Rise of ‘megafarms’ illustrates the pressure on the UK food system

The continued rise in the number of so-called ‘megafarms’ in the UK can only heap more pressure on the meat and dairy sector. Freedom of information requests by the BBC revealed the number of larger-scale beef and dairy farms in Great Britain had jumped from 756 to 802 over the past five years – taking the number of cattle held on these premises to just under a million.

A further 141 farms in Northern Ireland were of a similar large scale – defined as holding at least 700 cattle – the BBC reported, in a development Compassion in World Farming described as “deeply concerning”.

Many of these farms also kept animals in ‘continuously housed’ or ‘no graze’ systems, though the UK’s devolved administrations did not hold specific data on exact numbers.

But the investigation’s findings clearly illustrated the “sheer scale” of these farms “and the desperate, broken, and unsustainable food system we have created”, Anthony Field, CIWF’s UK head, told the BBC.

The group’s concerns over animal welfare and “poor health conditions”, were robustly rebuffed by farmers quoted in the piece, who said welfare was not dictated by whether cattle were kept outdoors or indoors, but how livestock was managed.

And whether more intensive livestock farming is bad for animal welfare outcomes is open to debate.

‘Factory farming’ scrutiny

But it comes at a time of rising scrutiny into the farming sector and these types of industrial ‘factory farming’ systems, not just for animal welfare reasons but in terms of their environmental impact.

Take the River Wye. The waterway has become significantly polluted in recent years, with many campaigners blaming nearby livestock and poultry farms for the increased presence of damaging phosphates in the water. 

It has now become so bad the River Wye Special Area of Conservation, which covers the stretch of the river in England, was downgraded to ‘unfavourable – declining’ last year. And Defra is spending £35m on cleaning it up.

But apart from these types of targeted actions, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported in June that government (including the new Labour administration) had no clear policy about the rise of these ‘US-style’ megafarms and how to mitigate their impact.

In fact, megafarms have increased by 20% in number since 2016 under successive Conservative governments, the BIJ reported.

The concerns around these systems are numerous, from ammonia emissions to the rise of deforestation in other parts of the world in order to meet rising feed requirements, coupled with the challenges posed to biodiversity.

Ultimately, the rise of these types of farms – which are so at-odds with British farming’s bucolic reputation – all come back to basic economics and the need to ensure farmers can fulfil their obligations to retailers without losing out on business, Liam Sinclair, professor of animal science at Harper Adams University, told the BBC.

And with the farming sector having faced crippling economic pressures in recent years, there was therefore no surprise many were looking to maximise revenues by increasing herd sizes, while also taking animals indoor, due to the lack of available land for grazing, he suggested.

With the NFU reiterating its warnings about the UK’s delicate self-sufficiency on Monday – the day the national larder would run empty if we only ate food produced in the UK from 1 January – therein lies the problem.

And unless the nation’s supermarkets, food businesses and consumers accept the need for food to become more expensive and for more cash to flow down supply chains, the trajectory of industrialisation in our food system is only going to continue in one direction.