Beef production gets a bad rap, but in some situations cows can aid conservation
Are cows eco villains or eco warriors? Why cattle COULD be secret heroes for wildlife
Imagine it’s the height of spring on the Inner Hebridean island of Tiree. There are flighty pairs of lapwings and oystercatchers rearing their precious broods of chicks in almost every field, and around the margins of the island, the short-cropped machair (low-lying grassy plain) is dabbed yellow and white with buttercups and daisies.
Brown hares are common, too, but the real jewels on this emerald isle are the nearly 300 or so calling male corncrakes, a once-common migrant that has disappeared from almost the entirety of Britain.
Modernisation, particularly mechanisation, of farming across the country has left this dumpy little bird with nowhere to breed, but on Tiree, traditional crofting (farming on small, rented plots) is alive and well. Visit an area of long, dense vegetation at dusk or after dark, and you’ve a chance of catching the corncrake’s distinctive rasping call.
There’s a one-word answer to why Tiree is so rich in wildlife – livestock. Sheep and cattle, but mainly beef Highland cattle, which feed on grass in spring and summer, then home-grown silage or haylage in winter.
Ground-nesting birds – which lapwings, oystercatchers and corncrakes all are – have very particular requirements for raising a brood. Corncrakes like long-ish dense vegetation, while lapwings prefer it shorter. Both require a good supply of invertebrates with which to feed their chicks.
Cattle are brilliant ecosystem managers, grazing some areas more than others, creating a mosaic of habitats in which a rich diversity of wildlife can flourish, and all the while producing copious quantities of dung that provides food for insects.
Agri-environment payments are given to crofters on Tiree to keep the habitat just right for the birds, explains the RSPB’s officer on the island, John Bowler. The RSPB works with them to ensure the pastures are neither under- nor over-grazed, and to delay the point at which fields are cut for silage, which gives female corncrakes a better chance of raising two broods.
But if cattle are so important for wildlife on Tiree, why isn’t that the case elsewhere in Britain – or indeed the world? Why are cattle so frequently portrayed as one of the greatest enemies of biodiversity, with beef responsible for some of the highest carbon emissions of any food produced on the planet? According to one study, beef produces 50kg of carbon dioxide for every 100g of protein, compared with 20kg of carbon dioxide for lamb and mutton, just over 5kg for poultry and 2kg for soya beans.
The writer and campaigner George Monbiot specifically claims that pasture-fed beef (and lamb) are “the world’s most damaging farm products”. He says a staggering 26 per cent of the world’s land surface is used for grazing, but the animals produce just 1 per cent of our protein. If we ate a more plant-based diet, the argument goes, we’d need less land to farm, and this could then be given back to nature.
Still, Alastair Driver, director of Rewilding Britain, argues that comparing large-scale ranching operations with small-scale, low density conservation grazing is like correlating apples with pears.
Driver has crunched the data on 60 sites in England and Wales that have undergone some kind of rewilding. What he’s found is that the number of sheep on those farms and estates has decreased from 41,000 to 2,200, while the number of beef cattle has increased from 2,000 to 2,800. “They are replacing large numbers of sheep with small numbers of rare, native breed cattle,” Driver says.
Take the best-known rewilding site in England, the West Sussex estate of Knepp, where owners Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree gave up conventional agriculture nearly 25 years ago. Here, livestock – longhorn cattle, as well as Exmoor ponies and Tamworth pigs – act as substitutes for extinct native herbivores, and they are essential to the ecological recovery that’s taken place.
They disturb the ground to permit different types of vegetation to get a toehold, disperse seeds and provide dung for invertebrates, but they are kept in very low densities. “We carry around 0.3 livestock units per hectare,” Burrell says. “A typical conventional farming system would be 3-7 livestock units per hectare.”
Not only has low-intensity livestock grazing restored wildlife to Knepp, it’s also doing wonders for carbon storage. Total carbon sequestration rates – in the soil and in woody shrubs and trees – are estimated at 5.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide per hectare per year over a 20-year period, which are “comparable to rates for woodland creation projects in lowland Britain,” according to a report drawn up by a team of consultants and academics from the School of Geography at Queen Mary University of London.
So can cattle be good for the environment?
In many ways the answer to the question of whether cattle are good for the environment is quite simple – yes, where they are kept primarily as drivers of ecological change and no, where they are primarily sources of food. The former – such as those at Knepp or on Tiree – do end up as meat on someone’s plate, but as Monbiot points out, in such small quantities that they cannot be regarded as feeding either this or any other nation.
“Knepp […] generates just 54kg of meat a hectare,” Monbiot writes. Estimates for conventional beef production vary widely, but anywhere between roughly 250-500kg of beef per hectare appears to be typical.
The RSPB’s John Bowler argues we shouldn’t get too focused on how much meat conservation grazing like that on Tiree can produce. There, the semi-natural machair is naturally fertile, and can support up to eight times the number of livestock units than, say, inland “sliabh” moorland habitats, he says. But for all farms or crofts that maintain wholly or mainly grass-fed cattle and other livestock, it is an almost constant exercise balancing the needs of the animals with the needs of the land.
Instead, he wishes there could be some way of recognising the quality of the beef that comes from an island such as Tiree. Knepp, for example, sells fillet steak from its shop at around £63 per kg, whereas a typical supermarket charges about £45-50 per kg for an organic product of the same cut – and remember the farmer will have sold the meat for substantially less than that, whereas Knepp is making all the money for itself.
“Tiree cattle are well-grazed and they are in good shape and they are doing a fantastic job for wildlife,” Bowler says. “If people were aware of where their beef came from or what the cow had done for the environment, I’m sure they’d be happy to pay a little bit more.”
The bottom line? Unless you know your beef or lamb has come from an extremely low-intensity pasture system in which the meat is a by-product of ecological recovery, the chances are it will be having a disproportionate and harmful impact on wildlife in one way or another.