Mega-farms are booming in the UK

Politics & law

17 Aug

One of the UK’s nine mega-farms each holding 1,000 or more beef cows. Photograph: Bureau of Investigative Journalism

NEWS: A new book by Compassion in World Farming CEO Philip Lymbery has revealed that the number of US-style mega-farms in the UK has ballooned to 1,099, trapping millions of birds and thousands of pigs and cows in these huge industrial systems.

The information - an update on mega-farm figures revealed in 2017 by the Guardian and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism - comes to light in the same week that Henry Dimbleby, the government’s food tsar, has reiterated the necessity of cutting down meat and dairy consumption by 30 per cent in the next decade is the only way to achieve sustainable land use in England. The contrast between the increasing numbers of mega-farms and Dimbleby’s call to action starkly reveal how the government is failing to curb, let alone reduce, the amount of meat and dairy consumed and produced in the UK.

While meat industry figures including the National Farmers Union president Minette Batters have tried to defend the existence of the mega-farms, Lymbery did not mince his words over their harmfulness. “Let’s stop denying that factory farming is inherently cruel and a major driver of wildlife decline and climate change,” he told the Guardian.

Even though the government is too afraid, as Dimbleby pointed out, to take meaningful steps toward helping the nation reduce its consumption of animal products, halting the expansion of animal farms - both in number and size - should be a no-brainer. To do this effectively, the planning system would need overhauling, as at the moment the decision to grant planning permission to a new farm rests with local authorities which tend to look at the application in front of them in isolation from larger contexts and issues.

Nonetheless, a line needs to be drawn somewhere. The boundless growth of animal farming sooner or later results in harms that are too big even for the government to ignore, as we have seen with the catastrophic pollution of the River Wye thanks to the boom in intensive chicken farming along its catchment, or the devastation of wild bird populations due to the spread of highly pathogenic strains of avian flu. The farmers protesting the efforts of the Dutch government to address the Netherlands’ nitrogen pollution crisis should be a clear warning: the longer we wait to curtail this growth and the increasing industrialisation of animal farming, the more painful it will be down the road.

Claire Hamlett is a freelance journalist, writer and regular contributor at Surge. Based in Oxford, UK, Claire tells stories that challenge systemic exploitation of and disregard for animals and the environment and that point to a better way of doing things.