WWF, 2022
- Subsidies
- Livestock on leftovers will not save us, we have to reduce meat
- Feed-food competition
- Food security in the UK
- UK farmland use
- similar to Feeding the problem (Greenpeace, 2019)
aka future of feed paper
https://www.wwf.org.uk/sites/default/files/2022-06/future_of_feed_full_report.pdf
The paper argues for a livestock on leftovers approach to UK farming: sketching a system that has no animals fed human edible food
Growing cereal crops to feed animals uses 40% of the UK’s entire arable land area - around 2 million hectares - and consumes half of our annual wheat harvest, the nation’s most important staple crop
Grazing and crops grown for animal feed combined represent 85% of the nation’s total agricultural land footprint - at home and abroad
The report breaks down the % of high opportunity feed, low opportunity cost feed and grass we feed to various animals
- Cow's are fed 79% grass
- Sheep fed 86% grass
- Pigs fed 81% high opportunity cost feed
- poultry fed 89% HOC feed
High opportunity cost feed are crops and soy cake
It would also massively reduce the number of livestock animals, in one model reducing the UK’s headcount of non-poultry livestock from 48m to 13m and eliminating the 187m poultry birds entirely - whilst still providing sufficient animal protein for human health, here