Labour has urged British farmers to stop raising cattle and grow lentils instead as part of a Net Zero push. GB News has more.
The Government published its highly-anticipated ‘Farming Roadmap’ on Wednesday, outlining its long-term vision for Britain’s agriculture sector.
The 71-page document outlined the Government’s intention to help British farmers wind down high-emission farming – including cattle – and move towards “growing oilseeds and pulses” for planet-based products.
“Farmers will play a critical role in delivering this transition by adopting practices that reduce emissions while sustaining productive, commercially viable businesses,” the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) wrote.
The roadmap is widely regarded as a bid from Labour to get back in rural Britain’s good books amid continued fury over Rachel Reeves’s family farm tax.
However, cattle farmers have hit out at the plans, insisting that land used to raise their animals would not be suitable for growing plant-based items, such as lentils.
Henry Graham, a Berkshire-based farmer who owns a mob of 400 cattle, told the Telegraph: “The idea of somebody ploughing up pasture to grow lentils is ludicrous.”
He insisted that chemicals used on lentils would be unable to be sprayed near water courses where cattle graze because it would simply be too wet.
According to figures from the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board, the number of Britons adopting a plant-based diet has started to level off.
Worth reading in full.
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“move towards “growing oilseeds and pulses” for planet-based products”
So where do cattle come from, if not this planet? Betelgeuse VI?
Can we have some “sanity-based policy” please?
The establishment’s war on farming is based on similar junk science to their war against humanity in general, i.e. pseudoscience on the alleged but actually negligible dangers of nitrogen and CO2 respectively. It’s all such obvious nonsense, so what on earth is their ulterior motive?
The latest post from Promethean Action gives the answer – The Great Reset, with the Malthusian British royal family to the forefront – by neatly joining the dots on the deep state’s Covid and Ukraine skulduggeries: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsbZBrtAG78.
Cut and paste from UN’s Agenda 2030 and 2050. We pointed this out years ago. We were told we were just conspiracy theorists and ridiculed. Its on their own website for gods sake, bold as brass. Conspiracy theorists, my arse.
Well put. UN Agendas are responsible for this power grab and I am making it my mission to keep saying so until people wake up to the fact that we are now governed by a whole new set of laws. Agenda 2030 and Agenda 2050.
Urbanites & non nutritionists….
Animals can prosper on the side of hills and poor soils giving us fantastic bio available food.
Lentils low bio availability and have fussy growth needs.
But what do our NZ nutters know..I doubt they’ve managed an allotment.
Lentils?
Japan in the 1950s. South Korea in the 1970s. China in the 1980s. Brazil in the 1990s. Vietnam in the 2000s. Every economy that has clawed its way up in the last hundred years has done the identical thing.
The first thing they spend the new money on is animal protein. Meat, dairy, eggs. Steak, pork, chicken, milk..
And in every case, within a single generation, the children come out taller. The old illnesses of going without fade away..
Not lentils
h/t Sama Hoole.
Defra’s obviously been taken over by Activist Vegans and Vegetarians.
The highly processed plant-based food in my local Sainsbury is forever being heavily discounted because very few people want the junk.
Lentils now, bugs later.
The government should have no long term vision for any industry. Set the conditions for growth and get the f out of the way.
Anyone notice how the last series of Clarksons Farm was pushing offal (as well as AI). I’m not necessarily saying there’s anything at all wrong with offal, but it’s the agenda that it fits into that’s interesting. My favourite bit was Clarkson showing off his human-free machinery as Caleb looked on with a deep sense of loss. Turns out age doesn’t always buy you wisdom. I won’t be watching another series of it.
Mrs SoR likes eating liver but hates the idea of eating kidneys. A bit odd in my opinion. Seems happy to eat haggis though.
I thoroughly enjoy offal. Cow’s heart, cow heel, liver, kidneys, the head, although not strictly offal but makes good head cheese, lungs. Great eating for not a lot of money.
So yesterday I got a bit of a telling off here on the Sceptic for admitting that I’ve never voted in an election. That’s fair enough, as I understand that some people see it as a bit of a civic responsibility, and there’s always the “if you don’t vote, you can’t moan” angle.
But then we get nonsense like this and I find I’m faced with a bit of a conundrum.
I’m not greatly into “civic responsibility” beyond “don’t act like a dick”. I see voting more as a rational choice – why wouldn’t you try to influence things. If there’s no party that is remotely acceptable to you (which up to now I can 100% understand) then spoil your ballot paper. People are sceptical about that, but if there were thousands or tens of thousands of spoiled ballot papers in every constituency it would be headline news. I think Reform deserve a chance, maybe two (Trump 1.0 was pretty mediocre, though better than the alternatives, 2.0 was a lot better and still is broadly though I think the Iran thing was a mistake personally).
Apathy was the largest party in the last election. Labour govern with something like 20% of the possible electorate.80% didn’t choose them. But they did, by default.
I think Australia has mandatory voting. Next Government please consider.
As every good freelance herdsman knows, bovine ordure smells pretty much the same whichever part of the country your farming roadmap takes you to.
Yes, even the bullshit in Westminster and Whitehall.
As usual the proponents of this sort of action are utterly deranged.
We need to be rid of them, although I would draw the line at eating them myself.
Urgh.
On one of my regular dog walks there’s a sign on a gate into a quite lush-looking garden: Trespassers will be composted.
OK, not an original thought but it has some possibilities.
I hate this country, it’s utterly shit now.
Me? I love this country. I just hate the wicked cuhts who made it this way.
Snap!
I am personally vegetarian through choice, however I wouldn’t dream of suggesting abandoning or even scaling down cattle farming. Beef is only one of the many reasons for cattle-rearing, others including land management through grazing and manure for enriching the soil. This is partly why Hindu cultures consider it a sacred animal.
Cow manure is an extremely good, healthy organic fertilizer, but of course the green zealots as always only see one side of the equation (the irrational loathing of that life-giving gas, CO2), and ignore the fact to balance the equation, famers would have to compensate and actually increase the use of nitrogen-based fertilizers to keep the land viable.
If you prevent the use of all fertilizer then you reduce the amount of food and eventually you have fewer people. People are what the greenies really hate, especially ones that are not greenies.
You could be right… Malthus may ultimately be proven correct in fatalistic doomsday prophecies, albeit not because of natural population dynamics, but because of Labour ministers who are as thick as mince! (Or, of course, Green ones)
Exactly. There, but for the grace of God…
Recall, the 2021 Sri Lankan, (i.e. President Rajapaska’s) “Let’s ban modern fertilisers experiment?” Esp see: ‘the Ghost from the Past’ paragraphs, in:
https://ceylondailynews.lk/home/2026/04/11/sri-lankas-fertilizer-crisis/
And now, five years later, the IMF’s intervention is the least of Sri Lankans’ worries…
Destroying farms and farmers is all part of the process of destroying Great Britain plus when the food runs out – population reduction.
Everything coming along nicely.
So they plough up the land and chop down the hedges…. and release a load of carbon in the process. Or maybe they are just trying to get us to eat lab grown ‘meat’ which sounds very dodgy and probably going to make Bill Gates or some billionaire elite loads of money.
The roadmap is widely regarded as a bid from Labour to get back in rural Britain’s good books amid continued fury over Rachel Reeves’s family farm tax.
If this is the case then the Labour government is even more retarded than we thought.
They’re not bright enough to be thought of as retarded.
Love it 😀 😀😀
Just plough up that grass hillside and plant crops, your tractor will tip over and the soil will erode away in 1 year but your saving the planet from methane, a gas that is entirely subsumed in its absorption spectra by water vapour and breaks down in a decade, also there used to be 65 million bison in the US and caribou in the tundra who farted the stuff out constantly en masse and it had no effect on the bloody weather!!
I wonder which minister has tried to grow lentils on salt marshes, upland areas or water meadows. In fact, lentils are not well suited to our conditions and require a lot more machinery and diesel than cattle.
I rather doubt that any Labour minister has been anywhere near a farm in their lives especially that nasty smug bastard Reed.
Of course! A morsel of logic that no Labour minister would ever bother considering. Just one of the many consequences of decreeing policies from on high, randomly for ideological reasons and no experience or insight into the industry they’re “net-zeroing” (in this case farming). I can imagine the head of Defra wishing he/she could sit swivelling in a chair drinking coffee and hitting the “No Cattle” button on the British Farming App!
That’s basically how we’re seen by left wing governments: as pieces in a giant puzzle to be sorted into order – the aim of the game being Utopia – sitting high in their Ivory Towers with only the most minimal engagement with the hoi polloi.
Nobody I know in real life follows a “plant based diet”, not even the Hindus at work. I did have a couple of strictly vegetarian colleagues, at least one was vegan, but they were lifelong vegetarians who believed killing animals for food was immoral – they were not trying to “save the planet”.
Oh for gods sake!
There is no problem so sever that government intervention cannot make it worse.
“…The idea of somebody ploughing up pasture to grow lentils is ludicrous…”
Indeed it is. Almost as ridiculously absurd as abandoning agriculture, and farming solar panels instead.
Pulses like lentils give you terrible flatulence.
Methane-maker!
Absolutely! Have they factored in all the extra farts?
Just stop it already.