If you want to save the planet don’t go vegan — slam in the lamb instead

This isn’t another column saying that the veganism thing is overblown and that I enjoyed cooking a steak the other night, although I did (very rare, in both senses, since it came from pocket-sized rare-breed Dexter beef I buy direct from a Derbyshire farmer). I like eating meat. I can understand why some people don’t. Sometimes I just steam a bit of rice and I like that, too.

But turning vegan isn’t going to save the world on its own. How we produce our food matters a lot, as the Committee on Climate Change argued in an intelligent and important report this week. But that applies to industrial vegan products as much as it does to greasy takeaway chicken.

Take soya beans. You’ll eat a lot of them, even if you don’t realise it. They are in all sorts of foods, from cakes to curries, and animal feeds. Demand for processed vegetarian and vegan products is adding to the already massive market. So it’s no surprise that English farmers are being encouraged to grow the beans, although it’s hard to compete with estates carved out of the Amazon rainforest.

But big fields of boring soya aren’t good for the environment just because they are not meat-based. “Spray broad-leaved weeds with post-emergence herbicide,” one UK seed supplier advises soya farmers, adding there should be “possible inclusion of a fungicide with this… apply a graminicide two weeks later… [and] a dessicant prior to harvest”.

The climate committee’s report doesn’t talk about the spread of soya, but it does say we should waste less food, eat less meat and use land better to store carbon. That’s right.

I wish the report had been as clear about where the meat we will still eat should come from. In this country it rains a lot and grass grows fast. That’s why we’re good at producing outdoor meat, which is healthy if you don’t eat too much, and good for nature, too, if farmers don’t cause overgrazing and we don’t waste it.

It’s a backward step for the environment if you stop eating beef and lamb and switch to chicken instead (which is mostly factory-produced and often fed imported soya), or tins of tuna stripped from the sea. But that is what’s happening: last year home deliveries of cheap chicken meals went up by 37 per cent.

What can farmers do to win back our trust? The answer could lie in a law going through the House of Commons. A week from today, at 11pm, we’re leaving the EU. If you try to write a list of good things that might happen because of Brexit it will probably be quite short, but at the top you should put a better way of farming. The Agriculture Bill aims to replace the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, which pays people who own land regardless of how they farm it, with a new system that aims to put the environment first.

Some of the detail is still to be filled in, and political decisions could mess things up if, for instance, farmers with huge fields, little wildlife and damaged soil (the sort who might decide to get into growing soya beans) demand they still get payments from the State without doing anything to restore nature.

But last week the Government published the Bill and the signs are good. It managed a tricky double-act, getting a warm welcome from environmentalists while keeping farmers on board. The idea is the new system will pay people to do green things that don’t make them an immediate profit. We all benefit from more birdsong, cleaner rivers and a way of farming that stores carbon in the soil, so those are the things taxpayers should be funding.

If the new system works, it should start to reverse the loss of biodiversity which has happened in our countryside in the last half century, even as billions have been paid to farmers by taxpayers.

The detailed 2019 State of Nature report sets out the grim details. It says the area of crops treated with pesticides increased by 53 per cent between 1990 and 2010, for instance. It’s no wonder that most (although not all) bird and insect species have been in sharp decline (with the worst damage occurring in the Eighties).

We know how to do better. Not by stopping farmers farming, but by getting them to farm differently.

The new Bill asks them to look after the soil, for instance, rather than see it washed away when it is ploughed, or crushed by machinery and sprayed with chemicals so that it becomes a dead grey gloop. It supports rare breeds and environmental grazing, rather than mass production.

Lots of farmers want to be part of this. Others, who haven’t yet woken up to what’s coming, will go bust. It is possible to run big farms producing the food we need while making nature a part of them. It matters that small farms which produce meat in traditional, healthy ways don’t vanish, leaving us with no option other than industrial meat.

So what could go wrong? The Treasury could kill the new green system by slashing payments. And the US will demand we let in cheap, chemical-ridden meat and crops as part of a trade deal. If we give in, we’d end up wiping out any hope of farming here that tries to help nature, and we’d be left with worse food, too. Ministers say it won’t happen. Meanwhile, may I recommend the lamb chops?