OPINION: Today marks the start of ‘Regenuary’, a month-long campaign founded by the dubious Ethical Butcher in response to Veganuary’s “overly simplistic narrative” regarding animal agriculture. Emotions always run high, but is regenerative farming truly incompatible with veganism, or is there common ground rooted in very sensible dialogue?

This is a very difficult thing to admit for a staunch vegan, but the month-long #REGENUARY campaign, which kicked off today, actually has some merit to it. Of course, it’s very easy to get swept up in the social media slanging match - and don’t we all love arguing with strangers over the internet - but in amongst the tit-for-tat and rebuttals rich in playground logic are some very sensible questions on both sides of the debate.

For the uninitiated, Regenuary was founded in 2019 by the duo behind the self-proclaimed Ethical Butcher. One of the two main chaps, Glen Burrows, seems to have emerged as the face and voice of the campaign, not because he’s particularly media-savvy, far from it, but more because he claims to have been plant-based vegetarian for 25 years before becoming a born-again-butcher, making his tall tale far more interesting for newspapers. The Times, for example, in 2020 ran a profile piece on Burrows with the headline ‘What’s his beef? The man who became a butcher after 25 years as a vegetarian’, a narrative that editors of certain newspapers of a certain political and cultural leaning knew would appeal to their change-averse audiences.

This isn’t the first time we’ve talked about Regenuary, the Ethical Butcher and Burrows. Last year, we took a slightly tongue-in-cheek look at their social media faux pas and how their snarky, off-balance responses to a vegan cyclist’s Instagram posts weren’t doing their cause any favour. (We expect they’ve sharpened up their game this year and changed the password for the socials so Glen can’t say anything silly.) Surge co-director Ed Winters, on his Earthling Ed YouTube channel, also dissected the philosophical oxymoron that is ‘Ethical Butcher’ - the video is included below as a fitting crash course.

• READ: The (Un)Ethical Butcher is outraged and it makes perfect sense

Last year, the Regenuary campaign focused on tired and long-debunked arguments against veganism, including the problems with swapping animal products for nuts and avocados; the environmental impact of importing fruits and vegetables rather than buying local; the advantages of regenerative animal agriculture versus arable monoculture, and that vegans are destroying the planet by eating soya grown in South America. The blatant vegan-bashing falsehoods were addressed, with supporting studies from reputable sources, in Ed’s Instagram post from last year. Rather than repeat it all, here it is for your convenience:

Learning from past mistakes, Regenuary this year has taken a different approach. Now it’s inclusive, hooray. Everyone is welcome, from vegans to carnivores and everyone in between. Says the Ethical Butcher in the caption of its Instagram launch post: “Whether you're vegan, vegetarian, omnivore, carnivore, flexitarian, fruitarian ... you can be regenetarian. We can all be regenetarians, it's the only label we need.” This is smart because their crusade against vegans and obsession with Veganuary resulted in criticism from moderate farmers and omnivores who felt it was doing their cause no favours to appear so unbalanced and fuel a petty, less-than-constructive war of words. Instead, they’re positioning regenetarianism as a unifying term rather than a divisive one. If only it was that simple.

The launch post hasn’t exactly gone viral at the time of writing this, but the small number of comments so far have been positive, an indication that the inclusive approach is being well-received. One vegan, commenting on the post, proclaimed it “wonderful” and pledged to share natural plant-based recipes to promote the idea of being more conscious about where our ingredients come from. The Ethical Butcher graciously welcomed the vegan’s comment, saying it was “exactly the kind of thinking” they were striving to inspire, but were they being genuine, or just patronising the one vegan in the room to appear friendlier?

In an earlier Instagram post on New Year’s Day, announcing the start date for Regenuary, the Ethical Butcher fired a visual shot at Veganuary. The image they used included a barren field, clearly meant to represent an arid wasteland ravaged by monoculture and captioned “Veganuary”, juxtaposed against a serenely backlit photograph of a cow in a lush, wild grassland pasture under the wording “Regenuary”. The bias couldn’t really have been more obvious, choosing to portray the worst of vegan food production versus the best of animal agriculture. Hardly balanced and inclusive, but a reminder that Regenuary still can’t quite shake its roots in hatred against Veganuary.

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One positive did emerge from that post and the interactions in the comments. Some very sensible questions were being asked about food production, and valid points were raised about food miles, transportation of fruits and vegetables from distant lands, and the feasibility of future arable technologies such as vertical farming utilising renewable energy. At its core, regenerative agriculture seeks to promote a form of farming that has a neutral or positive impact on the environment, reversing the damage caused by industrial systems to soil health, carbon sequestration and land management, and who would ever argue with that.

But where the Ethical Butcher and most of the modern regenerative movement opposes ethical veganism is in the belief that grazing animals should be part of this form of positive agriculture. The Ethical Butcher would be lying if it claimed not to have ever referred to the holistic management principles championed by Allan Savory, as featured in the controversial Netflix documentary Kiss the Ground (obviously we have a response to that too). Suffice to say, the claims that holistic management makes about its ability to drawdown atmospheric carbon and reverse climate change have been debunked by academics, most notably in the Dazed and Confused study from the University of Oxford, which found that it could only offset 20-60 per cent of the emissions released just by grazing those animals holistically in the first place, let alone make any impact on global emissions.

Holistic management is non-vegan pie in the sky, it’s fantasy unsupported by science, and you would be hard-pressed to find any peer-reviewed studies cited on the Ethical Butcher website to back up any of the environmental claims about animal-based regenerative agriculture and soil health or carbon sequestration. The only vague citation we found was in a blog post from yesterday about why they won’t leave Veganuary alone, and that was just a reference to statistics about the size of the UK’s cattle herd. This is hardly surprising given Savory’s rejection of the scientific process:

"You'll find the scientific method never discovers anything," Savory told Range magazine in 1999. "Observant, creative people make discoveries. But the scientific method protects us from cranks like me."

Even though the anti-Veganuary blog post was an unnecessarily lengthy and often pedantic dissection of one obscure comment made by Veganuary's Toni Vernelli about last year’s Regenuary, one good point the Ethical Butcher raised was why Veganuary ignores regenerative agriculture: “You'll note that this definition [of regenerative agriculture] isn't restricted to animal farming: it goes across the board to include all types of plant-based agriculture and yet after a careful look over Veganuary's website, there was not a single mention of sourcing food produced like this. If the goal of Veganuary is saving the planet, how is this possible?

“In fact, we couldn't even find any information on their website to suggest how to source your food with a lower impact as long it contains no animal bits. For a movement that claims to be better for the planet, this is frankly staggering.”

To accuse Veganuary of hypocrisy is a bit of a low blow for a brand that has proclaimed itself ethical despite admitting that the regenerative principle they prize so highly doesn’t actually need to include animals, but then still both promote and sell a wide range of animal products on its website - that would be like the Veganuary website having a shop section and directly selling plant-based products. There is no ethical way to kill and consume animals if there is an alternative to doing so. Let’s also not forget that TheEthicalButcher.co.uk is an e-commerce marketplace that re-sells animal products online sourced from farm suppliers, whereas Veganuary is a UK-registered charity that must declare its finances with the Charity Commission. Is it a coincidence that the Ethical Butcher’s ‘F’ logo is the Fehu rune, a symbol of wealth and prosperity? Cue the spooky music.

With money to be made, Regenuary is arguably a thinly veiled marketing campaign to attract people to the Ethical Butcher website and encourage them to buy its animal products. Their branding is decent, using a minimalist aesthetic that appeals to the same eco-conscious demographics that would be tempted by veganism, and utilising wording that sounds environmentally progressive but has little substance or backing in science. Any ‘evidence’ of the benefits of animal-based regenerative agriculture is seemingly anecdotal at best or reliant on the testimonies of their regenerate ‘ambassadors’ and ‘advocates’ who all have vested interests in furthering the message, running farms and restaurants themselves or even supplying the Ethical Butcher’s own stock. Could it be just one big advert for niche producers who have everything to lose from people going vegan?

In the second blog post to discuss Veganuary and Regenuary published on the same day, the Ethical Butcher again rather antithetically answered the question about whether it was possible to be both vegan and regenerative:

“Regenerative outcomes are most commonly attributed to the correct management of animals within a farming system, however, there are increasing numbers of methods being used to achieve these results in pure arable systems as well as mixed or rotational systems, so yes, technically it is possible to eat a plant only diet and source everything from regenerative agriculture.”

So as much as the Ethical Butcher accuses Veganuary of contradicting itself by promoting harmful food production, the Ethical Butcher is also guilty of sending out mixed messages. Monoculture is bad, we can all agree on that, so Veganuary could do more to promote the buying of fruit and vegetables from local producers, but in fairness, Veganuary is taking a global approach and must pick and choose its battles, the greatest of which is reaching out to people who exist in vastly different social and cultural contexts and informing them about the ethics of killing and consuming animals. Plant-based food production that is objectively harmful must also be addressed - without doing so, more vegans would amplify the problems with arable farming in its current form. This however is not an argument against veganism per se, it is an argument for investing in research into new forms of plant-based food production.

The Ethical Butcher can pick holes in Veganuary as much as they like, but their scope is vastly smaller being limited mostly to the UK. Regenuary can raise up regenerative agriculture because it’s more convincing on a small scale, with small British producers serving niche markets. The Ethical Butcher stands against factory farming of animals on welfare and environmental grounds, almost as staunchly as we vegans, but the uncomfortable truth for proponents of animal-based regenerative agriculture is that their proposed system - one without factory farming or monoculture - would not be able to feed significant populations. Maybe it could feed villages and small communities, but towns, cities and sprawling urban areas, and with grazing animals in those environments? Why spare a thought for the inner city families when they’re selling grass-fed sirloin and venison to people who read the Times.

Even George Eustice, UK Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, a sixth-generation mixed farmer and advocate of regenerative farming, told the Telegraph in October that switching away from harmful intensive farming would push up the price of red meat, and that within 10 years he envisages “more vertical farming, potentially a whole new generation of glass houses that could be co-located with industrial processes, making use of surplus CO2” and heat to grow crops that we would normally import. The technology necessary to fix the problems of monoculture and mitigate the need to import crops out of season seems far closer and more practical than the insurmountable task of changing UK food production to animal-based regenerative agriculture to feed the population.

If Regenuary really was inclusive, and the Ethical Butcher truly wants to be welcoming of vegans this month rather than just pay lip service to moderates, where is the blog post discussing examples of veganic regenerative farming? Where are the advocates and ambassadors who don’t sell dead animals? Could it be that the Ethical Butcher is afraid to promote a plant-based message for fear of angering their animal farming partners who sell via their website? To give them the benefit of the doubt, including animals does make regenerative farming an easier idea to sell to traditional farmers, particularly those already engaged in mixed arable and pastoral farming for whom the transition to rotational grazing would be much easier.

Regenerative agriculture, yes, and now thanks to the Ethical Butcher we know it’s possible without involving animals. Because as ethical vegans, we will never accept that animals should be used when there is a viable and practical alternative - this doesn’t make us dogmatic when our accepted definition of veganism makes allowances for situations where it is unavoidable. I for one am ready to extend the olive branch if Regenuary and the Ethical Butcher are brave enough to drop their bias towards animal agriculture.

Andrew Gough is Media and Investigations Manager for Surge.

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