Opinion: Time to challenge the anti-farming climate zealots

I recently enjoyed taking my toddler to the zoo for the first time and seeing his face light up at the magnificent animals gathered from all corners of the globe – animals we adults have taken for granted our entire lives.

Less enjoyable was reading the label attached to many of the info-panels: “critically endangered”, a hair’s breadth from the next category, “extinct”.

With only a few dozen animals of some iconic species left alive in the wild, I wonder whether my little boy will ever know of leopards or rhinos, except as we know of the Dodo.

About the author

Joe Stanley

Farmers Weekly Opinion writer

Joe Stanley, ARAgS, is head of sustainable farming and knowledge exchange at the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust’s Allerton Project, researching how farming and the environment can work in harmony. He is also chair of Leicestershire, Northants and Rutland NFU and sits on the NFU Environment Forum. Views expressed in this column are his own.

Read more articles by Joe Stanley

Humanity has everything to answer for when it comes to climate change and biodiversity loss – as Earth’s only hyper-keystone species, we are wrecking the very planet we rely on for our existence.

Yet hypocrisy permeates all attempts to enact vital change, and nowhere is this more pronounced than in food and farming.

See also Real impact of Aussie trade deal ‘to hit farmers in 10 years’

In the year of the UK-hosted COP26 climate change summit, there’s no shortage of green rhetoric emanating from government.

Yet the UK-Australia free-trade agreement sets an environmentally destructive precedent which will see some of the world’s least sustainably produced food shipped from around the globe to displace produce we are, in many cases, perfectly capable of growing ourselves in sustainable abundance.

It’s remarkable to see some politicians advance unrestricted free trade as the solution to climate change, despite it being one of the prime causes, and to lobby for ever-higher standards and costs for UK farmers while unfairly lowering the drawbridge for our unregulated and over-subsidised competitors.

But such hypocrisy extends much further. What of billionaires who ban “climate-destroying” beef on their commercial airlines while launching themselves on hugely polluting jollies into space?

Or racing drivers who circle the globe in private jets while expounding the climate imperatives of canine veganism?

Or campaigners who lobby to “rewild” up to 50% of farmland in the UK, as if that wouldn’t merely export and amplify a much larger environmental footprint abroad – out of sight, out of mind?

Or the fossil fuel companies who have spent a century enriching their shareholders by digging up carbon dioxide and burning it into the atmosphere, but who now claim to be “carbon neutral” while blaming climate change on cattle?

Farmers are constantly upbraided for insufficient care of the countryside, yet government is pressing ahead with the environmental mincing machine that is HS2 and seeks to relax planning laws to make meadows ever-easier to smother in concrete.

And then there’s the baffling contradiction of the push for soil health and regenerative farming, while the Environment Agency effectively outlaws autumn applications of beneficial organic manures with its renewed enforcement of the Farming Rules for Water.

British farmers have the solutions to so many of the problems society faces: from producing carbon-neutral food by 2040, to naturally absorbing the greenhouse gases emitted by the rest of the economy, to growing the affordable, nutritious food needed to make us healthier.

But to achieve this, we need less hypocritical grandstanding and more concerted action from those with the power to influence.

Four years of busted harvests prove to me that climate inaction is no longer an option.

Farmers are on the front line of climate change; it’s high time the armchair generals stopped shooting us in the back.