Debate: We Should All Go Vegan with George Monbiot and Patrick Holden | Intelligence Squared

hello and welcome to this Intelligence Squared online debate uh we should all go vegan and I can say that I have been both vegan and carnivore I would say on West and I've also been vegetarian I've tried the whole lot I'm pescetarian um but I am very open to debate um and to my mind being changed so first of all I'm going to ask you to make your first vote so we can see whether your mind's going to be changed um you need to vote for or against the motion should we all go vegan and if you're unsure you can vote undecided this is going to take a couple of minutes probably for the results to come through so before we start I'm going to explain briefly how this session is going to work in a moment our two Debaters are going to make their opening speeches then I'm going to chess and debate between the two of them and then I'm going to take your questions so anything you think of as you go along uh you need to scribble down and then you can send it across and at 6 55 the speakers are going to end the debate with short closing statements and then I'm going to ask you all to vote again we're going to see whether anyone has changed their mind at all so if you can start sending your questions to the speakers as soon as you uh want and you can type your question in the box at the bottom of the screen and if you don't want your name mentioned don't worry you can just click anonymous before you press send you can also tweet using the hashtag iq2 and uh then we will see what the first vote is and I haven't actually seen it yet I haven't been told what it is so we may have to start before we know what the answer is unless anyone else as George have you been given the results before me I resent them in the post yesterday yeah exactly so I think then we should get going and I will if the results come through I will and I think we should first I'm going to give a brief instruction to George who doesn't really need very much introduction he's a guardian columnist he's the best-selling author whose latest book is Regenesis feeding the world without devouring the planet which is uh fantastic read and very eloquent as well as persuasive he's a committed vegan um although I think occasionally you have cracked and you can watch his documentary it's apocalypse cow how meat killed the planet which is on channels for my four and I think actually you may have eaten a stag in that um although it was shot entirely for environmental reasons um but I'm sure hope it wasn't that yeah well the answers don't you could actually have the answers on toast can't you can you yes isn't that what lady laying down did um I came here to learn stuff and this already begun let me try it out one time on X more Dartmouth um George is going to speak for seven minutes so would you like to start now thanks Alice well yeah the the problem we have with this debate is that the great majority of people I think it's fair to say are in deep denial about where their animal products come from and we all uh have a picture of livestock farming um as being the picture that was really planted in our minds by those children's books that we were all exposed to when we were pre-literate you know the the classic children's book is a livestock farm with one rosy cute farmer one cow one Pig one horse one one cat one chicken they all talk to each other they all live in harmony no indication of why they might be there or where they might be going and the reality could not be further from the truth as I found when I worked on an intensive pig farm as a teenager and every day I was thinking first of all this isn't what they told me farming was about and secondly why is this legal you know if we treated our cats and dogs like we treat pigs and chickens for example we would be sent to prison but the great majority of our animal products come from intensive factory farms like that um in countries like the UK between about 85 and 90 of our animal products come from those places and they are devastating for Animal Welfare but also environmentally devastating um and that's because they need to be fed they can't feed themselves in those sheds and so the food is imported often from the other side of the world where it can be have devastating consequences in its production area the size of Spain in Brazil has been destroyed to produce soy um to largely to feed the world's farm animals um and and then the nutrients pass through those animals there's far too much done for the land to absorb and so when Farmers spread it on the land they claim they're fertilizing it in fact they're dumping the dung it washes off into the rivers and kills the rivers and we're seeing this with The River Why many other rivers around the Welsh borders um dairy farms are doing Sim in Patrick's part of the world pembrokeshire and and in my part of the world in Devon as well with just horrendous consequences and so people say well the answer then obviously is to go for extensive livestock farming free range livestock farming and to eat pasture-fed meat and this has become the great call of Foodies and celebrity chefs and even some environmentalists that's the answer because you know we like that picture we like the picture of cattle and sheep grazing in the fields it looks harmonious it chimes with thousands of years of pastoral poetry and children's stories um and you know BBC programs because if the BBC were any Kino and sheep it would be illegal um but the reality of that is in some ways even worse than the reality of factory farming because of the vast amount of a resource that it uses that we neglect massively in environmental discussions it's possibly the most important of all metrics and yet we scarcely discuss it it should be right up there with greenhouse gases synthetic chemicals all the rest of it what is it land use the amount of land we use is an absolutely critical environmental issue because every hectare we use for our own extractive purposes is a hectare which can't be used to support wild ecosystems so such as forests and wetlands and Savannahs and natural grasslands not not enclosed and used for pasture and and those wild ecosystems are what the great majority of the world species depend on and in fact Earth Systems as a whole depend on the survival of wild ecosystems now there's one area in which we are tuned into land use and that would that's when it comes to urban sprawl and we all dislike urban sprawl and so we should it's bad for cities it's bad for the countryside but the entire urban area of the planet occupies one percent of its land surface all the homes all the businesses all the infrastructure one percent much of the rest of the planet is Desert is ice caps is is mountain ranges um just 15 is protected areas but by Far and Away the greatest land use is farming and um and farming occupies roughly 38 of the land surface of the planet and when I say farming you're probably thinking of growing crops but that occupies just 12 of the land surface of the planet and of that almost half those crops are being grown to feed to those animals in the factory farms so only six or seven percent of the planet's surface is growing crops to feed humans directly so what about the 26 percent of lamb which makes up that 38 all that is producing pasture-fed animals it's basically pasture-fed meat production and this carries an enormous ecological opportunity cost and an enormous carbon opportunity cost in other words the cost of what you're not using that land for which is supporting wild ecosystems and despite the outrageous climate denial claims of the livestock industry wild ecosystems are almost invariably much richer in carbon um and and lowering greenhouse gas emissions um than any of the pastures being used to produce our beef or our lamb now there was a study in the United States which said what if we were to do what all the food is in celebrity chefs are doing and switch away from eating corn-fed beef which is enough of a problem and switch towards pasture-fed beef they found that you would have to increase the area used to produce cattle in the United States by 270 percent you'd have to cut down all the forests drain all the wetlands water all the deserts Diggers at the national parks demolish the cities and you would still be importing a lot of your beef from Brazil that's simply not enough planet to do it we could all eat pasture fed beef and and laugh if we had several planets and no space for wild ecosystems on any of them but as we don't and as we desperately need to conserve and restore wild ecosystems if we're going to get through this Century we just can't gate that right to ourselves um and and the fact is that you know if we were to make that switch to pasture fed beef only the rich would eat it you know there's this idea where we can all eat less and better but that you know does that ever work with any luxury product you know do do do the world's poor eat Beluga caviar once a year um or bluefin tuna sushi once a year no because that's not how luxury products are distributed if we produced far less meat which we ought to only the very rich would eat it there is no good way of providing animal products which everyone can meet eat without inflicting enormous damage to Earth Systems and so we we live in this state of delusion really that that we can somehow have a thriving planet and at the same time um eat exactly what we want to eat but actually our diets are by far and away the biggest impact of all the things we do and by far the biggest component of that impact is eating livestock products in fact if we if we stopped eating livestock products according to a paper in science uh we would save 76 of the agricultural land area that we currently use and if we did that then that would enable a great Global rewilding we could restore ecosystems on a massive scale we could bring back the rainforest we could bring back the wetlands we could bring back the Wild savannas and the wild grasslands at Sea we could bring back the the celt forest the coral reefs the ocean uh the ocean sea floor which is absolutely essential to protect in life and protecting carbon and all that would be possible if we switched away from an animal-based diet to a plant-based diet and I don't think this is a luxury in fact it's quite hard to see how we're going to avoid the sixth great Extinction and for that matter the collapse of Earth Systems unless we switch away from eating animals there are two fundamental things that we have to do to prevent the the environmental disaster that scientists predict if we don't change course one is to leave fossil fuels in the ground the other is to stop eating animals thank you fantastic now I have to say the results are in so you've got quite an uphill battle I feel George but it was very uh well argued so we'll Welcome to my life but eight percent agree and 48 disagree um with 44 undecided so I think we're now over to Patrick um who may have an easier job but on the other hand if you lose some voters um it may be awkward so we will talk now to you and you are the founder and chief executive of the sustainable food trust and Patron of the UK biodynamic Association and um I think really since I first became interested in farming you have been a major player on the scene and very involved I think the first time I met was bread making actually so you've been involved in the whole process for Generations really um your work centers on the importance of transforming our food and farming systems to address climate change and Traverse the biodiversity loss and improve Public Health uh you're also an organic farmer in Wales and you've got a herd of Atia cows so George may not be thrilled by that but your milk goes to produce cheese and um you are feeding um people not with a vegan diet but with a much more healthy diet that they might get if they just popped down to McDonald's so you now have seven minutes to speak well thank you very much um thank you George and I just would like to start by acknowledging your great work George I think you are an incredible environmentalist and campaigner I've admired you for many years and I think your book regeneres this uh the first half of which I fully agree with is a brilliant critique of what is wrong uh with industrial farming including livestock so there is so much we share and for me it's very disappointing uh that there's such a polarization of our views over the role of livestock in sustainable farming systems because I agree with you that the Livestock systems that predominate all over the world at the moment are definitely part of the problem but rather than trade statistics with you which we could do and no doubt we will do it when I've had my six minutes and there's a bit of a you know back and forward I want to talk about my own practical experience and because I think that one of the reasons why I think you doubt the capacity of farming to transport in a way which will have livestock really at the center of the sustainable Food Systems which replace the ones we've got at the moment is because you're not a practitioner I am a practitioner I'm within a month of celebrating our 50th Anniversary here on this 300 acre mainly livestock Farm you know that we've grown vegetables along the road and we were just talking about it we used to be a carrot producer for supermarkets we had to stop because the system got too centralized and I've just been out today ridging up my potatoes so I'm a a definitely a vegetable grower but the main use of the land on this Farm uh is for producing uh livestock we have now a 90 car air shahead and followers and we produce cheese as Alice just said and what is really interesting about our farm after 50 years of not using any nitrogen fertilizer and farming in harmony with nature is the impacts the first of which I want to focus on a little bit which is carbon we just had a carbon ordered and it looks as though if you believe the data that we are actually carbon negative in other words the soil building of in the permanent pasture and the rotations because we do gross emotes and peas to feed our cows looks as if it not only offsets the methane emission of the cows but also the energy that we use on the farm so we are net carbon negative now obviously this is just one farm and I I also want to speak about the nature impacts uh you said that if we took more land out of production to um if we if we carried on um if we went to my system at scale it would have devastating impacts because we'd have to have more land in production well the if you farm in harmony with nature you have fantastic biodiversity outcomes our farm is alive with birds small mammals insects amphibians all because we're not farming in a hostile way and the like the wildlife can coexist with the system we also employ around seven full-time equivalent labor units on the farm and so if you take it together we are producing a lot of food we're producing enough cheese to feed 3 000 people uh the milk we sell could feed another two and a half thousand and the meat which comes either from the dairy cows at the end of their lives or the male carbs can feed another 500. now you might say this is just one farm and what did you say you said we're living in a state of delusion well I I plead guilty I am in the state of delusion after 50 years I'm convinced that my farming system could go to scale and if you don't believe me we did a report which we published just recently called feeding Britain from the ground up where we modeled a nationwide transition of farming to sustainable farming systems operating within planetary boundaries the sort of farming I'm doing here we looked at the impact on total food output and the fascinating conclusions are that we could maintain and maybe even slightly increase our national level of food security and our staple foods if we switched to farming systems like the one we are using here and if we scale that globally yes we could feed the world but only if we ate differently here's some areas where we agree we'd give up all industrial livestock farming no more cheap chicken no more horrible pork from industrial pork units or Mega dairies you mentioned there are Mega dairies near this Farm in karadigian but if we if we gave up eating meat it would be a problem because the Farms that need the farming systems that need to replace the ones we've got at the moment would rely on a rotation 50 of which at any one time would be infertility building and that would normally be Clover and grass and to maximize the food output from that system and actually I would say to revitalize the soil we need livestock grazing livestock yes mainly grass-fed not exclusively grass-fed at a dairy system but certainly with beef and lamb production more or less 100 grass-fed and if we did that we'd actually have quite a lot of meat to eat but far more than most people think what we have to give up is the cheap chicken that everybody's become used to so in summary I'm not sure how I'm doing for time but in summary if that system was scaled globally every country would have a different diet because obviously the geography soils and climate of different countries varies but there's no reason why we couldn't maintain our livestock production except that we've changed what we eat and take that to scale so I think that you need to come here George you remember you may remember you were here in 2007 at the launch of transition Town Lampeter but you didn't have a chance to do around but uh in celebration of our 50th Anniversary come and look for yourself because I think at this time it's important that environmental environmentalists work together sync our differences and share our stories and my story is that it is possible to produce livestock working in harmony with nature my wife uh Becky is out there milking the cows at the moment she sings to them when when when she's milking they are loved they are treated with compassion throughout their whole lives and the cheese and the milk that we produce and the meat is a reflection of our compassion for the animals there's no reason why we can't take that to scale thank you George now is there any more questions they're coming in now but we we can take quite a few more um I'm going to start I'm very interested Patrick today you're on the Today program but and you weren't invited to number 10 but you really should have been shouldn't you buy for the farming conference today do you think uh listening to what came out of that the government has any interest at all in your kind of farming and being more sustainable or do you think in the end we're more worried about trade Wars and about trying to be profitable I think well I think trade Wars are important because we need to have a way of measuring the sustainable impact of all the different foods that we're trading in because trade will continue because we are structurally unable to be self-sufficient but I don't think that the sort of issues that I was talking about on the Today program this morning will have featured in the conversation when we when I listened to Judith Bachelor and Minette batters later on in the program I was thoroughly depressed and it was rather annoying that the presenters didn't bring up the points that I'd made because it seems to me that we need an agricultural transition just like we've had or are having an energy transition and it will have many of the same features because at the moment if you farm in a sustainable way as we do you make less money and a less profitable than if you're farming in an extractive way when I'm sure George and I would agree with that so what we need is a mechanism like the feed-in tariffs to enable the transition to truly sustainable farming systems which do involve would involve rotations to build fertility and I think that's the key point that we need to drill down on because I don't think Tully um is a Great Hero in uh George's book Regenesis I've known Tony for 40 years he's a vegan grower he said to me very recently quote you know I agree with you about the role of livestock in extensive farming systems definitely you can produce vegetables um in a vegan system tolly does it and my friend Peter Sega down the road does it but if you want to farm at scale you need a crop rotation and to turn that crop rotation into food that we can eat uh we need grazing livestock so George what is wrong with um Patrick's assessment that you had lots of small farms that were carbon negative and that were produced at scale why we couldn't accept that and have that wouldn't that actually be a better way of producing a sustainable environment sustainable farming well I don't want to dis um what Patrick does at all you know he's he's totally insincere and you know he's a lovely Guy and um he treats his cows very well and all the rest of it but I just don't buy it if he is indeed a carbon negative livestock Farm he's the first one on earth because there's been endless studies pure published in peer-reviewed journals looking at the claims of being carbon negative and none of them so far have withstood the scientific Pro process in fact there was a meta study published at the Oxford Martin School part of Oxford University called grazed and Confused looked at 300 papers and it found no instance anywhere on Earth of livestock Farmers even washing their own faces in terms of greenhouse gas emissions let alone lowering down extra carbon emissions and there's a fantastic amount and not in any way saying that this is what Patrick's doing because but you know there is a huge amount of jiggery pokery involved in in carbon calculations of what's going on under the soil and it's just far too easy to make things look right when they really aren't as for the idea of well we could produce more pasture fed me I mean already 51 of the UK is is producing pasture-fed meat and yet it produces scarcely any I did calculations for for sheep for Martin and lamb and estimated that 4 million hectares of the Uplands are being used to produce mutton and lamb in this country and yet it produces just one percent of our diet now four million hectares is the same amount of as all the grain growing in in in in the UK which produces a very substantial part of our diet it's a really profligate form of land use it's agricultural sprawl is what we're looking at and this has an enormous opportunity cost so if you look at the hills of Britain they are almost entirely bare there's scarcely any trees above 200 meters parts of inner London have more trees per hectare than those Hills have including in our national parks and people think that's natural it's not the altitudinal tree line in the UK is is well over a thousand meters everywhere except perhaps the top of the kangoms and one or two other very Rocky parts of the Highlands almost everywhere else there would be trees in the western half of Britain it would be dominated by temperate rainforests the reason there are no trees is primarily because sheep and cattle selectively browse out tree seedlings they're extremely nutritious they're the things they like to eat more than anything else and so unless you bring your numbers down to ridiculously low levels one sheet per 20 hectares no trees are going to grow and that is the most basic component of ecological regeneration trees returning to a formerly forested landscape you haven't got trees returning it's not regeneration it's not Regen narrative um and so you get all these terms banded around this is regenerative farming you know it's just like the word sustainable it gets just tacked on to anything you happen to be doing regenerative ranching formerly known as ranching um it's just just a word which people use and when you look at the actual wildlife which Farms even wonderful beautiful picture book Farms like Patrick's support it's a very thin selection of the wildlife that could otherwise be living there starting with the large Predators you know we don't have wolves and links in this country because livestock Farmers insist that they don't get reintroduced having wiped them out because they um compete with us for for food which is because they might eat some of the livestock and everywhere you go on Earth with only one or two very small exceptions large predators are driven um to Extinction or to the brink of Extinction at the behest of livestock Farmers you don't have the trees growing on these farms uh there was a another meta-analysis looking at a hundred papers um and found out that for all major ecological groups Guilds of of Wildlife um every single one suffers from having Livestock on the land except for detritophores animals which he'd done all the other groups suffer they all improve when you take the livestock off the land so this idea that you can square the circle you know we can have our beautiful picture of the cattle and the Sheep grazing on the land and you can have thriving ecosystems it exists in picture books it exists in in our image of farming but actually what the numbers show is something very different and and you know Patrick he paints a beautiful picture but the problem is we are dealing in pictures when we desperately need to be dealing in numbers we need to become food numerate and just as with climate issues you know we've slowly become climate numerate we've begun to do the maths we've begun to understand how much fossil fuels we need to leave in the ground if we were to avoid a certain amount of global heating the same has to happen with food otherwise we're cooked definitely reply in a minute but they've asked whether when you scale up your system um would people be able to eat the same amount of me are you expecting to them to have the same sort of diet or if you had your Farms rolled out across the countryside would they be eating a predominantly vegetable based diet with some of your cheese and sustainable uh the I mean the answer is all in our report feeding Britain from the ground up I would recommend people should download it from our website um and there's a lot of data in there and it's all very carefully researched and if I'm unable to trade statistics with George now I've got colleagues Robert Barber Richard young back at base camp who will do that because we care as much as George does about getting the data right so George raised a lot of issues um evidence of soil carbon outcomes that's important very important the French Minister Stefan lafoll at the cop 21 set a target of four per thousand catch per meal uh it was a challenge for all the countries of the world to use farming systems which built their soil carbon by point four percent per year now I'm sure George doubts uh the veracity of our recent audit and that's fair enough George but there's a growing body of evidence that shows that if you adopt holistic grazing practices as we have been doing here for the last five years you get a continuous soil carbon gain and the most surprising thing about our recent audit was because we've been keeping soil carbon records for now over 10 years is that some of the permanent pastures which have been now rotationally grazed with a mob grazing system was showing the highest soil carbon gain now obviously one swallow doesn't make a summer and that's it so it's a very important thing to test but there is a website called carbon Cowboys run by a man called Peter Bick who's a researcher at the University of Arizona State Arizona Arizona State University who's been doing some really amazing work on comparing holistic grazing Farms with their neighbors and it looks as though those Farms could achieve the four per thousand Target as set by at the cop 21. I think think we may be getting close to it here so it's really important that we we do more research in this area there's a growing body of research suggesting that you can build soil carbon really quite quickly and if we're right then that's huge and I'm sure George you would agree that if this evidence can be presented to you and you thought it was valid you would have to change your opinion about livestock well that's always the case with with everything if if I see the evidence I will change my opinion you know I'm entirely evidence-led on this issue which is why I turn from being an advocate of meat eating to a vegan can I just say George that's fantastic because I I think this is the beginning of a conversation between us where we really do need to look hard at the data and by the way I hope you'll know a chap called Pete Smith who's a grassland scientist at the University of Aberdeen and he's more with you and than with me about the potential of grassland to build soil carbon but I said to him when I recently saw him you know absence of evidence isn't necessarily evidence of absence sure and the truth is the grassland science Community have not been doing proper studies on this but we don't have an absence of evidence on this um in fact um it's it's really very clear you're quite right that some forms of ranching will sequester more carbon than other forms of ranching but not by comparison to the Natural ecosystems that would have been there before though you know you can offset finishes so so you can say okay in this field where there are X number of cows grades in a particular way there's more carbon than in this field where their y number of cows grades in a different way yeah that's totally a fine and and we can we can agree on that but what what the the climate change committee the government statutory climate change committee shows is that if you go from pasture to Woodland which is what what much of the land we're talking about would have supported you increase your carbon by 25 tons per hectare that's just your below ground carbon let alone the carbon in the trees above ground and this is massively greater than any of the sort of details but this this grazing system versus that grazing system absolutely George I just want to say I don't think that's true you don't think that what the CCC is true no I don't and by the way Lord dieben who's the chair of the climate change committee privately agrees with me yeah you see you're giving yourself a private anecdote you know someone said to me this someone said you know the the published figures Patrick are you know that that had you we have to meet certain scientific standards I know that if we're to to so I'm just going to move on but I think that we've also got on your side you really need to um explain what you're what you want instead so someone's put what are the true costs of producing healthy vegan-based products and the new scientists this week suggested that lab grow meat could be 25 times worse for the climate than beef sure so I mean I'm not happy yeah so my problem was I read your book and and I thought the first half was extraordinary I loved it I thought it was really tough brilliant and then when you started getting on to um talking about you know meat grown in factories and taking pills I sort of lost the plot because I felt like talking about taking pills honestly it's the sense that it didn't feel natural to me anymore 1930s sci-fi epic well it felt like that very much when you wrote it and I think when you talk about it we're not going to be able to eat the links we're not going to want to eat the Beavers what what are you expecting people to eat are they just going to be eating props but then also we will have then grown the crops on land so that's not all going to be Woodland is it no so well for I mean if you were to do what I broadly do which is to eat a large plant-based diet you would immediately greatly reduce your land footprint your greenhouse gas footprint your water footprint just about everything which is involved in in producing our our food you reduce those Footprints but and that's you know just where we are using plants as our substitutes now plants aren't great substitutes for animal products you know and and if you're not going to eat substitute animal products and I'm not remotely interested in Veggie sausages or or veggie burgers I don't I don't really like them I don't think they're very good yeah I prefer just to eat um nice plant-based meals there's lots of brilliant Indian meals and Thai meals and loads of wonderful things you can make entirely with plants which aren't pretending to be animal products but I realize that I'm in the minority here you know most people are going to want to eat something very much like animal products now for 12 000 years we've been farming multilateral multi-cellular organisms plants and animals and we pretty well push them to the absolute limits of their efficiency I mean I think you can say with a chicken you push it beyond the limits they can't even support their own weight anymore many of the chickens that people eat but we've scarcely begun to explore the farming of unicellular organisms and I think this is going to be a massive shift in human diet um and indeed in human civilization itself it's going to be the most important um environmental technology ever developed because if we do switch to to farming microbes instead of farming markets we can greatly beg your pun I said I'm farming microbes that's well of course of course that's right but but that's a highly inefficient way of doing it just finished what I'm saying and then you can come onto your lovely cows but you know so so growing microbes I mean you know on for instance if you use hydrogen or methanol as your feedstock you can reduce the land area by thousands of times you can reduce your water use massively your fertilizer use massively according to my calculations all the world's protein in an area the size of greater London not that I'm suggesting that that we grow it there but that would enable a massive rewilding and those and and by producing unicellular organisms you can produce far better substitutes for animal products than you Cannery plants but also I think it'll trigger a whole new Cuisine because just as the first people to domesticate a wild cow weren't thinking about Camembert there's a huge range of potential products that we can start making from microbes now I know this all sounds very sci-fi but it's not about pills I mean I the first I was the first person outside the lab to eat a pancake made entirely from bacteria it's delicious tasted just like a pancake it's but but we've got to start think looking big and at the moment we're in a situation with livestock where we're saying to people oh just stop eating it but we're not giving you any good substitutes it's a bit like saying stop burning fossil fuels but we don't have solar panels or windmills so what are you going to do just just get cold so so it we now have the potential and I think we should stop feeling afraid of it we should stop being so neophobic we should grasp the enormous scope for greatly reducing the environmental impacts of our diets so Ewan has put here without life celebrity return nutrients and organic matter to soils that are used to Growing grains so how does Patrick would say how how are you going to restore those soils that have been growing grains yeah well there's there's a huge amount of amount of Mythology around this you know people say well we're mimicking nature this is the way you do it when you look at mixed farming yields they're really small by comparison to other forms of grain growing or vegetable and fruit growing and so that it leads to considerable agricultural sprawl it means you have to use more land to produce a given amount of food George and then when you look up the use of manure as a fertilizer you find you're losing 37 more nitrogen than you do with artificial fertilizers which is why the soil Association rules allow you to import manure from conventional Farms using Harbor Bosch nitrogen but at one step removed George I on this Farm we are practicing farming and harmony with nature and the results are fantastic for carbon for nature for people and for good delicious food come and see and walk around the farm with me because honestly This Is 50 years of practice our yields are going up there they're not tiny yields we're growing crops in a rotation and to the point that Alice made if you're going to rebuild the devitalites and decarbonize soils after 60 or 70 years of continuous arable farming you need a crop rotation and typically 50 of that rotation will be fertility building of clover and grass and in order to turn that bit of the rotation into food that we can eat then you need ruminant animals and I am certain from my own observation here that the system works and builds fertility of soil and the methane emission of the rumors which have been part of an ancient carbon cycle can be more than an offset by the soil carbon gain I'm really confident about this I've never felt more positive about our relationship with nature which of which we are part and the animals that part and even in your wild ecosystems you're going to have deer you're going to have and we're the top predator and unless you have nails and many lynxes and you know you're going to have to control some of these animals and I agree with you about sheep of course there are too many sheep on the mountains there's so much inspiration that can be found from a growing number of farmers all over the world but including in the UK who are adopting these regenerative systems I agree with you there's no formal definition but I'm talking about a serious definition as we use in our feeding written report to define the practices I really think you should reassess your view about the the efficiency in ecological terms of the farming systems that I've been using for 50 years just come back briefly on this you know when you look at the numbers you find that in order to produce something which is in any way ecologically regenerative in other words for instance that the net wildlands as a state in Sussex very famous a lot of people say you know this reconciles um um The Return of wildlife with food production and it is a great example of what you call non-trophic rebuilding rewilding without Predators you know so it's missing some components but there's a lot coming back and it's brilliant but they produce 54 kilos of meat per hectare per year and if you were to turn the whole of Britain internet you would we would each have 75 um calories of meat per day and nothing else it's tiny tiny productivity well well actually I have read that report and it's so full of holes it makes a calendar look look watertight but anyway please can we can we trade with a public exchange of emails starting now your critique of feeding Britain because we put a lot I'd be happy to do that but I think I'm going to move on now because otherwise I'm just going to be trading facts and figures and disagreeing with each other so uh Joe has actually put a very question which isn't the vegan versus Omni more vulnerable argument a distraction from the bigger causes of environmental damage from transport and energy and plastic you know actually if you take someone like Patrick's Farm what he's doing could actually be beneficial um and it could be neutral you feel it that actually maybe mildly detrimental but it's nothing like flying or the plastic waste or um really just human consumption of goods that goes on outside food production well actually um livestock production produces more greenhouse gas emissions than All Transport um that there's a recent paper showing um it's uh I mean there's a range we can't be completely sure but at the lower part of the lower point of the range is still higher than that you've got it might be um it depends I mean if you were to roll that out um because of the methane and nitrous oxide produced by by his cattle um and you know he you know he makes these claims about soil carbon well we'll see but but because of those very powerful greenhouse gases um uh it could even be under Patrick system that that would continue we need to specifically if we were eating all your pancakes George wouldn't that would also be detrimental wouldn't it because we'd be having farming and factories and we would also it would probably be done to scale and you would also get these you know bath conglomerates so and it may not actually be particularly nutritious for people to eat either well you've mixed up about six different issues in one question there so it makes it rather hard to answer but if you're talking about greenhouse gas emissions much much lower from Precision fermentation than than than from any of the farming systems we're talking about um yes there's a real danger of corporate concentration as there is in all aspects of the food system and indeed all aspects of the commercial system and so as as everywhere antitrust laws should be strong and intellectual property rights should be weak and that requires political campaigning but at the moment 90 of the global grain trade is in the hands of four corporations do we ban the global grain trade well if we did billions would start no we've got to break up those corporations and we need to do that in the new food economy just as we need to do that in the old food economy and you think you could do that well I mean look it's within the human capacity to create political change but it doesn't happen passively we have to get together we have to campaign we have to mobilize to create the food system as well as all other aspects of the economic system that we want to see but that only comes about effectively through political action it's not going to come about through consumerism alone and we've become really passive when it comes to political action you know we allow the big corporations to walk all over us and that's that's a change it didn't used to be like that antitrust laws used to be strong intellectual property rights used to be weak but it's been reversed by the effectiveness of corporate lobbying and the ineffectiveness of citizens campaigning but just say we took Patrick's view um and Nick sinfield's asked this um how long would it take to rapidly translate that to a level of success across the countryside what kind of measures would you need because at the same time I mean both of them they're both are actually not at extremes but they're they're both very different views it really depends on how they're rolled out both of them doesn't it so it does depend on big business it does depend on that how how could yours be rolled out Patrick to make it work I do think it would need a large companies I think it'll need a large retailers I think it's a top-down and bottom-up transition and it will need a bit like as I mentioned the energy transition um that started with the the then German minister of Agriculture Renata kunas to introducing the freedom tariffs which essentially taxed the fossil fuel companies uh to enable a small-scale renewable energy generation to be profitable and look where we've got to now it's more profitable to produce using renewable energy than it is uh using fossil fuels we need to get to that situation quite rapidly without with the agriculture land-based agriculture and I think we can we need to Finance the agricultural transition we need to create conditions where it's more profitable to farm the way we do than it is to form in an extractive way that means the application of the polluter pays principle it needs Banks insurance companies food companies and retailers yes and also governments to enter into a new collaborative scheme whereby we I would say it take it would take about a third increase in Farmer's income from where sustainable farmers are at the moment to make all Farmers think okay I'll go on this transition journey and society as a whole has to put that together and of course the criticism which is on the Today program this morning is food prices will go up well I'm sure you'll agree with this George we currently have dishonest food prices because the polluter isn't paying we've got hidden costs of food which are going into climate change damaging Public Health polluting Rivers yes the wire is an absolute disgrace and all those Mega dairy farms should be banned immediately so government can play a role and as we saw during the recent Ukraine conflict when Energy prices went up the chancellor stepped in and he gave us all money to make sure that we didn't get into energy poverty we need to do the same with food if that becomes necessary so it's a great Coalition of different people including small farmers and then right up to the big food companies operating together in an unprecedented way because basically we've got no choice unless we get our foods and farming systems in harmony with nature not causing climate change not threatening the six Extinction we will not have a habitable planet the thing is that I'm you know all that is great but if we were to reduce meat eating to the point at which it was in any way compatible with a habitable planet you know which means a tiny tiny proportion of the amount of animal products that we eat today it really would be the case that only the rich would eat it because it would become honestly that's not true ability now well how could it not be true I mean I think you're I think I'm a bit older than you but I'm old enough to remember during the 50s and 60s when I was a boy we had chicken once a month it was a very expensive treat we celebrated it and that was right because ecologically a ton of grain is very expensive to produce we didn't have industrial production then and so the staple meat was grass-fed and mainly grass-fed leaf and lamb we need to go forward to that situation again and it will be it will be its true price we shouldn't fool ourselves and the food prices only the world's richer people could eat it now you look back to your childhood and say well you know we weren't that rich you probably by comparison to the global average you were probably extremely rich you're a farmers you know how how would you not be rich by comparison to you here which feeds into this which is from an anonymous attendee but it says eating well as a vegan is actually a challenge for time poor people how can we vegans avoid unhealthy ultra-processed expensive food which contains additives preservatives and high levels of salt and sugar while maintaining a nutritious and wholesome food-based diet this is absolutely true um and I don't deny that at all because at the moment um the products are really poor either you need to have enough time and the cooking skills and the kitchen and the pots and pans to produce your own food um in which case you can make really great vegan meals or you're going to be paying a lot of money for not very good products and that needs massively to improve and this is one of the reasons why I'm so enthusiastic about this unicellular one cell Revolution because it can produce much more cheaply with much less processing much less need to sort of strip out all the plant secondary metabolites in order to make something more like an animal product and and you can you know I mean that that pancake I ate came straight out of the vat the flower just it was just this golden colored flower coming straight out of the vat 100 bacteria we had to mix it with a bit of wheat flour to bring down the protein and and fat content otherwise we would have made an omelette instead um it didn't require any processing you know but plant-based products require a lot of processing because they're so dissimilar to animal-based products and the the protein content is much lower um they they they're tangled up with all these plant secondary compounds which are defensive compounds there's loads of unicellular organisms which don't have any in there so and and ultimately this is going to be decided on price you know we these debates are great we can use moral suasion that's not what's going to sway most people it's going to be are we can we produce a really healthy cheaper product with a far lower environmental impact which people are going to want to eat and at the moment it has to be said most plant-based products have failed to do that but what about the lab mixed products can do much better we're not talking about lab meat here we're not talking about cultured meat that's the dead Precision protein Precision fermentation yeah yeah well look I'm going to condition fermentation in the rumors of the cows and making cheese and it's working and it's produced it's building soil carbon and it's coexisting with an abundance of biodiversity what's wrong massive at a massive land cost and so it's it's a huge issue which is always you asked me a question you asked me a question let me answer it um you know you were talking about the polluter phase principle which I'm very much in favor of you're quite right it's absolutely essential but you know included in that has got to be this crucial environmental metric how much land are you using and what are the opportunity costs of that land use what ecosystems would that land be supporting how much carbon would those ecosystems be absorbing if you weren't using it in this very extensive agricultural sprawling way using a lot of land to produce not very much and and if we were to incorporate those costs your system wouldn't come out nearly as well as you like to imagine it would so George can I just ask you one other issue um which is who would be looking after your land if you rewildered it and you know across Britain who would own it now would it be owned by large landowners which at the moment is the people who are wild intend to be the people with the money yeah so there's there's two models there's two sort of major models of rewilding at the moment one is I call it aristocratic rewilding which I'm not so keen on the other is community rewilding like the Langan Moore trust which had bought their own land the communities bought it or trees for life which has brought land through public subscription um I mean it's you know it doesn't necessarily change the land holding model and in fact you can we're in a great position to create a a just transition here because there would be no extensive livestock production at all in this country if it weren't for public subsidies you know we're paying the money which keeps those animals on the land and prevents a wild ecosystems from from being restored it's completely perverse but we could pay the same money um two farmers to say do the opposite you know and let you know we'll pay you to bring back the wild ecosystems to re-wiggle the rivers to do all the things which which draw down Carbon on a vast scale and have a much richer ecosystem defending our bigger life support systems which keep everything going but I suggest with Patrick you probably feel that you are feeding the country that that's part of your purpose it's it's looking after the land but also feeling that you're giving something to the country isn't it that's what farmers do feel yes I feel that I think the farm a healthy Farm is an ecosystem healthy ecosystem we have one here it's not unique but I feel so sure deeply sure that if George if you came and had a look around this Farm today you would be blown away by the beauty of it by the fact that we are working the land in harmony with nature we're producing a surprising amount of food 30 or 40 tons of cheese a year lots of milk and meat as I mentioned earlier and we are doing this it's not a sprawling operation it's it's actually quite efficient but at the same time there's this amazing atmosphere of nature which permeates just about every corner of the farm and I just think I don't want I don't want to trade stats with you George I care about science but I'd like you to come here and I think we should we should film ourselves going around and have a positive conversation because I think that for as long as you and I argue about these things we're not going to move forward to where we both agree we need to be which is Humanity living in harmony with the natural world and I believe we can do it based on the principles we've used here for for five decades well uh thank you Patrick I mean next time I'm in your part of the world I'd love to come I'm always visiting Farms um I I'm always learning from them um I love doing so but we also have to see the bigger picture we have to look at the numbers because what you have to see is what you're not seeing in any one place that's what we mean when we talk about ecological opportunity costs it's like you know we're seeing what is here and it can appeal to the eye very much so because it chimes with those palmyard storybooks it chimes with the Pastoral poetry it chimes with the Old Testament and with the New Testament with all that thousands of years of imagery but what we're not seeing which very often are the things which have been demonized by our culture the wolf the links the deep dark forest all those things also to an ecologist to the eye of an ecologist have a tremendous beauty of their own and so we can trade Aesthetics but that actually doesn't take us very far we also have to be aware of what the science is saying and of what the numbers are saying we'll have to wrap up there and I think we're going to ask people to vote again and see whether anyone has changed their mind so if you could all vote now you have a couple of minutes and while you are voting so we can see what the um answer is it says host and panelists cannot vote um I'll ask you just a couple of final questions really just summing up um George do you think this is going to happen in your lifetime at all or is it actually uh just a pipe dream and and do you feel when you look at it do you think Britain would look more beautiful in the traditional sense would it look completely different under your system so um more beautiful than what I mean we're facing you know we are facing a sixth great Extinction you know we're we're facing the collapse of Earth Systems and it's very hard to imagine what that looks like um you can see it in the Rocks when it's happened before you know and you're talking about you know just ecosystems disappearing soil disappearing in global circulation systems stopping the planet simply becoming uninhabitable and that will include Britain if we don't make very very drastic and rapid changes so you know I'm deeply fearful for the future if things do remain the same if we do follow these sort of trajectories of well let's just carry on a bit as we are and tweak it a little bit and and have a bit more livestock and a bit more of this we have to make huge drastic changes just as we do in energy just as we do in every aspect of the economy or we're not going to get through this Century now my lifetime won't extend very much further into this Century I turned 60 recently you know um but you know even now we're beginning to see drastic impacts and a lot of those far more than we know are being driven by our diet and that is primarily driven by our our eating of animals Patrick how would you sum up just to try and convince people to have Farms like yours well it's so much I agree with about what George just said and I came here 50 years ago as a back to the Lander from London it was a hippie commune and after 50 years I'm deeply convinced that the system of food production that we've developed here could be applied nationally that's our feeding Britain report but also as appropriate to every country in the world and I think that there is a growing awareness amongst especially young people that this change is possible that it is needed and that I'm convinced it's going to happen so I don't feel pessimistic and the main reason I don't feel pessimistic is from my own practical experience here on this Farm I think there's huge cause for optimism and I just want to embrace George I don't want to fight him I just don't think we need this sort of combative exchanges I I don't really feel I've even done Justice if I absolutely honest during this exchange I just know some deep place inside myself that this change can happen and if we if we collaborate and talk to each other in a new spirit I think we can make it happen quite quickly thank you both very much and we have got now the final vote which is 31 now agree and 53 disagree so um I would say that uh it's the undecideds that have really changed so you have swung a few people George as has Patrick I think we only have 16 undecided so both of you have been fantastic persuasive and you both I think your views are so much better than what we have now but I think either option uh to me is just so measurably uh more impressive than anything we're seeing or we're seeing out of defra so thank you both very much um and I do hope that Georgie goes to the farm and look at Patrick's Farm uh Patrick comes eats one of all um pancakes at some stage um good luck with that all right thank you all very much and thank you very much for joining and thank you so much for all the questions which were fascinating um and for the voting which shows that more people are gradually being persuaded to go vegan

Channel: Intelligence Squared

Views: 7,878

Keywords: intelligence squared, debate, intelligence squared debate, top debates, best debates, most interesting debates, intelligence2, intelligencesquared, iq2, iq2 debate, iq squared, Intelligence Squared +, IntelligenceSquared, Intelligence squared plus, IntelligenceSquaredPlus, IntelligenceSquared+, intelligencesquaredplus, intelligencesquared+, Should we all go vegan, veganism, vegan, vegan based diet, health and nutrition, debate competition, debate we should all go vegan, george monbiot talk

Id: ji43ZXp7gkE

Length: 60min 57sec (3657 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 29 2023