Apocalypse Cow: How Meat Killed the Planet

This programme contains scenes of hunting

We've just seen two deer, down there, by the river.

I know this is the right thing to do.

But I feel like I'm going to go and commit a murder.

I'm an environmental journalist, a campaigner

and a vegan who hates everything about shooting animals.

The deer are just down in the hollow.

But I'm armed with a radical plan...

..for preventing ecological catastrophe.

GUNSHOT

We all know the world is in trouble.

We're facing a man-made disaster of global scale.

And we keep being told how to fix it...

..but getting rid of plastic straws

or flying less isn't going to be enough.

There's a bigger culprit that hardly anyone is talking about.

The food industry is destroying the living world.

And it appears to be insatiable.

But the good news is that there could be a way out of this mess.

This film is about revolutionary ideas

that could do away with agriculture as we know it,

but still feed ten billion people,

and restore the natural world to create something extraordinary.

SHEEP BLEATS

We're often told on TV, in books and in poems,

what a green and pleasant land Britain is.

One that's been shaped by centuries of careful stewardship.

Which part of the country represents the nation's natural beauty

better than the Lake District?

In 2017, it was given World Heritage Status,

to protect its spectacular landscape.

But something crucial is missing from these hills.

A lot of people see this as a beautiful landscape,

and it's true that the shapes of the hills are stunning.

But to me, it's an ecological disaster zone.

These bare hills were once covered with a rich mosaic of trees,

of shrubs, all sorts of other plants, teeming with wild animals.

And now?

It's a sheep-wrecked desert.

Because they love eating tree seedlings,

sheep are highly effective at destroying rich living systems,

and the wildlife they harbour.

It's amazing how little there is up here.

There's rocks, there's grass, there's a bit of moss.

I've seen two birds the whole of the way up this mountain

and the trees stopped a few hundred metres down.

But what there is in abundance...

..is sheep poo.

We have nearly 23 million sheep in the UK.

Understandably, people worry about urban sprawl.

But agricultural sprawl is a far bigger cause of habitat destruction.

I've been working out exactly what it's doing to the UK

with the help of my scale model.

And the results are surprising.

This is our whole built environment -

all the cities, all the villages,

all the roads, all the airports,

just a bit over 5% is where we live and where we work.

It's amazing how small that is.

Now, the bit where we grow most of our food, arable farming -

all the cereals, the potatoes -

that's 19% of the United Kingdom.

What about our fruit and vegetables, horticulture?

Less than 1% of the total UK area.

Well, here's the astonishing thing.

51% of the surface of the UK

for grazing livestock and for growing grass.

While sheep and cattle use over half the country,

trees cover just over one tenth.

Trees are essential, both for flourishing, living systems,

and to prevent climate breakdown.

BIKE BELL PINGS

In my local botanical gardens,

I'm meeting one of Britain's leading ecologists.

Much of my early career was living in Brazil,

working in Brazil and making the case for the conservation

of the Amazon, in terms of carbon and climate and biodiversity.

And one almost constant refrain I heard was,

"How can you say anything about the future of the Amazon

"when you live in amongst the most deforested landscapes on Earth?"

Britain was once covered with trees,

but it's been farmed so extensively, and for so long,

that we've forgotten how rich our ecosystems once were.

Now, the rest of the world is catching up.

Agriculture today is by far

the biggest driver of global deforestation.

We need to absorb carbon from the atmosphere,

and the trees are the natural carbon sponges that exist all around us.

So, broadly speaking, this is a stick of wet carbon?

Yes, about 40% of this tree is carbon, the rest is water.

And more than that, when the tree sheds its leaves,

that carbon goes to the soil.

So, if we look beneath this tree, what we find is

this absolutely gorgeous, black, humic soil that's rich in carbon.

There's probably as much carbon in the soil here as in this trunk.

When carbon-absorbing trees are destroyed...

..and the soil around them ploughed,

greenhouse gases that have been locked away for centuries

are released into the atmosphere.

When you take into account the forests

and other ecosystems that would grow on land used by livestock...

..scientists estimate the carbon cost

of just four kilogrammes of beef is equivalent to taking a flight

from London to New York and back again.

So why do we allow this destructive cycle to continue?

I think it's because of the stories we're told.

It's amazing how many of the books that we read in earliest childhood

have the same theme. It's all about a farm.

But it's not really a farm that bears much relationship

to the farms I see these days.

It's a farm with one pig and one sheep and one cow,

one horse and one dog and one chicken.

And they're all living together in perfect harmony.

There's no discussion about why the animals might be on the farm

or what's going to happen to the animals that are on the farm.

It's this bucolic idyll which we all grow up with.

And we all come to believe, as children,

that this is what farming really is.

And it takes quite a lot to un-see that,

to recognise that actually something rather different is going on

in the countryside.

Perhaps our fictional view of farming explains

why we're prepared to pay so much for it.

UK livestock farms receive, on average,

£26,000 a year in subsidies.

This is taxpayers' money being used to prop up an industry

that's destroying our life support systems.

So why don't we pay farmers to use their land

to grow carbon-absorbing trees instead?

Let's ask one.

Now this is a bit more storybook.

Hello. How you doing? Hi, it's very nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you. Great, thanks for having us here. No problem.

This is the oldest part of the farm,

and this would've been the farm of my grandfather's era.

Abi Reader has 200 dairy cows

and she's Vice Chair of the National Farmers' Union's Welsh Milk Board.

Hello. They're a bit shy, aren't they?

Yeah, they get used to the sound of peoples' voice, I suppose. Yeah.

This farm has been in Abi's family for three generations.

When you're looking at your cows like this, what do you feel, Abi?

They are my father, they're my grandfather.

They're, you know, they're just... Yeah, they're brilliant.

It makes me really proud.

Sometimes you...forget that you're producing food.

I'm seeing these as great big, carbon-releasing machines,

who are taking up a load of land which could otherwise be used for

an amazing restoration of wildlife, for sucking carbon out of the air.

It just seems to me like an extravagance

that we can't afford any more.

Well, I'm a food industry, I'm very important for you.

I'm important for you three times a day to make sure that you survive.

Well, except I don't eat any of your products.

Shame on you.

I don't blame any farmer for being wary of a vegan on a mission.

My biggest problem with livestock farming is how inefficient it is.

Remember those 23 million sheep that occupy so much of the UK?

Well, they provide just over 1% of our food,

in terms of calories.

We keep being told we should switch to free-range meat,

as it's meant to be more environmentally friendly.

But the surprising truth is that

it causes more damage to the living world than indoor livestock farming,

because it uses much more land, mostly for pasture.

And even that pasture may not be enough to support the animals.

Abi's dairy cattle eat more grass and cereals than she can grow,

so she has to supplement their diet with imports.

So how much of this do you buy in every month, Abi?

A tonne a month... A tonne a month. ..of this, that's calf feed...

That's the calf feed, right. So what's that feed got in it, then?

A little bit of soya in there, a little bit of palm kernel.

The bulk is usually either wheat or barley. Hm.

Yeah, when I hear palm kernel being in that feed. Yeah.

I mean, that's oil palm, isn't it?

That chills me, because, you know,

this is possibly the most destructive crop on Earth,

the rainforests are being felled for it.

And to think that our milk is partly dependent on that business

is not a happy thought.

86% of the feed products in that tonne of food

is from food that cannot go into the human chain.

It's true that this animal feed isn't fit to be eaten by humans.

But it wouldn't have to be grown at all

if it were not for animal farming.

One third of the world's crops are being grown to feed to livestock.

Chew on this. 90% of all the soya humans consume

is embedded in fish, eggs, meat and dairy.

Behind almost every picture-postcard farm

is a huge, industrialised, global food chain.

I love cows. I really do.

You know, it's not that I've got in for the cows,

or for the farmers, for that matter.

It's just, the total impact of all these operations,

farm after farm after farm, nation after nation.

We just can't sustain it.

But no farmer wants to be told that their work is harming the planet.

So I could suddenly stop producing livestock,

and every livestock farmer in this country

could stop producing livestock, and we could re-wild it, happy days.

But if we're just left with our crop land,