Photographs VIVIEN KENT/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO128 bbcgoodfood.com APRIL 2020
a hurry, if at all, because that
leaves too few farmers with the
land, expertise, or heart to revive
them. In this scenario, it’s perfectly
possible that UK-produced foods
we take for granted, such as
cheese, beef and eggs, could
become ultra-expensive and hard
to obtain, simply because so few
people are left producing them.
Instead our shelves could fill
with foods imported from other
countries with lower quality,
ethical, and hygiene standards.
None of this seems to bother
advocates of wholesale rewilding.
Sir Ian Boyd, for instance,
advocates vertical farming,
otherwise known as ‘plant
factories’: stacked, fully controlled
environments used to produce
food. Others argue that bioreactor-
manufactured protein and
lab-grown meat have the potential
to meet elevated demand for
food when farmland is shrunk.
This sci-fi scenario fills me with
foreboding. Give me real, natural
food any day over ultra-processed,
substitutes. As it stands, to@JoannaBlythmanJoanna Blythman
Why ‘rewilding’ would
devastate farmers
Could new proposals have a catastrophic impact?
next
month
The great fake
sourdough scandalDo you agree
that rewilding will have a
negative impact? Let us
know on Facebook and
Twitter#bbcgfopinionGood Foodcontributing editor Joanna is an award-winning
journalist who has written about food for 25 years. She is
also a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4.compensate for the reduction
in livestock food, we’d need
to intensify the production of
plant food on the 50% of land left
for food production. To crank up
production to fill the gap, growers
would be obliged to abandon the
most enlightened regenerative and
organic methods and use more
fertilisers and pesticides – both of
which, ironically, are derived from
environment-wrecking fossil
fuels. Our country would then
be a landscape of polar opposites:
one half wild, the other half
ultra-intensively farmed.
Rewilding could be a force for
good on a sensible, well-targeted
scale, but when it is grandiose in
its ambitions, it walks hand-in-
hand with the most intensive
versions of industrial farming and
all its attendant harms. Wholesale
rewilding is excessive, anyway.
Britain could reap the benefits
offered by wilder landscapes
simply by steering farmers
towards more regenerative
agriculture methods, silvopasture
and agroforestry, for instance,
that combine trees, forage plants
and livestock together in one
integrated system. We could, for
example, stock our orchards with
sheep, and have pigs and poultry
foraging and feeding in our woods.
If we want to put food on our
tables in years to come, let’s not
throw out the farming baby with
the rewilding bathwater.A
big push is on to ‘rewild’
Britain. As part of an effort
to combat climate change,
last year, Sir Ian Boyd – a former
government Chief Scientific
Officer – called for half of our
farmland to be ‘returned to
nature’; that is, allowed to revert
back to unmanaged woodland and
natural habitat. To put the scale
of this in perspective, he believes
that cattle and sheep numbers in
the UK would plunge by 90 per cent.
Now, I’m all in favour of planting
more trees and using farming
techniques that are in harmony
with nature, but these extreme
rewilding proposals could have
a catastrophic impact on our
nation’s ability to feed itself.
Surely UK food production would
plummet if most of our livestock
farmers – the people who put food
on our plates by producing eggs,
meat, and dairy products – were
no longer in business?
As it stands, Britain is not
self-sufficient in food. We
currently produce only 60 per cent
of what we eat and rely on imports
for the rest. Of course, there will
always be certain foods that we
can’t grow well in the UK – lemons
and the like – but our nation’s
‘food security’ (our self-reliance in
staple food) is already sub-optimal.
That leaves us worryingly
dependent on faceless producers in
faraway places to feed us, who owe
us nothing. All it would take would
be an unpredictable stress or
shock to the global food supply
- drought, flood, war, political
upheaval, and global price hikes - and our larders could become
precariously empty.
The trouble is that when you
start shutting farms down, you
can’t suddenly reinvent them in
Our
country
would be
one half
wild, the
other half
intensively
farmed