Month: March 2021

Modern humans have a mind-boggling capacity to create complicated things. From bikes, cars and trains, to quantum computers that ‘think’ and learn for themselves. We are on the verge of combining robots with humans, and creating vaccines in record-breaking time.

Yet, we are the only species which has consciously and actively destroyed its own habitat. Today’s world is plagued with problems: Climate emergency, biodiversity collapse, viral pandemics, human trafficking, escalating conflict and mass migration all of which we tackle in ever more sophisticated ways. 

Are we so drunk on our masterful achievements that we no longer think we have to live by universal laws? Do we see ourselves as entirely outside and beyond nature? Natural law, no longer relevant, living in a world where all is out-sourced and out of sight?

Cheap food for example, is grown on intensively managed land where the fertility comes from fossil fuels, and the ‘pests,’ also known as ‘wildlife’, are killed with toxic chemicals. These intensive systems are fraught with destructive, direct and indirect consequences. 

Results are decoupled from problems, so costs are kept low for the polluter, the tab, picked up by the citizen, under the guise of seemingly disconnected issues. Issues such as: adapting to climate chaos; cleaning up ocean dead zones; pollinating by hand due to insect population collapse; the huge social and environmental cost of human migration due to an area half the size of the European Union, turning to desert each year. 

In human health, the outsourced costs are vast: Since 1990 global cancer rates have almost doubled; autoimmune rates skyrocket, coeliac disease alone increases up to 9% each year; a tenfold increase in obesity; and now in the UK 1 in 54 children have autism. Rampant viruses from covid 19 to swine flu sweep through the world population, the latter of which resulted in the slaughter of 10 million factory-farmed pigs.

I believe that the most significant challenge we face today is not climate change, world hunger or a killer virus – these are all symptoms – it’s our inability to understand and work with complexity or find the real root cause of an issue. 

There are approximately 370 million indigenous people in the world occupying or using up to 22% of the global land area, which is home to 80% of the world’s biological diversity. 

Indigenous cultures understand/understood complexity. They live/lived as part of their ecosystem, watching and learning from the patterns of nature; knowledge handed down, through storytelling, rituals and the guidance of elders. 

But this ancient wisdom is sadly all but gone. Meanwhile we worship the gods of economics and technology. Distracted by soundbites of a marketable world, a far cry from any universal truths. ‘Meat is murder’ takes just a second to say but several hours to debunk – and that’s if you can get anyone to listen!  

Getting to the root cause of a wicked problem requires the ability to see the complex, interconnected, ever-evolving picture; it takes time, patience, a willingness to learn and think critically.

Who’s paying for that new scientific study? Who is really benefiting most from that new wonder drug? Are we asking these critical questions?

So, where did it all go wrong?

During the ‘enlightenment,’ Rene Descartes mechanistic thinking – the idea that everything can be taken apart like a machine, became the predominant way of looking at the world. Applied to living systems, such as human health and natural ecosystems, this is frankly disastrous.

Living systems are complex, interwoven, self-organising and emergent. The ‘whole’ system has properties that cannot be understood by separating and studying them. 

But evolution continues and beyond ‘mechanos’ has emerged ‘systems thinking,’ a new, ‘holistic’ paradigm. A way of seeing the world, that really can solve our most pressing problems, be it in our inner ecosystems (our bodies), or our outer ecosystems (our farmland and wild spaces).  

It is time to say, ‘enough is enough’, to rebel intelligently and quietly by taking the time to develop your own capacity to see the whole picture. This is the age of complexity. A new set of skills are required to work alongside ‘specialists’ – the capacity to see the world as the living, complex intertwined system that it is. 

In this series of posts, I plan to cover a wide range of issues. In each example, I will show a problem and how systems thinking can help to solve it. I hope to illustrate how every separate issue from crop failures to cancer, is utterly connected because it is all one system.

Below is the first of these, a short video looking at the issue of intestinal parasites in livestock. In a mechanistic paradigm, these are treated with chemicals, which have a chain of destructive knock-on effects. Within a holistic paradigm, we show how we can deal with this problem in a different way.

So what do we stand for? What can you expect from us in terms of standards and assurance? 

P – Pasture for life. 

Cows and sheep should eat pasture and only pasture, that’s what they’re designed to do. Feeding grain to livestock has negative consequences for animal health, and brings with it many environmental concerns. 

So we are committed to 100% pasture fed, and to assure you of our commitment, we use the ‘Pasture for Life’ certification, for all our herbivore meats. This includes a tracks-traceability system. 

Our omnivore (poultry and pork) meats, will eat an appropriate diet for optimal digestion and nutrient requirements. We will choose the most sustainable option available to each farm, based on a sourcing primarily from local farms, then UK grown organic feeds, and lastly, only if necessary, imported organic feeds.

We will also be exploring, and funding projects to develop the genetics for livestock that can thrive on more natural, and sustainable diets.

R – Regenerating soils. 

The farmers that supply our meat, farm in a way that regenerates soils. In order to tackle climate change, with its resulting extremes of weather, we need to farm in a way that takes more carbon out of the atmosphere than it emits. By using regenerative practices, our grazing systems are actively sequestering carbon into stable forms that are locked into the soil. 

Farms supplying us are monitoring carbon sequestration so we can demonstrate over a five-year timescale, a net-negative trend. Farmers also use ‘Soil Mentor’ annually, to show that the soils’ physical structure is getting healthier. This is a practical and straightforward proxy indicator, to show that the soil is sequestering carbon. 

I – Improving ecosystem processes. 

While carbon is important, so are farming practices which enhance biodiversity, rehydrate landscapes and rebuild the soil food web, so minerals can be passed from healthy soils, to healthy animals, and regenerate the health of the people eating the meat. 

Farmers supplying us are trained to monitor their land for the effectiveness of their ecosystem processes. From noting species diversity, to doing infiltration tests and worm counts, we use several simple, but scientifically proven ways of monitoring for improvements in these ecosystem processes. 

The farms that supply us with meats never use artificial fertilisers or herbicides.

M – Mature Meat.

Our culture is sold on the idea that only meat from young animals is tender and tasty.  This is not true, in fact, some of the tastiest and most celebrated types of meat around the world, come from more mature animals. Before the war, these meats were traditionally eaten in the UK as well. 

This prejudice has led to the devaluing of perfectly prime protein, resulting in the long-distance transport of live animals to foreign countries for slaughter in abattoirs with lower standards than our own. 

Although younger animals may have a more tender texture and delicate flavour, older animals produce meat of a deep, rich flavour, and delicious texture if dry-aged on the bone.  

We have created a ‘Prime and Mature’ range to help celebrate this forgotten delicacy. All the meat from beef and sheep is dry-aged on the bone for optimal periods.

A – Animal Health.

The farmers that supply our meat are proactive with regards to the health of their livestock. Farmers always aim to prevent diseases, by designing farm systems that address the root cause of why livestock get sick. They do this by leveraging the power of the natural ecosystem processes. Healthy ecosystems support healthy animals. In this way we can significantly reduce the need for medical intervention.

The livestock on our supplying farms are never routinely treated with antibiotics. 

We give you assurance of this, because we personally work with each farmer to design a whole-farming-system livestock-health-plan, that addresses any recurring health issues.

L – Living Naturally.

We believe livestock should be able to express their natural behaviours. Cows and sheep should be grazing on pasture, chickens need to scratch in healthy soil, alive with invertebrates, and pigs need to be able to root and nest. 

The breeds of animals that our supply farmers choose, are appropriate for their climate, topography, and reflect the cultural heritage of the region. 

As meat-eaters, we have a great responsibility to ensure a quick and humane death for the animals that we eat. We work with a hub system to ensure livestock are transported only short distances to slaughter, and we aim to support small, local, family abattoirs where possible. The kill process is quick and appropriate for the animal, conducted under veterinary supervision and will always include livestock being rendered unconscious before slaughter.