The ‘blockers’ who have so offended Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have, for the moment, scored another success in thwarting a wealth-creating development – but it is a success which I don’t yet hear the Prime Minister and Chancellor rushing to condemn. Nor, to be politically neutral, did our pro-growth former Prime Minister Liz Truss exactly rush to support the development when it was first proposed for her constituency – although she expressed a more balanced view than many of her constituents.
The project in question, which has just been given the heave-ho by the Borough of King’s Lynn and West Norfolk, is a ‘US-style mega farm’ which would house 14,000 pigs and 870,000 chickens in sheds near the villages of Methwold and Feltwell. The number of pigs who will not now be raised there – unless pig meat-producer Cranswick appeals and is successful – are outnumbered by the humans objecting to the project. Councillors voted unanimously against the farm after being presented with a petition of 42,000 signatures. There were also 12,000 formal objections to the planning application. In the words of one local resident: ‘these multi-billion pound food giants simply cannot be allowed to continue bulldozing their way into rural areas, bringing nothing but pollution and the destruction of nature with them.’
There has been little mention, needless to say, of the role that factory farming played in lifting Britain from being a malnourished nation which nearly starved during the second world war to one where almost everyone can afford a decent meal with adequate protein. A rather good series on Radio 4 presented by David Dimbleby explained last week how chicken farming practices imported from the US were the seedbed for Britain’s conversion to the free market in the 1980s.
Instead, it seems, rural areas are no place for farming – unless, perhaps, it is the fictional sort you get in children’s books where cows, pigs and sheep all live happily in twee little farmyards, and of course never get eaten.
Factory farming doesn’t sound terribly appealing, I’ll grant you that. But sorry, it doesn’t follow that small family farms are more humane and more environmentally-friendly places to raise animals. A few years ago I toured pig farms in Norfolk – including an organic one and one where the pigs were mostly indoors. I would have loved to have thought that the pigs were happier outside, but I can’t honestly say that I could tell. Nor could the farmers. One had just invested thousands in improving the environment for his animals. Could he tell that they were happier now? ‘Not really’, he replied, ‘they look just the same to me.’
We like to think pigs are happier sauntering in flower-flecked meadows because that is how we like to imagine ourselves spending time. We are not merely anthropomorphising them but seeing them through middle-class human eyes. When you are an animal I suspect that your thoughts revolve rather more around two things: food and security. If you can have those – and an indoor farm with food on tap is a pretty good place to find them – you are likely to be contented. None of this is to say that there are not farming practices which inflict pain and which should be banned on the basis on animal welfare. But are indoor ‘mega farms’ the real offenders on this score?
How would I like it, I can hear the anti-factory farm lobby ask, if I never saw the outdoors? Sorry, but I am not a pig
Admittedly I haven’t yet visited a pig farm in the US, but I have just scoured YouTube to see inside farms there and in China. Maybe their owners are just showing us what they want us to see, but I am damned sure that most of the 42,000 people who petitioned against the Cranswick farm (not all of whom were locals by any means) haven’t based their views on the reality of mega farms.
One or two observations: the most humane form of slaughter I found online was in a Chinese farm where the pigs were stunned by means of two electric probes which engaged with the sides of their heads as the travelled along a conveyor belt. It was over in an instant, and the pig clearly didn’t have the faintest idea what was coming. Nor did they have to be loaded onto lorries – the abattoir was an integral part of the farm. In Britain, by contrast, most pigs are dispatched by being rammed into cages and lowered, squealing, into carbon dioxide-rich air.
The more advanced the farming, the better animals welfare seems to be in many ways. One US farm was shown constantly monitoring pig health, scanning for signs of high temperatures. You can’t do that when your animals are roaming around outdoors. Temperature, humidity and lighting conditions were controlled to avoid discomfort. It was a long way from one of my Norfolk farms, where the farmer used one of his pigs as a stepping stone to reach a light he wanted to turn off. It is possible, of course, to cram too many animals into too small a space, but are the biggest farms the worst offenders here? Not necessarily. There are plenty of pigs keep in cramped stalls on family farms.
How would I like it, I can hear the anti-factory farm lobby ask, if I never saw the outdoors? Sorry, but I am not a pig, and therefore I have absolutely no idea where I would enjoying being a farm animal or not – and nor does any other human. But I do know that a farm like that turned down in Norfolk would help boost the rural economy and foster national food security, which given the current geopolitical situation is not a bad thing
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