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Could there be anything better than returning home to the smell of a rich and delicious shin beef casserole that has been slow cooking on the AGA into a gelatinous, rich, and sticky treat?

Yes.

Slowly cooking a brisket over an open fire on a camping holiday and serving it with pickled vegetables then eating it while watching the sun go down. 

Slow cooking is not just for wintertime, it is a great way to include a range of important nutrients in our diets at any time in the year. 

In our modern culture, we have on the whole left behind the culinary culture of slow-cooking meat – especially on the bone – and instead prefer to go for the easy and quick and lean meat such as steaks, chicken breasts, pork and lamb chops, and other pan-frying or grilling-friendly options – especially in summer.

This quick-cooking fits in with our fast lifestyles; many people don’t have a range cooker in their homes or a ‘wife’ at every stove. The ‘eat lean meat’ anti-fat propaganda runs deep too; many people opt for visibly ‘pretty’ and ‘clean’ cuts of meat because they consider them more healthy.

With this change of culture, we’ve lost the slow cooking skills which means we’re missing out on some of the most mouth-wateringly flavoursome parts of the animals available and missing out on incredibly important nutrients too.

Many of us who turn to eating an ancestral diet simply eat more and more meat. Not only does this raise many legitimate sustainability issues, it turns out that it’s actually really important to eat the full range of animal parts and not just the clean lean bits. This makes complete sense. Our genes have been moulded by our behaviours, and for hundreds of thousands of years we would have eaten the whole animal; our health depends on us continuing to honour our ‘hard wiring.’

In a diet that has a lot of ‘clean’, lean meat, a person will be ingesting large amounts of the amino acid methionine. It has been shown in studies that a diet high in methionine could cause a rise in plasma homocysteine. Homocysteine is used as an index of our susceptibility to disease. The great news is that if we eat enough glycine – found in offal, skin, and connective tissue – and get the ratios in better balance, this risk is negated.1

According to Catherine Shanahan, MD, quick cooked and overcooked muscle meat becomes ‘tough because the fat, protein, and sugar molecules have gotten tangled and fused together during a wild, heat-crazed chemical orgy. The result is a kind of tissue polymer that requires more work with a knife and more chewing as well as more time to digest. The worst part is so many of the nutrients are ruined.

In Denise Mingers’ wonderful and funny talk at the Ancestral Health Symposium in 2012, she explains that other cultures celebrate the ‘weird bits’ as the best cuts of the animal, using them for feasts and special occasions.³

When we fry or grill muscle meat and especially when we BBQ meat in summer it tends to char and burn – we like the ‘browned’ effect; it’s tasty. This process causes amino acids like creatine to react and form harmful compounds called heterocyclic amines (HAs). If the juices are allowed to drip and cause the flames to flare around the meat this creates another harmful compound polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). PAHs can result in DNA mutations after being metabolised by specific enzymes; when fed to animals these compounds have been shown to cause a range of cancers. This is very hard to study in people but is likely to translate to humans to some degree.⁴

When meat is cooked at lower temperatures, instead of a tangled mess of hard-to-digest amino acids, the long protein chains stay in orderly lines. The moisture in the meat allows the peptide bonds to be neatly ‘clipped’ into small peptide segments; this process is called hydrolytic cleavage. In a fantastic quirk of nature; these peptide segments fit neatly into our taste buds receptors, which are also tiny, and the food is perceived as ‘tastier’.

In fatty cuts of meat with connective tissue and skin, the water – maintained within slow cooking methods – gently teases out the family of molecules called glycosaminoglycans (GAGs). GAGs are long molecules but the slow cooking process reduces them into delicious ‘taste bud-sized’ sugars that taste great. Slow cooking makes meat taste better and also happens to be good for you!The GAGs you may be familiar with are glucosamine, chondroitin sulphate, and hyaluronic acid. These GAGs have become well established in helping with arthritic pain and improving joint health, but it’s important to realise when we are shelling out for these supplements that it’s the natural source of these (the collagen that turns into gelatine after cooking) that has been shown in studies to be most effective in combating joint issues – the supplements in isolation seem to be missing something. This is yet another example of where nature is ten steps ahead of science.⁵

Our grandparents often ate the cheaper cuts such as neck, shin, knuckles, head, shanks, and trotters from traditional breeds of animals reared on rich grasslands. These slow cooking recipes and techniques are part of our heritage for very good reasons – they really do taste great and are completely essential for our good health.

There are four significant amino acids found in collagen-rich slow cooking cuts: proline, glycine, glutamine, and alanine. These all have an important part to play in our health, but glutamine, especially when cooked with salt for a long time, produces a flavour now generally called ‘umami’, the fifth flavour. This umami flavour is what top chefs try to incorporate into dishes to send their diners’ taste buds into an orgasmic state. Umami has been used throughout history in traditional cooking; in some ancient healing systems such as Ayurveda the inclusion of a range of flavours is suggested as a way of ensuring you are getting the nutrients our bodies need.⁶

Lamb, hogget and mutton shoulder on the bone can make a delicious meal at any time of the year.

I think we will continue to learn that our bodies have the inherent ability to ‘taste’ what we should and shouldn’t eat for both improving our health and protecting us from danger. The problem we have as humans living in a modern world is that science has produced foods – artificial flavourings, for example – that ‘trick’ our taste buds and override this innate talent; essentially making healthy foods seem less flavoursome by comparison. We have sadly allowed our food growers to reduce our ‘range’ of foods and breeds of animals and plants down to commercial varieties bred for size, efficiency, and profitability instead of flavour and nutrition. This is one of the reasons your food is cheap, but at what cost?

Our grandparents often ate the cheaper cuts such as the neck, shin, knuckles, head, shanks, and trotters from traditional breeds of animals reared on rich grasslands. These slow cooking recipes and techniques are part of our heritage for very good reasons – they really do taste great and are completely essential for our good health.

Part 3: The Water Cycle & the Travesty of Bare Soil

In Part 1 of this series we talked about the soil carbon sponge, which is central to what we are going to explore here, through the water cycle. So for a very quick recap: soil with no organic matter is just dusty dirt, which holds very little water and is highly susceptible to desertification. However soil containing organic matter (largely made up of carbon), which gets incorporated into the soil structure by the myriad of organisms present in healthy soil, becomes like a sponge; springy in texture, able to hold vast quantities of water and support endless healthy growth of plants. 

Water

The water cycle is rarely part of the climate debate, which is strange because it drives the heat dynamics of our planet. Water itself is the most significant greenhouse gas, so it is essential that we cultivate a holistic perspective here, we can’t simply see things as good or bad; without the greenhouse effect we would not have a habitable planet, and water acts just as much to cool the planet as it does to warm it. Everything is about balance, and our climate, something nature has finely tuned over millions of years, is now out of balance. We are locked into global warming and it is essential we explore how best to naturally cool our planet. 

Anthropogenic climate change is not just about the addition of ‘ancient’ carbon to the system, but also about the ways in which management of land affects the water cycle, and therefore the heat dynamics of our planet.

Incidental Radiation

The sun shines and warms the planet (incidental radiation), which absorbs 342 watts per m² of heat energy a year. Before climate change, the same amount was reflected back and lost into space, but due to our out of balance greenhouse effect, the energy reflected back into space is just 339w/m², a shortfall of 3w/m², which is creating global warming. 

Latent Heat Flux

When the sun shines onto the earth, the heat causes evaporation of water from the soil and bodies of water, and evapotranspiration from plants and trees. For each gram of water that transpires from plants and trees up to 590 calories of heat energy is removed with it, cooling the earth’s surface in the process. 24% of incidental radiation is sent back into space through this process.

The micro-water droplets created in the latent heat flux rise up to form high albedo clouds. These clouds then reflect about 1/3 of incidental radiation back out into space. It used to be the case that around 50% of the earth was covered by clouds at any one time, but cloud cover is reducing, due to the disruption that land management is causing in the water cycle. If we could increase cloud cover by just 2% then we would mitigate the 3w/m² heating. 

So it is easy to see why geo-engineering and cloud seeding is such a temptation to ‘the powers that be’ in an attempt to halt run-away climate change. But these ‘sticking plaster’ approaches are fraught with problems and don’t address the root-cause of the problem, which could be far more safely and effectively addressed by restoring the earth’s hydrological cycles.

Heat Hazes, Clouds and Rain

Desertification and bare soils mean the amount of dust in the atmosphere is increasing, as are smogs from fossil fuel combustion (especially in Asia), plus the smoke from forest fires around the world. All these particulates are known as aerosols. 

Aerosols in the atmosphere attract the micro-water droplets creating a heat haze, raising humidity and heat, but never aggregating into clouds. These heat hazes contribute to higher ground temperatures. The ‘Asian Brown Cloud’ is an example of one of these hazes. It hangs over eastern China and southern Asia each year from November to May, and is associated with a decrease in India’s summer monsoon over the last 100 years. 

The reason these hazes persist is because such aerosols cannot seed rain clouds. There are in fact only three natural factors that can aggregate micro-water droplets into clouds and rain. These are: Ice Crystals – which form at colder higher altitudes, Salt Crystals – in water evaporated from the oceans, and Bacteria – which are present in the water transpired from plants and trees. Yes, forests do create their own rain due to these bacteria. In the Amazon five times as much rain falls as leaves via its rivers as a result. 

Re-radiation

The focus of climate science is almost exclusively on carbon dioxide, and more recently methane and nitrous oxide. However the re-radiation of heat from the earth surface, and the failure of global water cycles is less talked about. Perhaps because these things are difficult to quantify and therefore model. 

Re-radiation is the heat created and then radiated back out, by any surface exposed to the rays of the sun. When sunlight hits plant leaves, as we have already discussed, those leaves transpire water, creating the latent heat flux, which cools the surface of the planet and sends the radiation back into space. With dense leaf cover, the soil beneath the plants rarely rises above 20 degrees centigrade. 

However when the sun’s rays hit bare ground, the surface can reach 60+ degrees centigrade, and there is no sustainable, natural function, other than plant transpiration, that can remove that heat energy back to space and cool the surface. 

The re-radiation from bare soils therefore, is a massive factor in the warming of our planet, because re-radiation from bare ground is exponential in nature. Temperature to the power of 4, which is temperature x temperature x temperature x temperature. Re-radiation from bare ground therefore, is super-heating the planet. 

Bare soils, deserts and desertifying lands end up with heat domes (high-pressure weather systems) parking over them and not shifting. Low pressure cannot displace high pressure, so these places get hotter and hotter. The only thing that can change this situation is the return of plant cover to the land and the rebuilding of the carbon soil sponge, which creates a soil water reservoir, essential to the function of that water cycle.

Bare Soil Agri-culture

Intensive agriculture is largely associated with mono-crop systems, because they are still seen by most farmers as the most efficient way to produce food. But these systems are efficient only under partially calculated costs, and subsidised inputs. With the UN warning that we have less than 60 harvests left if we carry on producing food in this way, then the way we measure efficiency and productivity needs to become more holistic, and include all the collateral costs to the environment and human health. 

Such intensive systems not only kill living soils and oxidise carbon into the atmosphere, but also leave bare soils, often for large parts of the year. 

Millions of hectares of olive trees throughout Europe for example, are managed with bare soil underneath. Instead, understory meadows could be managed by grazing animals like sheep. This would reestablish living soils and sequester carbon which would benefit the health and productivity of the trees. But perhaps most importantly this plant cover would help cool the planet and halt the desertification of Europe’s mediterranean regions. 

Regenerative Grassland Management

There are farmers around the world doing extraordinary things using the principles of regenerative agriculture using livestock, our mobile bio-digesters, to rehabilitate degraded lands. For us this is perhaps the most hope-generating story of our time. The re-greening desertifying areas, the rehydrating of drylands, where rivers once more flow. With no fancy engineering, but simply the use of animals to re-establish living soils and the soil carbon sponge. Below is a short film from Kiss the Ground about this:

Conclusion

In this series on Climate Change and Agriculture we began with the soil carbon sponge and we are ending with it, and rightly so, for it is the key to unlocking us from the multiple crises of climate change, biodiversity loss and extreme weather events. All of these are, at least in part, a symptom of the loss of healthy living soils.

Finally The Soil Carbon Sponge:

• sequesters carbon from the atmosphere.
• requires herbivores, especially in the drylands, to create it.
• is the foundation of living, biodiverse soils, which in turn are the foundation of above-ground biodiversity. 
• the mechanism through which soils are able to hold water.
• is central to production of nutrient dense foods.
• if re-established can reverse desertification.
• is critical to mitigate both flood and drought events.
• results in the return of clean healthy rivers, because rapid runoff becomes a thing of the past.
• is the foundational aspect of the water cycle, helping water driving planetary cooling rather than heating.
• makes soil smell good.

References

Walter Jehne on the Soil Carbon Sponge and the Water Cycle (much of this final article is taken from Walter’s inspiring work)

When telling people that I sell grass fed meat a common response is; ‘isn’t all UK beef grass fed? They tend to get this look…..

In the UK we have a wide diversity of livestock farms that have a wide range of rearing systems and we do indeed have a lot of grass. 

It is true that in the UK, we may not see the huge concentrated animal feeding operations of the USA. However, the vast majority of farms do use grains in one form or another to ‘finish’ their cattle, lambs and mutton ewes.

Why does that matter?

We cover why eating grass fed meat makes so much sense elsewhere in great detail but in short the main reasons are;

It’s good for the environment. Grass-fed cattle grazed in regenerative systems promote the sequestration of carbon from the atmosphere into the soil. Buy not using grains farmers avoid using cereals and soya sourced from unsustainable farming systems.

It’s good for the animals.  Cattle are designed to eat pasture and graze in open fields. Pasture/grass-fed livestock tend to have higher welfare and spend their time doing what cows are supposed to do. Their mixed natural diet promotes robust health so grass-fed animals suffer from less disease and require fewer health interventions including the need for antibiotics. 

It’s better for your health. Grass fed meat has a healthy fat profile, is a powerhouse of nutrients and even contains concentrations of beneficial plant nutrients! 

There are no specific labelling laws governing the term grass-fed so the term is widely used to cover a broad spectrum of animal rearing systems. ‘Grass-fed could be used to cover animals who have had a very short time on pasture and are then cereal fed until slaughter, right through to those who are fortunate enough to graze naturally for the whole of their lives.

I am not suggesting that farmers who use grains are ‘bad’, or even that the taste or texture of the meat they are producing is poor, but, it certainly does not guarantee that the nutrient density is what we expect from ‘grass-fed’ meat.

It seems that the critical period for the animals to be grass-fed is in the 80-90 days prior to slaughter which would fall within most UK livestock’s ‘finishing’ period – when farmers are fattening the animals in order to get a good confirmation of carcass and a favourable price. The majority of UK farms will feed cereals for this period, and many will bring the animals indoors in order to do this efficiently.

An Australian study into the ‘Effect of feeding systems on omega-3 fatty acids, conjugated linoleic acid and trans fatty acids in Australian beef cuts: potential impact on human health’ (Ponnampalam, E.N., 2006), showed that all of the previously gained omega-3 and conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) of grass-fed beef was destroyed in just 80 days of grain feeding to the degree that it no longer qualified as being a meaningful dietary source by the New Zealand and Australian Food Standards Agency.

There are very few farmers in the UK finishing their animals exclusively on pasture which includes nutrient-dense pasture crops like red clover, lucerne and a variety of wildflowers along with grass.

The only recognised certification program for ‘grass-fed or ‘pasture-fed’ meat is operated by the Pasture-Fed Livestock Association and they are working hard to get more farmers on board to sell under their label ‘pasture for life’. The chances are if it is not certified your local farmer will, in fact, be finishing his ‘local grass-fed meat’ on grains!

It’s also worth noting that the term ‘grass-fed’ is really only relevant to ruminant animals that would naturally have a pasture-based diet. Omnivores such as fowl and pigs can eat some grass and love to scratch and root in the pasture, however, it is very unlikely these animals will be grass-finished at any commercial scale in the UK.

So really the term ‘grass-fed’ is pretty meaningless unless you dig a bit deeper. Unfortunately, the widespread use of the term ‘grass-fed’ also undermines the efforts of those trying to encourage more farmers to exclusively rear on grass. Rearing animals purely on pasture is an incredibly sustainable way to produce meat but it takes a deep understanding of organic farming, eco-systems and holistic animal health management.

If you want to be sure of the potential nutrient quality of the meat you are buying then you need to buy ‘pasture for life’ certified meat, or ask the following questions of your supplier:

Are the animals grazed outside on pasture?

Do the animals receive ANY grains?

What feed is used to ‘finish’ the livestock?

The answer to these questions should give you some insight into where, on the wide scale of nutrient quality, your ‘grass-fed meat’ may fall.

I am delighted to say that Primal Meats only sells beef and lamb that is Pasture for life certified. We work with a small and trusted group of farmers who rear their animals to the very highest standards of welfare and have farming systems that positively impact the planet.

We have a superb range of pasture for life certified beef cuts available all year round – something that is extremely hard to achieve – and at times also offer ‘cow shares’ where you can buy a share in a specific animal reared on a very special farm.

Check out our beef selection HERE.

Part Two: Methane & The Meat Tax

In Part 1 of this series, we established the importance of distinguishing between ‘ancient’ and ‘current’ carbon when considering whether a farming system is contributing to an overall rise in atmospheric carbon. It is always essential to ask, is the system being pumped full of ‘ancient carbon’ or, as with 100% grass-fed systems, does it rely largely on ‘current carbon’ being cycled between the atmosphere and farm ecosystem? 

We also look at the vital role of healthy grasslands in drawing down carbon, and locking it into the soil. Grazing lands across the world, managed under regenerative principles, is the best available option for rapid global carbon sequestration.

Meat Tax and Measuring Methane

Any animal gut is an anaerobic-digester, all of which produce methane. We don’t have to go too far back in history to find atmospheric methane (CH₄) stable at 700 parts per billion, which was the case for at least 10 million years, when there were many millions of large herbivores on the planet. 

The science and thinking that has led to the demonisation of meat as contributor to climate change, is not just to do with the lack of understanding the role grazing animals play in cycling carbon into the soil; and the lack of distinction between ‘ancient’ and ‘current’ carbon; but also the outdated techniques being used to measure global warming gases. 

Semantics too are essential in this discussion, nothing is simple, linear, good or bad. We can’t talk about Carbon Dioxide (CO₂) and the greenhouse effect being bad, because we have depended on the greenhouse effect for millions of years to provide us with a warm stable climate. 

Up until recently the scientific world has used Global Warming Potential 100 (GWP100) as its benchmark measure for the gases that create the greenhouse effect. GWP100 means that any gas, be it CO₂ from a power station burning fossil fuels, or methane from cows, within an intensive or indeed grass-fed system, are measured by simply working out what their ‘Carbon Dioxide Equivalence’ in warming potential is, then extrapolates that over 100 years. Methane is understood to have 28x the warm equivalence of CO₂, so is calculated as 28 x 100. 

However the problem is, this does not account for the fact that Methane is a short lived gas, and in fact will break down within a decade. Whereas the CO₂ from a coal fired power station, will perpetuate in the atmosphere for 1-2 centuries. 

The misleading nature of GWP100 has led to understandable alarm about the potential contribution that livestock make to climate change. But this is the red-herring that detracts from the fact that the two biggest causal factors with climate change are the combustion of fossil fuels and the degeneration and desertification of land across the world, the latter of which we will cover more in part three. 

Back to measuring methane, researchers at Oxford University, have recently created Global Warming Potential * (GWP*), which does take into account the lifespan of gases, and the results give a much closer correlation to what is actually being measured in the atmosphere. This means that ‘pollutants’ can now be linked far more accurately to their actual warming potential. Figure 1. show the comparison of GWP100 and GWP* against atmospheric measurements. It is clear that GWP* is far more accurate.

Meat Tax

There is a strong drive in Britain and Europe to introduce a meat tax, to take into account the methane contribution made by the meat industry. Our concern is that this does not distinguish between different production systems, those that are pump-primed with ‘ancient carbon’ and those that are not. Intensive beef systems use huge amounts of fossil carbon in their systems.

The meat tax will detract from the essential role played by herbivores in helping grasslands sequester massive amounts of carbon from the atmosphere. 100% grass-fed systems would do far more to offset global heating, than the methane the animals in such a system produce. But economics is always driving farm production towards intensification, and a meat tax will be no different, as farmers battle for ever decreasing profit margins.

Upsurge in Methane

Since 2007 there has been a global upsurge in Methane, and scientists still don’t fully understand where it is coming from. For one thing it turns out that extraction and leakage of fossil fuels, in particular in natural gas and shale extraction, contributes far more methane to the atmosphere than previously understood. 

It is in fact possible to distinguish between methane that comes from fossil sources and current biological activity because they vary in isotopes concentrations. What is baffling scientists is that there has been an upsurge in methane from biological activity, mostly in the tropics. This could be from a myriad of sources from the enteric bacteria in the intestines of animals, to increased bacterial activity in wetlands and rice paddies due to higher temperatures, to landfill sites and anaerobic lagoons of pig manure. 

Due to the urbanisation and increased wealth of global populations, there has been an increase in intensive meat production. But we can say with some confidence that enteric methane from livestock alone is not responsible for this rise in atmospheric methane, as the changes in livestock numbers through this reference period were gradual. Ruminant numbers have increased in less industrialised societies, and have stabilised or reduced in the industrial world. Cattle numbers saw their steepest global increase between 2000 and 2006, when methane levels were flat.Even though scientists are unsure of the source of increased atmospheric methane, all this focus of CO₂ and CH₄ means that the conversation about carbon sequestration by soils never gets to take the main stage. It is imperative that it does because with ever increasing temperatures we are seeing the rapid-thawing of permafrost in the arctic, which releases CO₂ and CH₄ as microbial activity kicks in. This source of atmospheric carbon, which will release ever more rapidly, possesses by far the greatest threat yet to global climate stability.

What happens to methane in the atmosphere?

Atmospheric methane levels are checked by hydroxyl radicals (OH), which are responsible for the short lifespan of CH₄. One of the key ways that OH forms is when atmospheric water droplets are exposed to sunlight. OH creates a chain reaction breaking methane down into water (H₂O) and CO₂, and cycling OH radicals back into the system. So OH radicals are the air-cleaner that keeps on giving.

Through evapotranspiration from leaves, a healthy pasture will produce 100x the OH radicals required to break down methane produced by the animals grazing that pasture. 

We know that healthy ecosystems support the OH cycle, what we don’t know so well is what the consequences of poor land management and desertification have on the atmosphere’s ability to clean itself. Could the loss of forests and healthy ecosystems be causing the atmosphere’s cleaning systems to falter and therefore atmospheric methane to increase?

Assessing the impact of land management is challenging at global level, due to the vastly different contexts, but it can be achieved effectively and objectively on a farm by farm basis.

Methodologies such as Ecological Outcome Verification (EOV), developed by the Savory institute, take a systems science approach to monitoring ecosystem health. EOV offers a way of measuring the complexity of nature, through empirical and tangible outcomes, which in turn provide the farmer with ongoing feedback from which to make better management decisions. EOV measures and trends key indicators of ecosystem function, which in aggregate, indicate positive or negative trends in the overall health of a landscape. Healthier landscapes = a healthier climate.

A word on Nitrous oxide (N₂O)

Nitrous oxide has also been under scrutiny in recent years for its role in climate warming. Nitrous oxide is 300x more potent than CO₂’s warming potential, and stays in the atmosphere for an average of 114 years, before being removed by a natural sink or destroyed through chemical reactions in the atmosphere. It is important that we look at this too, especially because its major source is from the land. 

Nitrous oxide has been heralded as another reason that we should introduce a meat tax, and while we are in total agreement that meat from industrial sources is a problem, this again is a tricky issue, because N₂O is part of the natural circulation of nitrogen between the atmosphere, plants, animals, and microorganisms that live in soil and water. Nitrogen takes on a variety of chemical forms throughout the nitrogen cycle, including N₂O. Natural emissions of N₂O are mainly from bacteria breaking down nitrogen in soils and the oceans. 

N₂O is removed from the atmosphere when it is absorbed by certain types of bacteria or destroyed by ultraviolet radiation or chemical reactions. But it is important to maintain things in context, agriculture in Europe, according to the European Environmental Agency, still only contributes 10% of global warming gases. 

If we look more closely at how N₂O is produced in farming, what is clear is that although it is a natural bi-product of biological processes, the use of chemical nitrogen fertiliser, the mis-management of animal manure (created in intensive systems), and poor soil management are the main drivers behind why N₂O emissions from agriculture have increased. Again, a shift to extensive, regenerative system would mitigate this rise, as well as drawing down CO₂ into the soil.

For every gram of excess (not taken up by plants) nitrogen fertiliser added to the soil, 30g of carbon is oxidised from the soil to the atmosphere in the processing of that nitrogen. 

Conclusion

• It is easy to use and misuse statistics to support any arguments when it comes to climate change. 
• Methane levels have increased alarmingly in the atmosphere, but this cannot be blamed on enteric methane from livestock. Of much more concern is the methane leakage from gas, and fracking industry, and the warming of the arctic where permafrosts are emitting CO₂ and CH₄ at increasing rates as the climate warms.
• If we focus on N₂O we become alarmed by the fact it has a far greater warming potential than CO₂, however it is still a small player in the bigger picture, and N₂O is a natural part of the nitrogen cycle, so can detract from more important issues. 
• If we take in the whole picture we can see that there are two primary casualties in climate change:
  • The use and leakage of fossil fuels. 
  • Poor land management creating bare soils – this topic will be the focus of part three where we will take an in-depth look at this through the water cycle. 
• It is essential that we disentangle regenerative agriculture from the climate change blame game, because it offers the greatest opportunity available for warming mitigation, through carbon drawdown into soil sinks.

References

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/overview-greenhouse-gases

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/pdfscache/1180.pdf

Methane & GWP

https://www.faifarms.com/podcasts/ruminant-methane-gwp-global-warming/

https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-a-new-way-to-assess-global-warming-potential-of-short-lived-pollutants

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41612-018-0026-8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwEToq05L2k

Meat Tax

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/nov/04/uk-health-professions-call-for-climate-tax-on-meat

Hydroxyl Radicals

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/144358/detergent-like-molecule-recycles-itself-in-atmosphere

http://acmg.seas.harvard.edu/people/faculty/djj/book/bookchap11.html

https://scitechdaily.com/researchers-clarify-recycling-mechanism-for-hydroxyl-radicals/

Rise in Methane

https://e360.yale.edu/features/methane_riddle_what_is_causing_the_rise_in_emissions

https://bg.copernicus.org/articles/16/3033/2019/

http://www.fao.org/3/y4252e/y4252e07a.htm#TopOfPage

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/146978/methane-emissions-continue-to-rise

https://www.wired.com/story/atmospheric-methane-levels-are-going-up-and-no-one-knows-why/

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2018GB006009

https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2785/unexpected-future-boost-of-methane-possible-from-arctic-permafrost/

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/arctic-thawing-ground-releasing-shocking-amount-dangerous-gases

https://lachefnet.wordpress.com/2018/05/04/ruminations-methane-math-and-context/

https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2013/12/beef-industry-money-affected-by-record-low-cattle-population/#.WuvYy6Qvy70

Nitrous Oxide

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/11092019/nitrous-oxide-climate-pollutant-explainer-greenhouse-gas-agriculture-livestock/

https://news.trust.org/item/20180918083629-d2wf0

http://www.icopal-noxite.co.uk/nox-problem/nox-pollution.aspx

https://www.aeroqual.com/meet-the-nitrogen-oxide-family

https://civileats.com/2019/09/19/the-greenhouse-gas-no-ones-talking-about-nitrous-oxide-on-farms-explained/

https://news.berkeley.edu/2012/04/02/fertilizer-use-responsible-for-increase-in-nitrous-oxide-in-atmosphere/

https://acsess.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.2134/csa2017.62.0413

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/7/2/024005/meta

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/9/10/105012/meta

Soil carbon and water cycle

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3Z430GFyZg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=123y7jDdbfY

Primal Meats is more than a meat company; we represent a movement for regenerating human and ecological health.

What we choose to eat every day is probably the most crucial decision we can make. Every ‘micro’ choice compounds into either a healthy life, able to do the things we want or a life plagued by disease and disability.

In Dr Mark Hyman’s excellent new book, the ‘Pegan Diet’, he shockingly highlights that our modern western diet is currently the biggest killer on the planet, exceeding smoking and every other cause. Conservatively our modern diet rich in processed foods, sugar and vegetable oils and lacking in protective healing whole foods kills 11 million people a year. He suggests this is a gross underestimate!

At Primal Meats, we have always supported using evolutionary and ancestral wisdom to understand better what to eat and which foods need to be politely escorted from our cupboards straight into the bin. We believe that human and planetary health and thoroughly intertwined.

You may choose to follow a paleo or pegan diet, a gut healing protocol such as GAPs or AIP, the advice of the Western A Price foundation, or simply be guided by sound science-based functional health wisdom from inspirational health leaders such as Dr Chattergee, Dr Mark Hyman or Shawn Stevenson. These approaches share the same principles and reflect the lifestyle that brought our hunter-gatherer forefathers such robust health. 1

Our modern world is at times exciting, convenient and full of mind-bogglingly clever innovations in technology – we have so much to be grateful for. Most of us live in more comfort with more access to helpful resources than a royal family would have enjoyed 100 years ago. 

But – and it’s a big but – this has not led to the health and happiness you would expect. We are considerably more depressed, more stressed and less satisfied with life than we were before many of these conveniences became available. The health of the westernised civilisations has plummeted in recent years. 2

As part of our move towards modernity, we have become dependant on science to decide what is good for us and protect us from disease. Although we managed to ‘out evolve’ every other species on the planet without the requirement of a single peer-reviewed scientific study to tell us how to live, nowadays, we give almost no credibility to ancient wisdom, traditional customs or intuitive nutrition.

This could be a big mistake.  

Along with junk food comes junk science, and it’s a rapidly growing problem potentially more harmful than any disease. The issue is rapidly gaining attention; a paper published December 16 in PLOS ONE reports that more than 13 percent of peer-reviewed studies in 10 of the top nutrition science journals had connections to the food industry—and of those, more than half reported findings favourable to business interests. 

Conducting good science is an expensive business – the corporations with enough money to fund such research are highly unlikely to be the same ones selling nutrient-dense whole foods! 

Evolution has proved that there’s simply no doubt that basing our diets on real whole foods such as grass-fed nutrient-dense meats, organic vegetables grown on healthy soils, wild foods, and eliminating refined sugar, processed foods and vegetable/seed oils is a HUGE piece of the health puzzle. But there’s a lot more to health than what we eat. 

Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes now account for 90 per cent of deaths each year in the UK.

These so-called ‘lifestyle’ conditions are a well-known problem in the west. Much less understood is that they now account for the majority (53 per cent) of deaths and disabilities in the developing world – taking 31 million lives a year. 

NCDs are not driven by infections and viruses but by behaviours such as poor diet, smoking, moving too little, alcohol and drugs. 3

Along with the murderous modern western diet comes the modern western lifestyle. The direct impact of losing connection with our roots is pretty hard to accurately measure scientifically – as it inevitably comes hand in hand with modern junk based diets, but it seems it matters a great deal.

You could have the best diet in the world. Still, if your sleep is disturbed, you spend more time on Facebook than you see family face to face, you sit all day at a computer, have a lily-white complexion from avoiding the sun, and generally see more nature on your TV than actually spending time in wild places. Your risk of disease is going to increase significantly.

Research has found that people who sleep less than six hours per night have a higher risk of death from any cause, and one large-scale study found that people with short sleep have a significantly increased risk of cancer and stroke. 

An analysis of 13 studies of sitting time and activity levels found that those who sat for more than eight hours a day with no physical activity had a risk of dying similar to the risks of dying posed by obesity and smoking. 4

Loneliness was associated with higher rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide. Loneliness among heart failure patients was associated with a nearly four times increased risk of death, 68% increased risk of hospitalisation, and 57% increased risk of emergency room visits. 5

Over the last two decades, we have even been convinced into thinking we should be afraid of the sun! Once again, questionable science funded by the very companies hoping to profit from the result. A new study published in the peer-reviewed medical journal JAMA found that several active ingredients in different sunscreens enter the bloodstream at levels that far exceed the FDA’s recommended threshold.

A huge and growing amount of research has now shown that avoiding sun exposure has created an epidemic of vitamin D deficiency. Current estimates are that at least 50% of the general population and 80% in infants are deficient in vitamin D. Low levels of D3 are now known to play a major role in the development in many of the chronic degenerative diseases. In fact, vitamin D deficiency may be the most common medical condition in the world and vitamin D supplementation may be the most cost effective strategy in improving health, reducing disease, and living longer. Those deficient in vitamin D have twice the rate of death and a doubling of risk for many diseases, such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, asthma and autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis. – Dr. Michael Murray 6

Our hunter-gatherer forefathers had a tough and uncomfortable life of extremes – sometimes leading to traumatic death – but living in close communities, waking and sleeping with the sunrise and sunset, moving throughout the day, experiencing periods of hunger, and being exposed to the sun clearly has its health benefits. 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

It appears that our lifestyles and reliance on scientists to guide our health decisions are not serving us that well after all. It is time for common sense, critical thinking, ancestral wisdom and high-quality, independent research to prevail. 15

In our Primal Living series, we’re going to bring together wisdom and stories from healthy nature-based peoples – past and present, along with research and top tips from scientific studies and health professionals to inspire you to regenerate your health.

We’ll be covering everything from how to optimise your sleep, the importance of functional movement and why digital distraction is making us stressed, depressed and ineffective, to why spending time in nature is not only a nice thing to do but can actually change your physiology for the better. 

We’ll be diving in cold water, walking in the wilds, drinking from natural springs, cooking with wild food and setting you mini ‘rewild yourself’ challenges.  

We’ll be exploring the microscopic world of gut health and the incredible disease suppressing world of phytochemicals in our wild plants. 

Before you know it, you’ll be dropping your I phone and picking up a book, ditching the TV for yoga in the woods, and padding around the garden barefoot.  

Follow us on Instagram for our primal living stories, ancestral recipe ideas, and so much more. We have even got a social platform dedicated to regenerative agriculture and primal health – we’re just getting started, so we hope you’ll join us on this regenerative journey back to your healthy roots. 

Caroline

Part 1: Carbon and The Carbon Soil Sponge

On the left is a graph of global Carbon Dioxide (CO2) levels since 2016. The black line is the mean, and the red line the actual, which shows the natural fluctuations through the year. We can see from this graph, how the planet takes a breath in and out each year. CO2 levels peak in April at the start of the northern hemisphere spring (there is a far greater land mass in the north), so the peak comes right before everything starts growing and absorbs carbon back into matter, which is only possible via photosynthesis.

Figure 1. Global Atmospheric Carbon Levels – annual fluctuation and overall rise. Graph thanks to NASA:https://research.noaa.gov/article/ArtMID/587/ArticleID/2636/Rise-of-carbon-dioxide-unabated

What is evidently unnatural about this graph is the fact that levels are increasing year on year. The planet draws down 120 billion tons of carbon a year, but 130 billion tons end up back in the atmosphere. The additional 10 billion tons coming largely from the combustion of fossil fuels (7,8).

The jump in atmospheric CO2 in 2019 and 2020, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), was probably due to an increase in extreme weather events – rainstorms and droughts causing floods and fires; and because our oceans, which are warming and acidifying, are less able to absorb excess CO2 (1). The world’s oceans act as a huge buffer to atmospheric CO2, there is currently 30,000 billion tons more CO2 dissolved therein than normal. 

But let’s go back for a moment to this idea that the world breathes in and out on an annual basis. This shows us how important and powerful the growth of life is in regulating the earth’s atmosphere. This fact is the gold at the end of the rainbow, it is the key to solving our climate crisis, but in order to understand how we can help nature to help us, we must first gain some understanding of the relationships and cycles between our atmosphere, climate and land management. 

For this reason we have put together this 3 part article on Climate and Agriculture, we hope you enjoy reading it. Welcome to part 1.

How do we Help the Earth Breathe More Deeply

Crucial to earth’s annual ‘breath-in’, is the functional condition of her ecosystems and soils, and we will return to this point in a moment, but first we must distinguish between ‘ancient’ and ‘current’ carbon.

Are Cows Causing Climate Change?

Animals breathe Oxygen in and Carbon Dioxide out, and plants do the opposite, so it is easy to jump to the conclusion that the best thing we can do to help the situation, is plant lots of trees and stop eating meat. Animals also emit Methane (CH4), so cows are further demonised as part of the problem (we will cover this in detail in part 2). But blaming cow farts for climate change is a gross red herring, because it ignores the role of animals in cycling carbon into the soil (which we will come on to), and it detracts from the important distinction between ‘current’ and ‘ancient’ sources of carbon. 

Fossil fuels are ‘ancient carbon’, mostly accumulated in the carboniferous period when there were much higher levels of CO2 and CH4 in the atmosphere. At that time mega-flora with huge photosynthetic capacity evolved. These plants sequestered vast amounts of carbon which eventually became the stable solid (coal), and liquid (crude oil) forms, buried underground, the power of which we harness today. The mega-flora that locked carbon into the earth, led to increasing oxygen levels, and eventually created the stable climate we humans now benefit from.

‘Current carbon’ is what was left in circulation, the stuff that the world breathes in and out each year. So whatever aspect of ‘the problem’ of climate change we are looking at, it is essential that we ask, are we pumping ‘ancient carbon’ into the system as a shortcut to productivity? Or are we working with ‘current carbon?’

If we look again at the beef industry for example, then yes, intensively farmed beef has ancient carbon pumped into the system on many levels. All feed that isn’t pasture, will be dripping in ‘ancient carbon’. Animals kept indoors or in feed-lots require a lot of machinery to move food around. So intensive beef is a serious problem, but then so is all intensive agriculture: Soya, wheat, chicken, you name it, it is all saturated in ‘ancient carbon’. 

100% grass-fed meat however has a very small ‘ancient carbon’ footprint. Very little if any machinery is required, mostly these farms manage to get away with just a quad-bike and no tractor. The animals never receive any additional feed, so apart from animal transport to slaughter and quad-bike fuel, the carbon is almost entirely ‘current,’ sequestered by the grasses and herbs in the pasture. 

How the Earth Breathes Deeply

You know how elderly people often have a shortness of breath, their bodily functions are not quite what they were, and they are unable to breathe deeply and easily like in their younger days. Well, the earth’s ability to breathe deeply also depends on the state of her body. It depends on the functional condition of her ecosystems and soils. 

The earth breathes CO2 in through photosynthesis by plants and trees, but the earth retains carbon (locks it in long term), by incorporating it into soils. Every living thing is made largely from carbon, so it is through all life forms that carbon gets cycled ultimately into the soil. These are the main 3 ways: 

1. Through animals who eat those plants and then defecate on the ground which soil microbes incorporate into soil. 
2. Dead organic matter from either plants or animals, which soil microbes and fungi incorporated into the soil. 
3. A  less apparent route is that plants directly feed soil microbes and fungi via root sugar exudates. 

So while it is an excellent idea to plant trees to try and stabilise the climate, it remains largely unacknowledged that soils are the ultimate carbon sink. There is no limit to carbon accumulation in soils, as long as they are well managed. This is where the debate about grazing animals heats up, because these walking bio-digesters are a key component to effective carbon draw.

Lands managed under intensive production on the other hand, be it livestock or crops, are only oxidising carbon into the atmosphere. These soils are unable to sequester carbon, because such soils are no longer alive.

Living Soils 

Agri-Culture still mostly works off a chemical model for how plants receive nutrients from the soil. If plants are short in potassium, we add soluble forms of potassium. But this is a far cry from how nature cycles nutrients. In a natural living soil there is an inexhaustibly complex web of interactions between life and mineral soil, and nutrient deficiencies do not exist. 

Plants exude sugars from their roots which feed bacteria, fungi and other microorganisms. Plants commonly expend around 30% of their energy in this way, feeding all soil microbiota, which in turn cycle minerals back, in forms that the plant can absorb. 

This process is grossly inhibited in intensive production systems because the plants are fed with water soluble inputs, so no-longer need this symbiotic relationship with soil microbiota; and because fertilisers, herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, etc, kill soil life. In livestock farming intestinal parasite treatments are death to soil organisms from dung beetles to bacteria, so the form of farming system is an essential detail when we talk about the relationship between agriculture and climate change. 

In regenerative livestock farming systems the land and animals are managed in a way that breaks the life cycle of intestinal parasites, removing the need for intestinal treatments. Farmers who convert to regenerative methods are astonished by the return of life to their farms. This surge in biodiversity however is just a symptom of what is going on underground – the return of living soils, which rapidly draw down carbon and create the carbon soil sponge. 

The Soil Carbon Sponge

The sheer enormity of soil microbiota, itself living and dying, as well as drawing down dung and other organic matter into the soil, builds up as a carbon matrix within the mineral structure of soil. Without this organic matter soils are simply dusty dirt, able to hold little water, and once dry are extremely difficult to rehydrate. However living soils, rich in organic matter have a sponge like texture, are springy under foot and can hold large amounts of water, all due to carbon. 

For every gram of carbon present in the soil, it can hold 8 grams of water (7,8). So we start to see that soil carbon is not just key to climate stabilisation and biodiversity, but also water management. Over time, carbon rich soils just get deeper and deeper, and it is from such soils that we can grow the best, nutrient-dense foods.

Mobile bio-digesters 

Vast areas of the world are naturally grassland-scrub: The great plains of North America once grazed by buffalo; the Savannahs of South and East Africa grazed by a myriad of ungulates; Europe thousands of years ago, where wild horses, aurochs, elk, bison and deer maintaining wood-pastures.

These animals and their grassland-scrub homes are synonymous. Originally predators like wolves and lions would have managed their behaviour, keeping them moving in dense bunches, grazing, trampling, pooing and peeing, then moving on. This animal impact is essential to grassland regeneration. Without them, especially in dry climates, grass stays standing up and can only decompose through oxidation; bare ground soon appears underneath, the start of desertification, where carbon only goes up, not down. Animals in dry grasslands are the only thing that can put carbon back into the soil. 

So while overgrazing is a huge problem across the world, especially in drylands, this is only due to the mismanagement of animals. Animals can be the problem, but also are the solution, because their correct management (mimicking the action of predators), is about the only thing that can reverse desertification which is all about locking carbon into the soil and restoring dense plant cover.  

The following examples show just how effective pastureland is at locking in carbon,
if managed correctly:

1. Texas A&M University study demonstrated 1.2 tons of carbon per acre per year (1.2 tC/ac/yr) drawdown via proper grazing methods (2).
   
2. University of Georgia study demonstrated 3 tons of carbon per acre per year (3 tC/ac/yr) drawdown via a conversion from row cropping to regenerative grazing (3).
   
3. Michigan State University study demonstrated 1.5 tons of carbon per acre per year (1.5 tC/ac/yr) drawdown via proper grazing methods and demonstrated in a lifecycle analysis that this more than compensated for natural enteric emissions of methane (4).
   
4. The drawdown potential on North American pasturelands is 800 million tons (megatons) of carbon per year (800 MtC/yr) (5).

To Conclude

This is part 1 of a three part series of articles about farming and climate change.

References

1. https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/blogs/earthmatters/2019/06/14/carbon-dioxide-reaches-record-levels-plus-6-things-to-know-about-the-greenhouse-gas/
2. https://www.jswconline.org/content/71/2/156.abstract
3. https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms7995
4. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308521X17310338?via%3Dihub
5. https://www.jswconline.org/content/71/2/156.abstract
6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxTtXabC2TM
7. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3Z430GFyZg
8. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=123y7jDdbfY
9. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwEToq05L2k 

It’s very true that all meat, regardless of how raised, is an important nutrient source – especially for developing children. 1

However, some serious ethical and environmental concerns are associated with factory-farmed animals reared to produce cheap meat. These concerns give fuel to the argument that meat no longer has a place in a modern diet. 

Exciting new science has, however, further highlighted why grass-fed and factory-farmed meat should not be treated equally. In fact, beyond the legitimate and convincing environmental and ethical arguments, it now turns out eating grass-fed meat could be an efficient way of eating your greens!

At the root of most of the global issues we face today is our tendency to apply a mechanical mindset to our management of natural systems – both the outer environment and our inner ecosystem (our bodies). 

In farming or human health, if you want to benefit from the vast productive capacity of functional natural systems and their inherent ability to balance and suppress disease, you need to work with nature rather than quantify, separate, and understand it by the individual components. We cover this topic in more depth here.  

The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

In my work as a consultant in regenerative agriculture, to benefit from these natural processes, we manage land and livestock with principles rather than prescriptions. The further you wander from these laws of nature, the more costly the economic, ecological and social consequences. This has always been the case, forever, for everyone. And it won’t change just because we have invented a new technological revelation such as chemical fertiliser or lab-grown meat. 

Living by these principles does not mean you’re anti-science. Not at all. It simply helps you understand that the science currently available is only a partial view of a far larger picture. True scientists understand this completely – this is why they do what they do. There’s always more to discover and understand. 

Because I live by these principles, I have always known that meat from animals raised within a healthy functional ecosystem is better for the planet, people and worth the extra price. But, in a western society that makes decisions primarily based on empirical evidence, it is frustrating that there’s not more good science to confirm what I already know to be true. This is starting to change.

The many health benefits of grass-fed meat.

What we do already know about the health benefits of grass-fed meat is thankfully pretty compelling 2: 

Meat from animals reared in functional ecosystems on a diverse pasture is higher in omega 3. It has a healthy ratio between omega 3 and 6, which allows us to benefit from omega 3 essential fatty acid’s potent anti-inflammatory properties. As inflammation has been scientifically proven to be associated with nearly all modern chronic disease, this is a pretty big deal. 3

Grass-fed meat is rich in conjugated linoleic acid – CLA. CLA is associated with a lowered risk of heart disease and may help prevent and manage type 2 diabetes. 4 5

CLA has also been shown to reduce cancer risk by blocking the growth and metastatic spread of tumours. 6 7

Some research suggests that CLA can help reduce body fat and promote weight loss. 8

For many years, we have understood that grass-fed meat, compared to grain-fed meat, contains a powerhouse of minerals and vitamins, including bioavailable protein, zinc, iron, selenium, calcium/or B12. All of these nutrients are critical for fighting disease and maintaining health – especially in a world where our fruits and vegetables contain fewer nutrients with every passing decade. 9

We know – although often choose to ignore – that animals reared in factory-farmed systems are more likely to suffer from disease (and therefore be routinely treated with antibiotics and medication) and live in low welfare conditions. Their production has a vast and negative impact on the environment. (We cover this in-depth in our free introductory course on eating meat.) 

Powered by plants.

We have for a long time known and studied the critical role of phytonutrients in promoting health and fighting disease in plants, animals and humans. ‘Phytonutrients’ or ‘phytochemical’ are primary or secondary metabolites found in plants and recognised to have nutritional quality attributes and powerful potential health benefits. 

Beyond the protective qualities they provide the plants themselves, these compounds have been known from ancient times to elicit positive biologic responses in human and animal systems. These elicitors have been shown to reduce the risk of many chronic diseases that plague modern society, including cancer, cardiovascular disease, dementia, diabetes and many more. 10

The need for food rich in phytonutrients to help tackle our ill-health epidemic has led to a push towards plant-based diets. It has also accelerated interest in the metabolic engineering and the genetic modification of plants to ‘create’ – and presumably patent – varieties that are higher in these disease suppressive nutrients. 11

Nature had this whole issue worked out a very long time ago – and without the need for a potentially disastrous intervention from modern technology. 

Wild plants are a powerhouse of beneficial plant nutrients. However, it takes healthy soil and healthy ecosystems to brew – through complex interactions between plant and the soil food web – the range of natural medicines found in our native wild plants.

Wild dandelions, for instance, contain seven times more phytonutrients than spinach, a plant considered a superfood among the sad array of factory-farmed vegetables proudly displayed on the supermarket shelves. 

Wild food wins.

Certain wild apple species contain a whopping 100 times more phytonutrients than the golden delicious you will find at your local convenience store. 12

The dramatic loss of phytonutrients in our modern plant foods comes from a combination of factors; 

1. Plant breeding for flavour, size and texture above and beyond health properties.

2. The fact that the main plant foods we eat come from growing systems that are the antithesis of a healthy functioning ecosystem. Lifeless soils and reliance on damaging chemicals lead to vegetables, grain, and fruits unable to perform the basic processes required to synthesise the plant nutrients that offer us health benefits. 13

1. The long gap between harvest and digestion. How we harvest, transport and cook food can have a degrading effect on our food’s nutrients.

Researchers have found that healing phytochemicals such as terpenoids, phenols, carotenoids and anti-oxidants with anti-inflammatory, cardioprotective and anti-cancer effects are found in the meat and milk of livestock who have access to healthy, diverse pastures.

This revelation is perhaps shining a light on why many traditional meat-eating cultures and modern carnivores see such dramatic health benefits from eating a diet high in grass-fed meat – when on the face of it, the diet seems to conflict with the natural principle of diversity. 14 15

By eating meat grown on healthy ecosystems – either hunted from wild landscapes or reared on regenerative farms – we leverage and upcycle the herbivores’ foraging behaviour. 

These herbivores freely graze and browse on the thousands of species of the most phytonutrient dense plants of all – wildflowers, grasses and legumes – growing on healthy soil or wild landscapes. 

Foraging phytonutrients for you.

Many of these native plants are inedible or unpalatable to humans, but as part of the pastures and woodlands they form, they are the foundation of a biodiverse food web. These plants create drought and flood-resistant landscapes that sequester carbon from the atmosphere. By eating the animals that eat these plants, we provide food and nutrition security in a highly vulnerable foodscape of monoculture grown vegetables and grains. 

Healthy pasture could legitimately be considered the only truly functional ecosystem that remains a part of conventional modern farming systems.

So I feel reassured. From my own experience of nature’s principles, I know that eating animals who have spent their entire lives grazing and browsing herb-rich pastures is better than eating meat from animals fed on grain. 

Eating animals that are part of a fully functional ecosystem – such as the regenerative farms that supply the meat we sell – is better for the animal, better for the environment, and better for my health. 

I am excited about what new incredible scientific revelations will further demonstrate that nature has the complete picture – the best and brightest human efforts still only represent a tiny piece of the puzzle. 

Caroline Grindrod

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.

Take a listen to this podcast in which I am featured talking about my views on veganism. It may be a surprise to know that as the owner of a meat business I welcome the movement as an important catalyst for change.

I hope you enjoy it. Caroline x

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/is-vegan-a-dirty-word/id1490590788?i=1000461549444