Should we as consumers be concerned about ‘megafarms’ as reported by the BBC?
If the data was actually accurate…you might consider it.
At Grounded Research, we are on mission to address data inaccuracies and misreporting in agriculture, this is mainly on survey responses but when the BBC article on the rise of the ‘megafarm’ ended up in my inbox from several people asking what our thoughts were, we had a closer look… we haven’t seen many ‘mega farms’ on my farming travels…recruiting over 800 farmers to our panel... perhaps these chaps would like to share their views in our research projects…
Ironically, the BBC asked me to interview on inaccuracies of farming data less than a month ago on the Farming Today programme.
Here is the full article, that reads as both frightening as well as frightfully uninformed about UK farming practices.
It seems the journalist could only find figures for Northern Ireland (don’t get us started on the data issues we have in reporting herd size being across different categories for each country in the UK). And by the figures there are 141 farms with more than 700 cattle;
‘In Northern Ireland, there are 141 farms with more than 700 cattle, holding a total of more than 141,000, according to the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (Daera).‘
So far so good.
But the term ‘megafarm’ or to be more accurate - Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation - definition says 700 dairy cows, not 700 cattle. For cattle the farms would need to have 1000+ cattle… going from 700 to 1000 is quite the levelling up in farming terms… which brings that 141 down significantly.
Here is the info on the definitions if you want to read yourself;
This could be an honest mistake from a journalist who doesn’t know the difference between dairy cows and cattle. They probably have no clue about the state of the art animal health monitoring used on these farms. And they may have never seen cows rush the gate to get back inside as soon as they see the farmer in the field.
No one in the UK has herds so big they are rounded up using helicopters so using terminology that comes from places that do…is somewhat…misleading.
Or it could be that the headline ’UK has small number of dairy farms housing large numbers of cows for the betterment of their welfare across several sites’ just isn’t quite so attention grabbing.
Poor quality data is one thing, but I will not see data weaponised against the industry to tell a story so far from the truth.
Every one of the 500+ farmers we have interviewed this summer…at length… is doing what they can for the land, their animals and their communities under some of the most challenging conditions in UK farming to date.
You can’t have the quantities of milk the consumer demands without a lot of cows. You can’t have a lot of cows unless you are efficient and you can’t be efficient if your cows aren’t healthy…though it seems the numbers aren’t the strong point here.
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