’s WeEatBalanced website, with its sheen of respectability and faux concern for health and the environment. 

In fact, the weaknesses of the arguments shine through. For instance, in a piece entitled “What would happen if the world converted to veganism” there is basically nothing that can be said to counter all of the benefits of a plant-based diet. 

Here’s the first of five pathetic straws that are clutched at: “Livestock produce much more than just food, from medicines and cosmetics to glue and waterproofing agents, they are in a huge number of products. Consideration hasn’t been taken on the impact of these production processes or the impact of animal-free replacements.” 

Is that the best you can do?!

If the world switched to a plant-based system, global farmland use could be reduced by more than 75% – an area equivalent to the US, China, European Union and Australia combined – and still feed the world (Poore & Nemecek, 2018). This was according to a study, published in the journal Science, based on a huge dataset from almost 40,000 farms in 119 countries and covering 40 food products that represent 90% of all that is eaten. It assessed the full impact of these foods, from farm to fork, on land use, climate change emissions, freshwater use and water pollution (eutrophication) and air pollution (acidification). Oddly, this and the many other benefits, don’t feature on the website. 

The global meat industry leaves a trail of destruction all over the world, including climate change, deforestation, forest fires, human rights abuses, land grabs from indigenous people and traditional communities, increased risk of future pandemics like coronavirus, and damaging health.

Joseph Poore, at the University of Oxford, UK, who led the research, said: “A fully plant-based food system “is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, not just greenhouse gases, but global acidification, eutrophication, land use and water use. It is far bigger than cutting down on your flights or buying an electric car.” 

There are echoes within the industry fight-back of other sectors that have ended up on the wrong side of history – tobacco and fossil fuels. If the food industry bodies wanted to be useful, they would put all of their efforts into bringing about a fair transition that protects independent farmers and supports the urgent shift to plant-based models. 

Instead, they shout, rant, misinform, and spend millions on lobbying, websites and advertising, as the sun starts to set on them. As Mr Garzón found recently, those that speak out will be attacked but these are the wayward, flailing punches of industries that are down and on their way out. 

What you can do:

Join Animal Rebellion and help us call out the hypocrisy and lies as we have done time and time again in our actions against the likes of McDonald’s, Arla, Red Tractor and others. 

Make a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority (in the UK, this is at https://www.asa.org.uk/make-a-complaint.html)

References:

Lazarus, O., McDermid, S. & Jacquet, J. The climate responsibilities of industrial meat and dairy producers. Climatic Change 165, 30 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-021-03047-7

Nemecek. T and Poore. J, “Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers,” Science 360, issue 6392 (June 2018): 987-992. 

The post Industrial farming: Fighting for its survival first appeared on Animal Rebellion.

Animal Rebellion Press Release

31st 08 2021

CLIMATE ACTIVISTS BLOCKADE UK’S BIGGEST MILK FACTORY CALLING FOR AN END TO DAIRY

LINK TO PICTURE FILE

• 50 climate activists from Animal Rebellion have blockaded the largest dairy factory in the UK

• Arla supplies 10% of UK milk and 2.7 million litres a day

In the early hours of this morning, protestors occupied the distribution centre of Arla Foods, the multinational company who are one of the largest manufacturers of dairy in the world. 30 activists are locked onto bamboo structures and concrete barricades. The factory provides 10% of the milk supply for the UK with 150 vehicles delivering raw milk each day and 1.1 billion litres being produced every year. 

Animal Rebellion is a non-violent movement which has previously gained attention for using civil disobedience to demand that companies transition to a plant-based food system. They are calling on Arla to transition to plant-based production by 2025 to address the catastrophic impacts dairy production has on the climate and animals. Protestors have stated they plan to continue blockading the factory until Arla makes a commitment to end dairy production and fund a just transition for its workers. 

James Ozden, a spokesperson for Animal Rebellion, said about the blockade: “The recent IPCC report issued a code red warning on the impacts of the climate crisis. It spoke of a need for urgent action from our government to address carbon emissions, including methane which is in large part a byproduct of animal farming. Companies like Arla claim to be leading the way in tackling the climate crisis, yet until these big multinationals start to talk seriously about the inevitable need to transition our food system to one that is plant-based, their words are empty.” 

Thirteen of the world’s largest dairy corporations, including Arla, together emitted more greenhouse gases in 2017 than major polluters BHP and ConocoPhillips, mining and oil giants respectively. In the next decade, extreme weather is expected to lead to unstable crop supplies for the 2.65 million dairy cows in the UK while higher temperatures will mean that dairy cows are expected to be exposed to heat stress for two extra months in the year. The climate crisis means that supplying the demand for cows’ milk will soon be simply unviable.

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“The dairy industry abuses animals, the planet and workers, who are increasingly squeezed by big business”, said Ozden, “Arla say they’re pro-worker but lobby for supermarket contracts that sell milk for less than water. We’re not just demanding that Arla go plant-based by 2025, we’re demanding that the government supports companies like Arla by funding a just transition for workers in meat and dairy industries to just and sustainable alternatives.”

What’s NEXT

Animal Rebellion is demanding that Arla go plant-based by 2025 and support a just transition for its workers.

Animal Rebellion is a mass movement using nonviolent civil disobedience to call for a just, sustainable plant-based food system. Today’s events are part of the ‘Rebellion’ – two weeks of direct action demanding urgent action from the government on the climate and ecological emergency. 

Interview opportunities and photos

LINK TO PICTURE FILE

The post Climate Activists Blockade UK’s Biggest Milk Factory Calling For An End To Dairy first appeared on Animal Rebellion.

Have you ever wondered what a plant-based world looks like? Have your eyes gleamed at the possibility, but a little voice called Doubt savagely trespassed your dream?

You’re not alone. After knowing the undeniable benefits of a plant-based food system, it’s difficult to ignore. However, the scale of this mission is intimidating and can often leave you feeling worse off. That’s why we are so excited to bring to you Geraldine Starke from Refarm’d who is bringing us one step closer to a plant-based world.

Geraldine dreamt of making an animal sanctuary but struggled with the fact that sanctuaries rely heavily on donations to operate and are tough to scale up i.e. helping more and more animals out of their life as commodities, becomes difficult. After considering all the factors required to build, operate and maintain sanctuaries she realised that dairy farms met all of these needs right where they were operating from! She began creating her dream into a reality by developing an end-to-end method for dairy farmers to transition to plant-based milks and convert their farms into sanctuaries. She created Refarm’d.

Why is her work important?

In the UK alone, dairy farming produces over 40 million litres of milk per day and is the largest in the agricultural sector: accounting for 16.85%. Small-medium scale dairy farms have been struggling economically and are increasingly falling into the hands of a few, larger farmers. The intensification of dairy has several impacts: environmental, social (animal welfare and human health), economical. Our current system means that dairy system changes in the European Union have been focused consistently on productivity: increasing efficiency and revenue. This comes at a large cost:

Environmental

• Between 2005 and 2015 there was an increase of 18 per cent (256 million tonnes) of CO₂ eq.
• As countries become wealthier, populations adopt more dairy into their diet, increasing the demand for dairy overall — there are at least 270 million dairy cows being farmed globally. Dairy farming contributes to greenhouse gases, soil degradation and wildlife loss and polluting of waterways.

Animal Welfare

• Science shows that cows are social beings, need space to exercise and experience trauma. Focuses on productivity ignore these facts and health is measured as the absence of disease and infirmity. Increasingly, dairy cows suffer from more mental and physical illness
• Smaller farmers are often left with no choice but to hand over their farm or cows to larger farms where their inevitable fates will be little social interaction, less space and lack of autonomy over their own bodies.

Livelihoods and Human Health

• Current trading systems undermine small scale production; falling milk prices and a constant need to increase the output of milk are pushing small and medium-sized farms out of business having a knock on effect in the community.
• Dairy farming can contribute to poor human health “through acute and chronic soil, air and water pollution as well as by increasing exposure to zoonotic diseases, pathogens and exacerbating the risk of anti-microbial resistance”.

It is clear, with the current and projected dairy farming methods, human health, animal welfare, environmental and social impacts are going to worsen. What Refarm’d aim to achieve is important.

How is it possible for a single woman to change the minds of not one, but several dairy farmers across Europe?

When we spoke to Geraldine in January, she briefly touched upon how she builds her relationships with farmers and helps them to transition. However, in order that the relationship is productive and long-standing, she needs to take into consideration the needs of the farmers.

She said,

“for farmers, they are proud of what they do — they feed the country — it’s their identity and that’s something Refarm’d take into account. Refarm’d will not be a globalised product. The farmer will get to have their own unique product. The farmers can decide their own prices. They take pride in the changes they are making- making it as carbon neutral as possible: renewable energy, planting trees, taking care of the animals in the long term etc.”

On 8th May at 18:00 BST Animal Rebellion is holding a Facebook Live Q&A to find out more. Animal Rebellion will explore her story and her work with current farmers, why several farmers across Europe are turning to plant-based milk, the social, environmental and economical benefits of her work and what people can do to enact change.

To support Geraldine you can “spread the message, spread the project”. Itgives her more opportunities which allow her to speak to more people and farmers. You can help her with anything you are passionate about: “people help me with the legal side, making a documentary or on the social media side”. She also needs people to fill out the market research form on her website so she can collect data on consumer demand. The more support and attention Refarm’d get, the more she can demonstrate that there is support and demand for this transition.

Website: https://en.refarmd.com/

Instagram: refarmd_official

Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/refarmd/

The post Refarm’d: One Step Closer to a Plant-Based World first appeared on Animal Rebellion.

Walk through any British supermarket today and you will encounter a vast array of milks. It’s not just green, red, or blue top anymore. Aisles are overflowing with alternatives and people are buying them (a quarter of UK customers). These plant-based options have spilled into cafes and restaurants too. You may find them at your work canteen, at school, at conferences or on trains. Wherever there is tea, there is milk, and wherever there is milk, there is an alternative. With the demand for plant-based milk growing, the UK cannot get left behind. We must choose the right milk to invest in.

Although plant milks have been around for thousands of years (horchata and almond milk), the dairy industry has long enjoyed domination of the global market through mass industrialisation, vast subsidies, and powerful marketing schemes. In Britain, dairy has been part of our lives for generations: it is in our recipes, our traditions, and our stories. Milk flows through so many of our memories. And no wonder; we have been lapping it up since childhood.

It can be difficult to challenge an industry when it dominates our culture, especially when the product has been a source of comfort and shared heritage. But these comforts have depended on the mass exploitation of billions of animals. And now that its environmental impacts are being exposed, the prevalence of dairy no longer feels so reassuring. We cannot afford to live in the past when the future is under threat. We need to imagine and create a better food system that can support everyone.

There are approximately 278 million dairy cows in the world and more than 6 billion people drink their milk. In 2017, 909 million tons of milk was taken from these cows (along with their calves) and distributed to humans. At what cost? And what is the alternative?

Water

Animal agriculture is responsible for one quarter of the global water footprint, of which 19% is related to the dairy industry.

It takes 1050 litres of water to produce one litre of cow’s milk.

The Alternative is Oat Milk:

It takes 48 litres of water to produce one litre of oat milk.

Land

One person drinking a daily glass of cow’s milk uses 7,000 square feet of land each year.

The increasing usage of fertilisers and manure disposal issues can pollute soil and water, damaging ecosystems.

The Alternative is Oat Milk:

One glass of oat milk requires 10 times less land than a glass of cow’s milk.

According to Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education, “oats provide quick, weed-suppressing biomass, take up excess soil nutrients and can improve the productivity of legumes when planted in mixtures.”

Greenhouse Gases (GHG)

Animal agriculture is responsible for at least 14.5% of total anthropogenic GHG emissions. This is more than the direct emissions produced by the entire transport sector.

Farming cow’s milk accounts for 20% of the animal farming sector’s emissions. These include methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N20) and carbon dioxide (CO2). Nitrous oxide is 298 times more potent than CO2.

1 litre of dairy milk produces 3kg of GHG emissions. This is almost three times more than any plant-based milk.

The Alternative is Oat Milk:

1 litre of oat milk produces 0.9kg of GHG emissions.

Invest in the best

When we consider the environment, all plant milks come out better than dairy. But oat milk is the ultimate alternative once you take into consideration land use, water use, and greenhouse gas emissions.

Grow what you know

Having farmed arable land for 44 years, Gordon Rennie notes that Scotland is perfectly placed to produce its own oat milk and enjoy huge earnings. He states: “The trend away from animal to plant-based foods is unstoppable and it is only going to gain more momentum. This is good news for Scotland’s arable farmers. We have a vast new market to satisfy.”

Gordon is not the only one to notice this opportunity. Oatly is planning to open a factory here and their oat milk has already made a big splash. The Swedish brand’s UK turnover was £18 million in 2018, an 89% growth from the previous year.

Oats are the UK’s third-largest cereal crop. No other country in the world has had higher search interest in oat milk than the UK in the past 12 months. Vegan oat milk sales increased by 70% to £36 million in 2018.

The Brits are waking up to alternatives, farmers are waking up to opportunities. Refarm’d is helping farmerstransition to plant-based milk productions and convert their farms into sanctuaries. But we all need support from government and big industries. If the UK is going to benefit from this growth, companies like Arla must divest from dairy and invest in oats. In the words of Gordon Rennie, “the future is good, the future will be plant-based. We as farmers have a fantastic chance to take part”. Come on Arla. Wake up and smell the oat milk!

OCCUPY ARLA

On Saturday 7th March 2020, Animal Rebellion marched to Arla to shut down Europe’s largest dairy distributor. Read more about our past action here: https://rebellion.earth/event/occupy-arla/

On Tuesday 31st August 2021, amidst the Rebellion, Animal Rebellion is blockading Arla to demand them to go plant-based by 2025 in response to the climate and and animal crisis. Add your voice to our demand that Arla transition to a just and sustainable plant-based food system.

Follow us on Twitter for updates throughout the day.

Most importantly, join us. For all those who produce milk and all those who drink it. For the animals, for the environment, for everyone. Occupy Arla.

The post Wherever There Is Milk, There Is An Alternative. Arla Must Choose Plant-Based Milk. first appeared on Animal Rebellion.

At a ‘Women in Dairy’ conference earlier this year, Dr Jude Capper, an ‘independent livestock sustainability consultant’ who also runs the ‘Februdairy’ campaign which attempts to promote animal milk, showed a slide during her presentation which featured two young children drinking what appears to be cows’ milk products. The message on the slide read, ‘Our biggest challenge is to keep dairy in the diets of future food purchasers’.

This targeting of children by the dairy industry is not new, even if, evolutionarily speaking, drinking the bodily secretions of another species is. Set against the 300,000 year history of our species, drinking milk is a relatively new habit. Before about 10,000 years ago, hardly anybody drank milk, and then only on rare occasions.

It was in 1924 that local education authorities in the UK were permitted to provide children with free milk. In 2005, in a paper published in the Economic History Review, Dr Peter Atkins of Durham University reviewed the motivations behind the introduction of cow’s milk in schools during the first half of the twentieth century (Atkins, 2005). He stated that the nutritional benefits of school milk were debatable, possibly even negative in those areas where it replaced other foods, but noted that the dairy industry did well, creating new markets at a time of depression.

Many may not realise that, even today, when childhood obesity is one of the greatest challenges facing us, the government still subsidises milk for children. According to the government website, the scheme ‘subsidises the cost of milk, certain milk products and yoghurts for school children in England, Scotland and Wales. This means that the products can be sold to school children at a lower price. Schools must offer drinking milk before they can supply other eligible milk products or yoghurts. Schools, local authorities, suppliers or other organisations can claim for the subsidy’. The Nursery Milk Scheme allows early years settings and schools to claim back the cost of providing one drink of milk per day to all children under the age of five. I have been unable to find evidence for the total cost of the scheme to taxpayers, but according to Viva, ‘In the academic year 2003 to 2004, around one million school children in England drank 34.9 million litres of subsidised milk at a cost of around £7 million’.

However, the true cost of dairy produced by commodifying sentient animals is harder still to calculate. According to Compassion in World Farming, ‘We have devised a distorting economics which takes account of some costs such as housing and feeding animals but ignores others including the detrimental impact of industrial agriculture on human health and natural resources.

Industrial livestock production contributes to impaired human health, overuse of antimicrobials, environmental degradation, greenhouse gas emissions, loss of biodiversity and wildlife and very poor animal welfare.’

Professor Dieter Helm, chair of the Natural Capital Committee which advises the UK Government points out: “the private costs of farming do not reflect the full social costs”. He continues: “Farmers can avoid costs, by passing on their wastes to others to clean up. Thus fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides can flow into the water supply, for water companies to clean up — and for the water companies to charge their customers accordingly. Slurry and agricultural effluents can leach into the water systems. Land is drained to force off flood waters for others to cope with. Carbon is emitted from the soils without paying a carbon price. Overuse of antibiotics drives up the costs to health care as antibiotic resistance builds up … biodiversity has been reduced without consequences to the farmers who have caused it.” We are all paying the price for animal agriculture, whether directly or indirectly.

Similarly, a report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has said: “In many countries there is a worrying disconnect between the retail price of food and the true cost of its production. As a consequence, food produced at great environmental cost in the form of greenhouse gas emissions, water pollution, air pollution, and habitat destruction, can appear to be cheaper than more sustainably produced alternatives”. The dairy industry is huge, with around 264 million dairy cows currently in the system. In order to provide milk, like all mammals, a cow has to be pregnant and to give birth. The usual method uses forced impregnation of restrained cows via artificial insemination. Calves born as a result are separated from their mother, usually within 36 hours, to prevent calves drinking their mothers’ valuable milk. This process is usually highly traumatic for such maternal mammals. Most male calves are killed at or soon after birth, or raised for a short time before being killed in order to produce veal. The females usually face the same bleak lives as their mothers-until they are unable to produce enough milk to be profitable to the industry, when they too will be sent to slaughter.

Numerous scandals of truly barbaric treatment of animals on dairy farms have been regularly exposed-the most recent being the undercover filming of dairy farms throughout the UK over an 18 month period by the campaign group Surge. The footage shows scenes of appalling cruelty towards newborn calves and their mothers. The campaign is #DismantleDairy and the shocking abuse, which was documented on every single farm where cameras were placed, can be viewed online.

The cost to us all of allowing the commodification of sentient beings and the downward market pressures on meat and dairy imposing increasingly abhorrent conditions for these gentle creatures isn’t the only cost though. We are in a climate emergency. The environmental impacts of dairy farming are horrendous. According to the US Department of Agriculture Natural Resource Conservation Services, dairy operations can use upwards of 150 gallons of water per day per cow in total, including the water used for drinking and cleaning, and whilst this may be lower on less intensive systems, the efficiency costs are shocking. A University of Minnesota paper quoted in Compassion in World Farming’s report concludes that for every 100 calories of grain fed to animals, we get only about 40 new calories of milk and for every 100 grams of grain protein fed to animals, we get only about 43 new grams of protein in milk. Each cow produces on average 37 kilos of waste every single day. Conventional dairy farming depletes nutrients in the ground and uses huge quantities of fertilisers — which account for roughly 1% of the world’s total energy consumption, whilst methane and nitrous oxide, a climate-warming pollutant 298 times more powerful than carbon dioxide are produced by the industry in huge quantities on every system through the very nature of a cow’s digestive system.

Every nutrient found in milk is available from plants, and the targeting of children and their parents is a particularly odious tactic used by the dairy industry to secure their own profits and future. The organisation ‘Cool Milk’, which runs a scheme for schools and parents to provide milk in schools, has a page called ‘Why milk is great’ on their website which illustrates the way in which parental concerns are used to promote milk. Infographics feature unlabelled graphs and colourful pictures spreading positive messages about milk on children’s health, yet each one features in the small print-very easily missed tucked away at the bottom-admissions that dampen down the hype somewhat. “There appears to be a need to assess this in controlled studies’, ‘the infographic is based on evidence from three available studies…a causal relationship cannot be concluded…more research is certainly needed’. But hey, when they’re offering a free fridge to schools who sign up, who cares? None of the health risks of milk are mentioned, nor the cholesterol, saturated fat, somatic cell counts (pus) limits allowed in milk. Nor is there any mention made of concerns by medical professionals that the bioactive molecules in cow’s milk may direct undesirable regulation, growth and differentiation of various tissues in humans. Of particular concern for example is the insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) which occurs naturally in milk and has been linked to several cancers in humans.

Dairy farming costs us all in one way or another, even if you personally eschew dairy in your diet. The environment, the health costs both to individuals and the state, the subsidies we all pay to this industry through the tax system. Children in the two-thirds of the world that can’t drink milk aren’t suffering from osteoporosis or rickets; in fact, China and Japan, where dairy is not traditionally a staple food source have lower rates of these conditions than Europe. It is frankly unbelievable that the government subsidises an environmentally damaging, unnecessary product and aids the dairy industry in seeking to secure its future profits using children.

The cost to us all is far too high to continue with this archaic system which targets the most vulnerable.

The post Are We All Being Milked? first appeared on Animal Rebellion.