There’s no such thing as a benign beef farm – so beware the ‘eco-friendly’ new film straight out of a storybook | George Monbiot
This results from a combination of two factors: finding safety and comfort in the familiar, and what psychologists call “ the primacy effect ” – the first thing we hear about a topic is the one we tend to recall and accept.
But because of those farmyard tales, reinforced by stories we’re told as adults in endless books and films celebrating the pastoral, we apply entirely different standards to it.Hannah Jones, from an organisation called Farm Carbon Toolkit, tells the farmer that, through the growth of his hedges and woodland, “you are removing more greenhouse gases from the atmosphere than you’re actually emitting”.More importantly, the counterfactual scenario went unmentioned: if his cattle were removed from the land and it was allowed to rewild, far more carbon would accumulate, both above and below ground, and this would not be counteracted by the farm’s emissions.Pointing to a massive rise in soil carbon in Jones’s “table of emissions and sequestration”, he remarks, “So the hedgerows are amazing anyway, and the woods are pretty good.First, there’s no academic study anywhere, meeting the necessary criteria, that shows sustained net greenhouse gas removal through soil carbon storage by a cattle farm.