Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Dead Zone
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Hampshire, England
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: British
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Lymbery * https://www.ciwf.org.uk/philip-lymbery/about-philip/ * https://www.bloomsbury.com/author/philip-lymbery/ * http://www.winchester.ac.uk/research/attheuniversity/FacultiesofHumanitiesandSocialSciences/centre-for-animal-welfare/the-caw-team/Pages/the-caw-team.aspx
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: nb2002052246
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/nb2002052246
HEADING: Lymbery, Philip
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PERSONAL
Born September 23, 1965; married; wife’s name Helen; children: Luke (stepson).
ADDRESS
CAREER
Activist, naturalist, and writer. Compassion in World Farming, campaigns officer, beginning 1990, then campaigns director, until 2000, CEO, 2005–; World Society for the Protection of Animals, communications director, 2003-05. Gullivers Natural History Holidays, wildlife tour leader, 1996-2005. Has also served as a visiting professor at the University of Winchester.
AWARDS:Outstanding campaigning award, Eurogroup for Animals; named “one of the food industry’s most influential people,” Grocer; International Golden Dove peace prize, 2015, for Farmageddon.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Philip Lymbery is an activist, naturalist, and writer. He is the recipient of the outstanding campaigning award by Eurogroup for Animals. Since 2005 he has served as the chief executive of Compassion in World Farming, an international organization that works toward improving animal welfare. Lymbery has also worked as a professional wildlife tour leader at destinations around the world.
Farmageddon
Lymbery published Farmageddon: The True Cost of Cheap Meat with Isabel Oakeshott in 2015. Lymbery and Oakeshott take critical aim at intensive agriculture in the book, focusing largely on the meat industry. The account exposes the lies and half-truths by those in the meat industry about the benefits of cheaper-costing meat and the methods that they use to commodify the animals. The authors look at various cases from around the world and link the purchasing habits of consumers on one side of the world to, for example, the destruction of the rainforests in Sumatra.
Reviewing the book in the New Statesman, Felicity Cloake summarized that “Lymbery and Oakeshott argue that we cannot afford not to change; industrial farming is yet another luxury that the world will eventually have to give up. A return to more sustainable, mixed pasture-based systems would seem to be part of the solution—and, they suggest intriguingly, would actually leave individual farmers better off. All this continent-hopping makes Farmageddon an engaging read.” Cloake suggested that “anyone after a realistic account of our global food chain, and the changes necessary for a sustainable future, will find much to get their teeth into here.” In a review in the London Independent, Mike McCarthy pointed out that the book “is not a vegetarian rant. It is not anti-meat. But it is an unforgettable indictment of the new hyper-industrialised agriculture originating in the USA which is now spreading around the world.”
In a review in the London Guardian, Tristram Stuart stated: “Given my suspicion of ill-informed technophobia, it was salient to read Philip Lymbery’s Farmageddon. This catalogue of devastation will convince anyone who doubts that industrial farming is causing ecological meltdown.” Stuart noted that “Lymbery is a pragmatic campaigner. He knows he can’t overthrow the whole system in one go,” appending that “the book comes to life when he describes his satisfaction at achieving incremental improvements–the successful campaign, for instance, to ban ‘barren’ cages for hens. Chickens confined to cages in Europe now have to have more space and some rather meagre recreational diversions. More significantly, and due to public demand, the percentage of free-range laying hens in the UK has risen from just ten percent in the 1980s to fifty percent today. If chickens could organise a religion, Lymbery would be one of their saints.”
Writing in the Ecologist, Julian Rose admitted that “to the authors’ credit, they never sensationalise the shocking scenes they witness, preferring to simply convey the facts and expose the reality of a brazenly exploitive empire conveniently sanitized and dressed-up as a caring, quality controlled production system bringing you, the consumer, everything you could ever wish for and all in the air conditioned convenience of your local hypermarket food dispenser.” Rose remarked that “fortunately, the reader is guided towards both personal and more general solutions,” adding that Lymbery and Oakeshott “are both pragmatic and realistic guides for the perplexed.” Rose concluded that “all in all, I would strongly recommend this book to anyone who wants a grounded, undiluted account of the machinations of the global food industry and its devastating affect on the lives of millions of sentient beings, including ourselves.” Reviewing the book in the London Telegraph, Tom Fort lauded that “Lymbery is excellent on the discreet scourge of aquaculture.” Fort concluded: “Thanks to campaigners such as Philip Lymbery, the truth about factory farming has been laid bare, but we prefer not to face it. A plague, an epidemic directly attributable to the horrible things we do to animals, might achieve what no book, even one as level-headed as this one, can.”
Dead Zone
In 2017 Lymbery published Dead Zone: Where the Wild Things Were. The account focuses on the problems created by the globalised system of intensive agriculture, from birds to fish and everything in between. Lymbery examines animal welfare in industrial farming showing how methods to increase the efficiency of growing and developing the animal into a product for consumption is usually considerably more harmful to humans, the animals, and the environment than more traditional methods that were replaced by the so-called Green Revolution in the 1960s. Lymbery provides statistics and many case studies from around the world to illustrate the severity of the problem.
Writing in the New Statesman, Mark Cocker reasoned that “like all authors trying to convey large ecological truths, Lymbery has to cast his net widely and follow the chain of consequences across continents.” Cocker commented that “although Lymbery’s narrative threads are subtle and replete with powerful evidence, he is sometimes unable to explain the process by which people can confront, let alone overcome, the alliance of vested political interests and drug and chemical multinationals that is at the heart of this unsustainable regime.” Nevertheless, Cocker conceded that “he does a superb job of equipping us with the hard facts. No author can do more.” A contributor to Publishers Weekly observed that “in this comprehensive volume, Lymbery encourages collective effort and effectively offers practical solutions to stymie further degradation.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Ecologist, February 5, 2015, Julian Rose, review of Farmageddon: The True Cost of Cheap Meat.
Guardian (London, England), January 31, 2014, Tristram Stuart, review of Farmageddon.
Independent (London, England), February 7, 2014, Mike McCarthy, review of Farmageddon.
New Statesman, January 24, 2014, Felicity Cloake, review of Farmageddon, p. 46; March 31, 2017, Mark Cocker, review of Dead Zone: Where the Wild Things Were, p. 61.
Publishers Weekly, April 10, 2017, review of Dead Zone, p. 63.
Spectator, February 7, 2014, Camilla Swift, review of Farmageddon.
Telegraph (London, England), February 10, 2014, Tom Fort, review of Farmageddon.
ONLINE
Literary Review, https://literaryreview.co.uk/ (March 1, 2014), Colin Tudge, review of Farmageddon.
Philip Lymbery Website, http://www.philiplymbery.com (January 3, 2018).
Philip Lymbery
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Philip John Lymbery (born 23 September 1965) is the chief executive officer of Compassion in World Farming (Compassion) and a commentator on the effects of industrial farming.[1][2]
Contents [hide]
1 Career
2 Personal life
3 Publications
4 References
5 External links
Career[edit]
After leaving college, Lymbery volunteered for several months at an RSPB reserve in Titchwell Marsh, Norfolk. From 1996 to 2005 he led birdwatching tours with a holiday company called Gullivers Natural History Holidays, travelling to locations including Costa Rica, Seychelles, the United States and the Spanish Pyrenees.[3][4] As Campaigns Officer and later, Campaigns Director at Compassion in World Farming from 1990 to 2000, he campaigned to end the live export of farm animals and ban the barren battery cage in the EU.[3][5] He worked as Communications Director at the World Society for the Protection of Animals (Now known as World Animal Protection) from 2003 to 2005.[6] In 2005, Lymbery became chief executive officer of Compassion in World Farming.[7] Under his leadership the charity has been awarded the Observer Ethical Award for Campaigner of the Year and BBC Radio 4 Food and Farming award for Best Campaigner and Educator.[8]
Personal life[edit]
Lymbery has had a lifelong interest in birdwatching.[5] He is a licensed bird-ringer for the British Trust for Ornithology.[6] Lymbery lives in rural Hampshire with his wife and stepson.[9]
Publications[edit]
Farmageddon
Published by Bloomsbury in January 2014, Lymbery's book Farmageddon: The True Cost of Cheap Meat is described as 'a wake-up call to change our current food production and eating practices, looking behind the closed doors of the runaway industry and striving to find a better farming future.'[10][11] Joanna Lumley says of this book, "A devastating indictment of cheap meat and factory farming. Don't turn away: it demands reading and deserves the widest possible audience.”[12]
Lymbery, Philip and Isabel Oakeshott (2014-01-31). Farmageddon: The True Cost of Cheap Meat. London: Bloomsbury. ISBN 978-1-40884-644-5.
Lymbery, Philip (2008-03-30). "The Theory and Application of Welfare Potential", in Proceedings of the Importance of Farm Animal Welfare Science to Sustainable Agriculture Forum. Beijing: CIWF, RSPCA, WSPA, HSI with the support of the European Commission.
Lymbery, Philip (2004). “A Comparison between Slaughterhouse Standards and Methods Used during Whaling”, “An Introduction into Animal Welfare”, in Philippa Brakes, Andrew Butterworth, Mark Simmons & Philip Lymbery, Troubled Waters – A Review of the Welfare Implications of Modern Whaling Activities. London: WSPA. ISBN 0-9547065-0-1.
Druce, C. & Philip Lymbery (2003). Outlawed in Europe: Farm Animal Welfare – 3 Decades of Progress in Europe. New York City: Animal Rights International.
Lymbery, Philip (2002). Laid Bare: The Case Against Enriched Cages in Europe. Petersfield: CIWF.
Lymbery, Philip (2002). Farm Assurance Schemes & Animal Welfare: Can We Trust Them? Petersfield: CIWF.
Lymbery, Philip (2002). Supermarkets & Farm Animal Welfare: Raising the Standard. Petersfield: CIWF.
Lymbery, Philip (2002). In Too Deep: The Welfare of Intensively Farmed Fish. Petersfield: CIWF.
Lymbery, Philip & Jacky Turner (1999). Brittle Bones: Osteoporosis & the Battery Cage. Petersfield: CIWF.
Lymbery, Philip (1992). The Welfare of Farmed Fish. Petersfield: CIWF.
References[edit]
Jump up ^
ABOUT PHILIP
Philip-Country-Life.jpg
© Country Life
Philip Lymbery is naturalist, author and chief executive of leading international farm animal welfare organisation, Compassion in World Farming (CIWF).
His latest book, published by Bloomsbury in 2017, Dead Zone: Where the wild things were, exposes how cheap meat is a key factor in the demise of some of the world’s most endangered species.
He was recipient of the 2015 ‘International Golden Dove’ peace prize in Rome for his first book Farmageddon: The true cost of cheap meat, written with then Sunday Times journalist, Isabel Oakeshott. Published in six languages, it gained international acclaim, earning him a reputation as one of industrial farming’s fiercest critics. The book was chosen as one of The Times Writers’ Books of the Year, described as an “unusually fast-paced enviro-shocker” (Evening Standard) and cited by the Mail on Sunday as a compelling ‘game-changer’.
An illustrated version of Farmageddon, Farmageddon in Pictures: The True Cost of Cheap Meat – in bite-sized pieces, was published by Bloomsbury in 2017.
Visiting Professor at the University of Winchester, Lymbery has been listed by The Grocer magazine as one of the food industry’s most influential people and he is recipient of the ‘outstanding campaigning’ award by Brussels-based Eurogroup for Animals.
Lymbery led the growth of CIWF internationally, with offices and representatives in 12 countries across Europe, the USA, South Africa and China. He spearheaded work by CIWF with over 800 food companies worldwide, improving living conditions for over a billion farm animals every year.
CEO since 2005, Lymbery was CIWF’s campaigns director throughout the 1990s, helping to win historic victories such as EU bans on barren battery cages for laying hens and veal crates for calves. More recently he led industry discussions that brought about a major reduction in live calf exports from Britain.
A life-long wildlife enthusiast, Lymbery spent ten years as professional wildlife tour leader, travelling to places like The Seychelles, Costa Rica, the USA and Europe. He is a licensed bird ringer for the British Trust for Ornithology.
He lives in a West Sussex country village with his wife Helen, stepson Luke, Duke the rescue dog, and flock of ex-battery hens.
Philip Lymbery is the CEO of leading international farm animal welfare organisation Compassion in World Farming and a prominent commentator on the effects of industrial farming. He is listed by The Grocer as one of the food industry's most influential people. Under his leadership, Compassion's prestigious awards have included Observer Ethical Award for campaigner of the year and BBC Radio 4 Food and Farming awards for best campaigner and educator. He is a lifelong wildlife enthusiast and lives in rural Hampshire with his wife and stepson. Philip is an avid blogger through www.acompassionateworld.org. He has a following of over 75,000 on Twitter. Follow @philip_ciwf
Writes: Science & Nature
Author of : Dead Zone, Farmageddon in Pictures, Farmageddon
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Print Marked Items
Fat of the land
Mark Cocker
New Statesman.
146.5360 (Mar. 31, 2017): p61.
COPYRIGHT 2017 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text:
Dead Zone: Where the Wild Things Were
Philip Lymbery
Bloomsbury, 384pp. 12.99 [pounds sterling]
The "dead zone" that supplies the title of this highly informed, utterly compelling book is an area of seabed
off the Louisiana coast. Philip Lymbery explains that it is caused by a monthly discharge of roughly
112,000 tonnes of fertiliser that is carried down by river systems draining North America's vast agricultural
zones of genetically modified corn and soya. The pollutants deplete almost all of the oxygen in parts of the
seabed, so the fish and other marine organisms are either killed or driven out.
The worst of the dead zones is the size of the states of Rhode Island and Connecticut combined, and the
collapse of the ecosystem, though temporary, is inflicting great damage on American fisheries. It is also
replicated in 40 such areas around the US. Worldwide, there are now 400 of them and they are doubling in
number every decade.
According to Lymbery, the root cause of the problem is our increasingly globalised system of intensive
agriculture. The "Green Revolution", which has done so much to meet the needs of humanity's spiralling
population--from three billion in the 1960s to more than seven billion today--is predicated on an
unsustainable exploitation of water, soil and natural ecosystems. But worst of all in this modern regime is
the intensive system of meat production.
As you might expect from a man who is the chief executive of the campaign group Compassion in World
Farming, Lymbery explores the consequences for animal welfare. Typical is our abuse of humanity's most
precious bird, the barnyard chicken. Most of the 60 billion reared annually are on a life cycle from egg to
table of about eight weeks, during which they have as much living space as the size of the page you are
reading. High numbers of them are infected with bugs such as Campylobacter or salmonella, the latter at a
rate up to ten times higher than among free-range fowl.
Animal welfare is a significant subplot, but this book's primary theme is the consequences of such
production methods for the rest of life on Earth. Despite the name, intensive agriculture is astonishingly
inefficient. Converting grain or soya to meat protein wastes about two-thirds of the total food value of the
original harvest. Beef is the worst, with a conversion rate of 3 per cent. It takes an arable area equivalent to
the size of the entire EU to produce feed for the world's livestock and this, if used more wisely, could yield
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food for another four billion people. In short, we are growing the wrong things in the wrong way for the
wrong purpose.
Like all authors trying to convey large ecological truths, Lymbery has to cast his net widely and follow the
chain of consequences across continents. In a chapter entitled "Elephant", for instance, he explores how the
margarine, shampoo and pork chops at your local supermarket are implicated in the loss of Sumatra's
rainforest, one of the most biodiverse areas on Earth. All of these household products require palm oil or
palm kernel meal, which is used to feed livestock and even farmed fish. The EU imports half of the global
harvest of palm meal, and demand for it is expected to treble by 2050. As the palm plantations expand to
meet this demand, so we cause the loss of more Indonesian rainforest and drive the Sumatran elephant, just
2,500 of which are now left, to extinction.
Although Lymbery's narrative threads are subtle and replete with powerful evidence, he is sometimes
unable to explain the process by which people can confront, let alone overcome, the alliance of vested
political interests and drug and chemical multinationals that is at the heart of this unsustainable regime. To
give one small example, UK soils are in a parlous condition because of our five-decade addiction to
chemical additives. Some of the richest peatlands in the Fens are being lost at a rate of two centimetres a
year. Lymbery describes a Cambridgeshire farm that was test-drilled 200 times to assess its worm
population. Not a single worm could be found. It sounds comic, but it should horrify us. Since Darwin, we
have known of the invaluable role of earthworms in soil health. Yet when the EU put forward a directive on
soil conservation, the UK, along with the governments of four other countries and supported by the
National Farmers' Union, campaigned for eight years to kill off the proposal.
Lymbery may not specify the exact political model that will allow us to challenge this madness, but he does
a superb job of equipping us with the hard facts. No author can do more.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Cocker, Mark. "Fat of the land." New Statesman, 31 Mar. 2017, p. 61. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491983144/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=bcea273d.
Accessed 16 Dec. 2017.
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Dead Zone: Where the Wild Things Were
Publishers Weekly.
264.15 (Apr. 10, 2017): p63.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Dead Zone:
Where the Wild Things Were
Philip Lymbery. Bloomsbury, $18 trade paper
(384p) ISBN 978-1-4088-6826-3
Lymbery (coauthor, with Isabel Oakeshott, of Farmageddon), a conservationist and animal rights activist,
bemoans the loss of delicate ecosystems and threats to various species in this lengthy volume on the
detrimental effects of industrial farming. He warns against reckless exploitation, arguing that land ought to
be used judiciously and efficiently with an eye toward sustainability. Though Lymbery primarily calls
attention to the cattle industry and ways in which cows are affected by horrible feedlot conditions, he also
sheds light on other animals affected by industrial agriculture, including elephants and penguins. Visiting
Sumatra, Lymbery observes declines in the area's elephant, orangutan, and tiger populations. He points out
that many species' habitats have been decimated by profit-seekers clearing wetland forests and jungle
habitats for palm-oil plantations. Palm oil is used to produce a variety of supermarket items,' including
margarine and ice cream, while palm-kernel meal is widely used to feed cattle, sheep, pigs, and poultry on
factory farms around the world. Damage can thus be traced back to increasing demand for cheap foodstuffs.
The author contends that by shifting consumption and buying habits, we can make headway in saving
certain animals and preserving valuable natural resources. In this comprehensive volume, Lymbery
encourages collective effort and effectively offers practical solutions to stymie further degradation. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Dead Zone: Where the Wild Things Were." Publishers Weekly, 10 Apr. 2017, p. 63. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A490319294/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=84f37806.
Accessed 16 Dec. 2017.
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Feeding frenzy
Felicity Cloake
New Statesman.
143.5194 (Jan. 24, 2014): p46+.
COPYRIGHT 2014 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text:
Farmageddon; the True Cost of Cheap Meat
Philip Lymbery with Isabel Oakeshott
Bloomsbury, 448pp, [pounds sterling]12.99
In the month that West Country beef and lamb producers finally won their hard-fought battle for protected
EU status, we could be forgiven for feeling pretty damn proud of British food. Farmers boasted that it's the
lush grass that makes their meat so good: indeed, to merit the coveted PGI (Protected Geographical
Indication) mark, cattle must have spent at least six months of the year on pasture. You might naively
believe that's the bare minimum they could expect--grazing is just what cattle do.
Not always, as readers of the unambiguously titled Farmageddon will discover. Philip Lymbery, chief
executive of the organisation Compassion in World Farming, reveals that the more modern way is to keep
them "corralled into grassless pens carpeted in manure ... on a diet of concentrated feed and antibiotics", a
practice that is commonplace in the vast plains of North and South America and starting to make inroads
here.
The idea doesn't suit everyone: soon after the book went to press, Compassion in World Farming was
alerted to a US-style "feedlot" in Lincolnshire after neighbours complained of the stench created by its
almost 3,000 cattle. Plans have been submitted to expand the operation and Lymbery told the press he was
worried that this might set a precedent--after all, the dangers of such intensive agriculture are exactly what
he rails against in this book.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
We've had enough food-chain exposes in recent years to put even the hardiest carnivore off several decades
of dinners: the likes of Jonathan Safran Foer, Michael Pollan, Felicity Lawrence and Joanna Blytheman
have done the job so well, you might wonder whether Farmageddon can have much more to add. How
many packed poultry sheds does one need to visit vicariously before free-range becomes the only option?
Thankfully, this meaty account makes a distinctive and important contribution, eschewing the narrowly
domestic focus of many of its predecessors in favour of a global investigation of how modern farming
practices affect not only the animals and consumers concerned but farm workers, their local economy and
the wider environment.
Lymbery spent two years travelling with his co-writer, Isabel Oakeshott, then of the Sunday Times, with the
aim of getting under the skin of today's food system". In a globalised economy, that doesn't just mean
visiting the farm where the cow that produced your hamburger was reared but travelling to Argentina to
meet the locals pushed off their land by the soya which fed that cow, the baby hospitalised by the relentless
spraying of pesticides on to those newly deforested fields and the Peruvians going hungry because their fish
stocks have been plundered for fertiliser.
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All these stories feed into the food we eat, yet, as Lymbery observes, most of us still cling to a romantic
dream of local farms, where chickens scratch around in the yard, a few pigs snooze and snort in muddy pens
and contented cows chew the cud". As this book shows, it's high time we woke up--because two-thirds of
the world's 70 billion farm animals are factory farmed, and even if you think that poisoned groundwater in
China's Henan province doesn't affect you, you may be rather more concerned about the vast pork industry
that's responsible for it when you read more about the link between such intensive systems and the swine flu
pandemic of 2009. Or, indeed, when that mega-dairy moves in next door and kicks up a stink.
Even the most insular city-dweller might be troubled, as I was, by factory-farmed meat having been found
in numerous studies to be considerably less nutritious than its free-range counterpart, giving the lie to the
idea that the Lz chicken represents a great leap forward for the poorest in our society. Anyone in Britain
who dares to question the ethics of cheap meat is decried as a kind of Marie Antoinette figure who believes
that only the rich should have the--considerable--privilege of eating animals. Farmageddon shows that the
farming methods that deliver such apparent value are promoting obesity, as well as helping to push up food
prices worldwide. In the long term, we will all suffer for it.
Because of Lymbery's role at Compassion in World Farming, I had expected to read more of the gruesome
details of mistreatment, but Farmageddon's main focus is on the future and how we can bring about change.
As he explains in the introduction, "this is not a 'poor animals' book"--it's far more interesting than that.
Lymbery's conclusion is not that we should all go vegetarian, or that only small, traditional farms hold the
key to sustainable food production. Instead, the book is more concerned with how business can make a
difference, arguing that commercial success and bad practice are not inevitable bedfellows--indeed, after the
authors visit a small family pig farm in China, it's plain that it is not the scale of the operation but the
intensiveness with which it operates that represents the problem.
In Lymbery's words, Farmageddon asks "whether, in farming, big has to mean bad" and, in a world where
agriculture has become just another industry, questions whether factory farms are really the most efficient
way to feed the world. He is clear-sighted in acknowledging that here, consumer pressure can make all the
difference; if the profits seem to lie with organic milk, or free-range eggs then giants such as McDonald's
will make the switch.
The book also rubbishes the popular idea that the earth is simply not large enough to feed everyone without
intensive farming, pointing out the vast inefficiencies it involves in terms of natural resources such as land,
water, oil and grain. The world currently produces enough food for ii billion people, yet so much is wasted
that we can't even feed the seven billion people on the planet at the moment. Put simply, Lymbery and
Oakeshott argue that we cannot afford not to change; industrial farming is yet another luxury that the world
will eventually have to give up. A return to more sustainable, mixed pasture-based systems would seem to
be part of the solution--and, they suggest intriguingly, would actually leave individual farmers better off.
All this continent-hopping makes Farmageddon an engaging read--and it also gives a full enough picture of
the situation in the UK to preclude any misplaced smugness on the part of the British reader. Anyone after a
realistic account of our global food chain, and the changes necessary for a sustainable future, will find much
to get their teeth into here.
For Felicity Cloake's food column, see page 67
Cloake, Felicity
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Cloake, Felicity. "Feeding frenzy." New Statesman, 24 Jan. 2014, p. 46+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A359335593/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=074c4a36.
Accessed 16 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A359335593
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Farmageddon: The True Cost of Cheap Meat by Philip Lymbery – review
Why the world's food system needs to be changed – now
Battery hen in cage
'If chickens could organise a religion, Lymbery would be one of their saints.' Photograph: Alamy
Tristram Stuart
Friday 31 January 2014 12.14 EST First published on Friday 31 January 2014 12.14 EST
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Every January in Berlin, thousands march against the agro-industry under the banner "Wir haben es satt!" ("We are fed up!") A fortnight ago, I went for the first time. The scale of the protest – more than 30,000 people, despite the mid-winter cold – gave me a flicker of hope. But although I addressed the crowd, and sympathise with many of its members' demands, I don't agree with their orthodoxy that large-scale farms and industrial agricultural technology are inherently wrong. Of course, I prefer organic farming to chemical-dependent farming, but sometimes absolutist organic prescriptions go too far. I don't even rule out the possibility of genetic modification generating some benign ideas, as long as we can keep them away from monopolists such as Monsanto.
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Given my suspicion of ill-informed technophobia, it was salient to read Philip Lymbery's Farmageddon. This catalogue of devastation will convince anyone who doubts that industrial farming is causing ecological meltdown. Whether it's a question of the wellbeing of individual farm animals, the biodiversity in rainforests or the harm caused to peoples such as the Toba tribe – displaced to the grim suburbs of Lima by the onward march into their traditional forests of GM soy plantations that feed European livestock – fixing the food system has to be a priority.
With every meal we eat, we choose whether or not to contribute to these problems. The businesses we buy our food from are our servants; they want to keep us happy. It follows that they will change only if we show them we are unhappy with, or, even better, enraged by, the current system.
Following Lymbery's prescriptions will not only help animals and the planet, it will also make you healthier and even, perhaps, wealthier. Eating less meat and wasting less food will offset any higher price you pay for improved animal welfare – your overall food budget will go down as noticeably as your risk of heart disease, cancer, obesity and diabetes.
Lymbery is particularly good on fish farming, which is often hailed as an environmentally efficient alternative to eating meat. But the facts don't add up when you consider how much wild fish has to be caught to fatten up carnivorous species such as salmon and trout. A fifth of all fish caught in the sea are now pulped into fishmeal, contributing to the over-exploitation of global fish stocks. Peru exports a million tonnes of anchoveta for this purpose every year – 13.5% of it to the UK alone. Removing these fish from the sea has not only depleted fish stocks for human consumption, it has also deprived of food the vast populations of seabirds that once fished these waters, leading to a 95% drop in numbers over the last 60 years. Violations of Peru's fishing quota laws are half-heartedly pursued, and the fishmeal-processing factories are giant quagmires of marine pollution. The producers of cheap pork in the UK are complicit in these crimes against nature: it is down the gullets of their intensively reared pigs, as well as Scottish farmed salmon, that Peruvian anchovetas disappear.
Farmed fish, in turn, are kept in such cramped conditions they rub each other's flesh raw. Lymbery describes seeing fish with tails missing, and eyes bulging out from infection. Escaped specimens breed with their wild brethren, producing future generations that are maladapted to the wild environment. Lice and other parasites that run rife in such dense populations emigrate to wild stocks and are wiping them out. Meanwhile, fish farms act as bait to hunting seals; rather than install expensive predator-proof cages, fish farmers in Scotland are permitted to gun them down – even though Defra knows this contributed to the decline in the population of harbour seals on the north and east coast of Scotland by a shocking 50% between 2001 and 2010.
On land, wildlife is faring just as badly. In the last 40 years, tree sparrow populations in the UK have crashed by 97%; grey partridges by 90%; turtle doves by 89%; corn buntings by 86%; skylarks by 61%. The catalogue of carnage goes on. One study has found four times as many worms on organic farmland as on chemical farmland – hence these declines. The purpose of farming is to deprive other species of the land, and sequester it for our own use. But by perfecting the art of monoculture, it has become too easy for us to exterminate everything else, leaving no wild plants, no food for insects and a barren land for birds.
Do we need all this, as proponents of industrial agriculture maintain, in order to feed the present world population of more than 7 billion people? Quite the reverse, Lymbery argues. Farm animals gobble more than a third of the world's supply of arable harvests and they waste most of this as faeces and heat. If your aim is to provide adequate nutrition for the world's billions, the fewer factory farms the better. By contrast, traditional systems let ruminants graze on grass while pigs and chickens snaffle up leftovers and forage, thus increasing, rather than decreasing, total food availability. Factory farming may also have helped to breed strains of superbugs that medicine cannot defeat because farm animals have been routinely fed antibiotics merely to increase their growth rate.
Lymbery is a pragmatic campaigner. He knows he can't overthrow the whole system in one go. He has been active in the charity Compassion in World Farming for two decades – he is now chief executive – and during that time he has selected his targets well. The book comes to life when he describes his satisfaction at achieving incremental improvements – the successful campaign, for instance, to ban "barren" cages for hens. Chickens confined to cages in Europe now have to have more space and some rather meagre recreational diversions. More significantly, and due to public demand, the percentage of free-range laying hens in the UK has risen from just 10% in the 1980s to 50% today. If chickens could organise a religion, Lymbery would be one of their saints.
He is also a passionate bird-watcher and it turns out this isn't just an annex to his arguments. We watch through his eyes as an osprey swoops and dives for a fish: a "powerful plunge, a momentary pause, then broad, fingered wings lift bird and fish from the surface and away with a shake". And then we understand what Lymbery absorbed as a bird-loving child: the chickens we confine in cages are also birds, capable, given the opportunity, of exhibiting all the behaviours we associate with wild species: attentive and tender courtship, exuberant dust-bathing, aggression. How dreadful to deprive them of all that.
I do have a quibble with the assumption, widely shared in foodie circles, that when it comes to meat, "cheap" equals "bad". Not only does this imply a price-barrier to virtue, there are examples of cheap and even free meat that is actually better than the most ethically sourced organic (and pricey) fleshy morsels. Offal and offcuts such as head and feet can be picked up for next to nothing and eating them helps to avoid waste. Besides, some wild animals, such as the invasive grey squirrel, are now so populous as to have turned the countryside into a larder of free meat.
A couple of omissions surprised me. According to the UN, endocrine disruptors – chemicals that interfere with the hormonal systems of humans and wildlife – are a hidden threat, and agricultural effluent is often the source. In an abominable 86% of UK river locations, male roach (a common freshwater fish species) have started to produce eggs alongside their semen. It may be no coincidence that fertility in human males has declined since the middle of the last century. No one has satisfactorily explained this, nor have we managed to regulate the release of these chemicals into the environment.
Lymbery rightly focuses on how much meat we eat: on average, in rich countries we eat two to three times more than is recommended. But the other side of the equation is how many people there are in the first place. When is population going to become an accepted part of the food debate? If it's fine to encourage people to think about halving their meat consumption, can we really not cope with a conversation about how many children we have?
Lymbery brings to this essential subject the perspective of a seasoned campaigner – he is informed enough to be appalled, and moderate enough to persuade us to take responsibility for the system that feeds us.
• Tristram Stuart's Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal is published by Penguin.
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Farmageddon - the true cost of cheap meat
Julian Rose | 5th February 2015
Front cover of Farmageddon, published by Bloomsbury.
Front cover of Farmageddon, published by Bloomsbury.
So just how serious is the impact of industrial farming? Worse than you could ever imagine, writes organic farmer Julian Rose in this review of 'Farmageddon - the Real Price of Cheap Food', which lifts the lid on the industry's human and ecological devastation, and the systematic cruelty inflicted on the animals that feed us.
... a grounded, undiluted account of the machinations of the global food industry and its devastating affect on the lives of millions of sentient beings, including ourselves.
Whatever happened that led a great part of humankind to give the animal kingdom such a lowly status in the overall evolutionary pattern of life on Earth?
How is it that we have subjected millions and millions of our animal cousins to concentration camp conditions so utterly abhorrent that to call their brief time on the planet 'living' would constitute a serious misnomer?
One of the critical factors that drove me to develop a mixed organic farming system back in the mid 1970's, was to give the cows, pigs, sheep and hens that formed the basis of my farming enterprise, the chance to grow up in a setting designed to replicate as closely as possible the conditions that these creatures would experience in their native environment.
It is important to recognise that farming is an enclosed agricultural system which has built-in compromises deemed necessary for the controlled raising of both livestock and crops. Within this context we have to be aware that the word 'natural' does not accurately describe this scenario, even when the best and most humane principles and methods are applied.
However, those who embark upon an organic farming management practice commit to a set of standards that places strong emphasis on animal welfare as well as forming a close affinity with the soil and the cyclic patterns of nature that underlie rotational, non chemical farming practices.
Under such a system the farmer has the chance to develop a strong affinity with nature and a deep respect for the animals and plants under his or her care. But unfortunately, the great majority of people living in post industrial Westernised societies ingest a daily diet that has little or nothing to do with such a caring approach.
On the contrary, the majority of individuals negotiating their way through 21st century urban and suburban life styles demand cheap, uniform foods that, in order to fulfil the consumers' supermarket groomed expectations, are grown according to methods that are about as different from 'natural' as plastic is to wood.
Enter the factory farm ...
Philip Lymbery and Isobel Oakshot, in their book 'Farmageddon - the True Cost Cheap Meat' have gone to great lengths to raise awareness of just how devious and deceptive is the globalised 'cheap food' conveyor belt that churns out the Western World's daily diet.
Philip Lymbery is the director of Compassion in World Farming, a remarkable farmer pioneered organisation formed in 1967 which now has worldwide offices and an equally eclectic swelling membership.
I met Philip on a number of occasions during the 1990's and recall his quietly profound concerns about the state of our toxic food chain with its heavy reliance upon animals given next to no chance to express their normal psychological needs and fundamental freedoms.
At that time Philip was somewhat sceptical of the Soil Association's welfare standards for organically raised livestock which I and my colleagues were moulding and refining for publication, seeing any form of commercial farming as synonymous with animal exploitation.
I understood his reticence: too many organisations make unrealistic and sometimes downright untruthful claims for the production methods that they espouse. Who hasn't seen those adverts depicting perfect looking farmsteads full of 'happy hens', smiling cows and contented pigs rooting around in ye oldie traditional farmyards - and then ends by displaying a mass produced product that bears no relationship whatsoever with such scenes.
The hell we inflict on the animals that feed us
During their specially planned world trip that makes up the body of evidence in this book, Philip Lymbery and Elizabeth Oakshot, political editor of The Sunday Times, come across scenes which would incriminate the perpetrators to a lifetime in gaol if the World possessed a justice system that dispensed genuine justice for man and beast alike.
On describing their visit to the hen houses of the UK's largest egg supplier in Nottinghamshire, the authors state: "The egg farm was a series of giant sheds clad in corrugated iron. Inside were a million hens. Throughout their short seventy two week life span (chickens can live eight to ten years) they would never see daylight.
"They lived in cages around five metres long, known in the business as 'colonies'. Suspended lights brightened and dimmed at particular times to create the impression of night and day, all geared to regulating the egg-laying process."
Pigs, suffer a very similar fate to hens and a chapter in the book is devoted to laying bare the tortuous conditions suffered by the great majority of large scale pig farms which supply the main supermarket chains.
In the part of the voyage that takes them to the USA the authors report how, in California, thousands of dairy cows (8,000 in one herd is not unusual) are milked to death in vast purpose built mechanised sheds featuring robotic cow carousels and antibiotic laced genetically modified feeds dispensed by automatic conveyors.
The whole thing working around the clock in what is the ultimate 'factory farm' format. The unfortunate animals that must endure this hideous regime are milked-out after just two to three years and sold off into the ubiquitous hamburger trade.
There is an alternative!
By contrast, my organically managed Guernsey herd of forty cows lived an average of fourteen years, very rarely needing any form of vetinary intervention throughout their milking careers.
This is due to the fact that we never pushed our cows to produce maximum yields, always treating them with respect and love while feeding them a diet of home grown grasses and clovers plus other green matter that fulfils the natural needs of herbivorous ruminant quadrupeds.
The glorious unpasteurised milk and cream that resulted was eagerly purchased by the local community and I seldom needed to go further than ten miles to complete my sales round.
Farmageddon also plunges into the fish farming phenomena; another form of concentration camp where fish are kept in intense confinement with high rates of mortality and where sea lice proliferate leading to a catastrophic decline of wild fish stocks.
'The illusion of cheap food' is smashed to smithereens as the reader is taken behind the largely closed doors of a ruthless global multinational industry supplying the World's largest supermarket chains and industrial food giants.
To the authors' credit, they never sensationalise the shocking scenes they witness, preferring to simply convey the facts and expose the reality of a brazenly exploitive empire conveniently sanitized and dressed-up as a caring, quality controlled production system bringing you, the consumer, everything you could ever wish for and all in the air conditioned convenience of your local hypermarket food dispenser.
Fortunately, the reader is guided towards both personal and more general solutions, under such headings as "how to avoid the coming crisis" and "consumer power - what you can do". They are both pragmatic and realistic guides for the perplexed - sensibly encouraging readers to buy 'local' from producers one comes to trust and respect. Not wasting food by over-buying and avoiding over-eating meat products.
Human health is recognised as being dependent upon soils, animals and plants being treated as vital living organisms whose optimum growth is achieved by using natural ingredients and through the adoption of a caring, loving attitude, that is the antithesis of the subhuman battle ground that epitomizes the twenty first century factory farm.
All in all, I would strongly recommend this book to anyone who wants a grounded, undiluted account of the machinations of the global food industry and its devastating affect on the lives of millions of sentient beings, including ourselves.
The book: 'Farmageddon - the True Cost Cheap Meat' is written by Philip Lymbery and Isobel Oakshot and published by Bloomsbury.
Julian Rose is an early pioneer of UK organic farming, writer, broadcaster and activist. He is currently the President of the International Coalition to Protect the Polish Countryside. His most recent book 'In Defence of Life - A Radical Reworking of Green wisdom' is published by Earth Books. Julian's website is www.julianrose.info.
Farmageddon by Philip Lymbery with Isabel Oakeshott, review
Tom Fort is impressed by a deft exposé of the nightmare world of modern factory farming
5 out of 5 stars
Herd instinct: what does the future hold for farming?
Herd instinct: what does the future hold for farming? Photo: Alamy
By Tom Fort7:00AM GMT 10 Feb 2014
A few years back I commented to a highly intelligent and articulate young Romanian on the proliferation of industrial pig units in rural Transylvania. He was a keen fisherman and passionate about protecting his country’s beautiful mountain trout streams. But he was puzzled by my interest in the welfare of livestock. “Why should I care?” he demanded. “They are just pigs.”
Romanians, like other Eastern Europeans, are mighty meat eaters and, like my angling acquaintance, largely indifferent to the suffering of farmed animals. It is no coincidence that Smithfield, the American hog empire, has invested so heavily in animal factories in Poland and Romania.
All the tales that come out of industrial farming are horror stories, and Philip Lymbery, of Compassion in World Farming, has criss-crossed the world to chronicle some of them. He has stood in the chemical-drenched almond orchards of California, where no grass grows and not a butterfly or an insect is to be seen. He has held his nose outside giant dairies where cows “with pink and grey beach-ball udders” stagger under the weight of their milk.
In Taiwan he inspected an “organic” egg farm where 300,000 hens were confined in cages stacked seven deep and starved to shorten the intervals between laying cycles. He boated across the waters of Chesapeake Bay to see how this marine wonderland had been fouled by waste from the poultry industry. On a plateau in south-east Mexico, Lymbery drove through a vast city of pig sheds and parked beside a lagoon of liquid effluent to talk to the locals about the stench, the pollution of watercourses, the outbreaks of swine flu.
All the statistics are appalling. Forty billion bees are trucked in to pollinate California’s almond trees because the native bees have been wiped out by chemical sprays. More than half of Argentina’s farmland has been turned over to grow soya beans to be made into animal feed for export. A third of global production of cereals goes on feeding beasts for the slaughter.
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There is a horrible account of Lymbery’s visit to the Peruvian port of Chimbote, the centre of the anchovy industry. More than a million tons of anchovies are exported annually from Peru as fishmeal, to be used to feed farmed fish around the world. The little fish are sucked from the holds into the factories to be processed, and the waste – scales, guts, surplus fat – is pumped back into the sea. The surface is a glistening layer of grease, while the seabed is a sludge-choked dead zone.
Lymbery is excellent on the discreet scourge of aquaculture – “fish factories under the sea.” He goes to Loch Maree in the far north-west of Scotland, which was once the most famous destination in the land for catching big sea trout. The trout have gone, wiped out by the explosions of parasitic sea lice from the salmon farms clustered around Maree’s outlet to the sea. Scotland’s salmon farms have despoiled once-pristine marine ecologies all around the coast, yet Alex Salmond wants to see production doubled or tripled to meet demand from China.
Who is to blame for this nightmare of callousness and brutality? In one sense, of course, it is the producers and those who fund them. But it is we, the consumers, who make it all possible. We are complicit and we are guilty.
As Lymbery patiently explains, we do not have to live and eat this way. If we could get accustomed to eating less meat, we could rear what we needed on outdoor pasture. We could feed fish to people instead of to other fish. We could feed pigs and poultry on food waste. We could keep the land healthy by switching from monoculture to mixed farming.
But we do not. Such a revolution would require us to change the way we think about feeding ourselves and our children, the way we shop and cook, the way we live. It is too difficult; far easier to maintain our collective blindness to the horrors that are hidden behind the orderly stacks of packaged meat on the supermarket shelves.
I’m afraid the only shock seismic enough to shake this complacency would be a threat to human life. Thanks to campaigners such as Philip Lymbery, the truth about factory farming has been laid bare, but we prefer not to face it. A plague, an epidemic directly attributable to the horrible things we do to animals, might achieve what no book, even one as level-headed as this one, can.
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Farmageddon by Philip Lymbery (with Isabel Oakeshott): Book review
Mike McCarthy Friday 7 February 2014 00:00 GMT0 comments
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One of the inescapable facts of the modern age is that America does everything first and the rest of the world follows. America gave us electricity and aviation and extra-terrestrial travel, and recently it has given us social media, and the electronic devices which make that possible. So far so good. But now it’s giving the world something it can do without: mega-farming.
The mega-dairy, the mega-piggery, the mega-beefery, are things which may not yet have impinged on your consciousness, not only because it is in the US that they have taken off, but because they are invisible anyway: this new, mammoth-scale livestock rearing takes place behind closed doors, in enormous, soulless sheds, where thousands upon thousands of animals are kept crammed and tightly restricted on concrete floors, for the whole of their lives.
It’s perfectly logical. In the spiritual home of capitalism, it’s merely capitalism’s first principle, the maximisation of profit, applied by big companies to the management of livestock, with ruthless efficiency. But in terms of animal welfare it is hideous, and it brings in its train a whole series of extremely serious new environmental problems (not least how to dispose of the millions of tonnes of excrement such facilities produce).
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Philp Lymbery head of the estimable British charity, Compassion in World Farming, sounds the alarm about the arrival of mega-farming in his remarkable new book Farmageddon (co-written with the journalist Isabel Oakeshott). It is not a vegetarian rant. It is not anti-meat. But it is an unforgettable indictment of the new hyper-industrialised agriculture originating in the USA which is now spreading around the world.
Lymbery has travelled the world to document it, starting in California’s Central Valley, whose mega-dairies can have 10,000 cows being milked in once place – 100 times the size of a British dairy herd. He looks at the gruesome mega-piggeries taking off in China and he shines a riveting spotlight on the repulsive fishmeal industry of Peru, where millions of tonnes of anchovies are dragged from the sea merely to be ground up as fishmeal for livestock feed.
Along the way he raises a raft of new concerns, one of the most sensitive and controversial being that vets, in contrast to their benign James Herriot image, have to a large extent sold out to agribusiness and are now on the side of the accountants rather than the side of the animals.
It is the most timely of warnings. Three years ago, plans for Britain’s first mega-dairy, an 8,000 cow facility in Lincolnshire, were thrown out after a public outcry. We’ve lived with factory farming for a long time and we probably thought it couldn't get any worse. But it can – if we let it.
COLIN TUDGE
Cereal Misdemeanours
Farmageddon: The True Cost of Cheap Meat
By Philip Lymbery with Isabel Oakeshott
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The pun in Farmageddon is fully justified: agriculture has seriously lost its way and since it sits at the heart of all our lives – and the lives of all other creatures – this places the whole world in danger. Modern farming fails to provide us all with good food, yet this, surely, is its purpose. Almost a billion people worldwide – one in seven – are chronically undernourished, even though we produce enough food for 14 billion – twice what we need now and 50 per cent more than the world will need this century (the UN tells us that the global population should level out at around 10 billion by 2100). But as Philip Lymbery and Isabel Oakeshott point out, about 50 per cent of what’s grown is wasted and about half of the cereal that does pull through (and at least 90 per cent of the world’s soya) is fed to livestock. We could easily produce all the meat that is needed to support the world’s great cuisines if we simply fed the cattle and sheep on grass and browse, which is their natural fare, and fed pigs and poultry on leftovers and surpluses, as was traditional.
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The mutant meat industry
Camilla Swift
Pigs in their pen in Chengdu, China. Image: Getty
Camilla Swift
7 February 2014
2:11 PM
When it emerged that there was horsemeat in cheap burgers, some people thought it might spark a revolution in the British meat industry. Now that the public are more aware of the ins and outs of it all – the complicated and murky supply chains, the potential drug contamination, the images of badly-wrapped frozen meat – perhaps cheap meat would lose its attraction.
But it doesn’t seem to have done so. Despite the stories about sales of game meat soaring and of people going back to basics and cooking from scratch, sales of processed meats such as sausages and burgers are still booming – both in the UK and abroad.
Perhaps a book called Farmageddon will do what previous meat ‘scandals’ have failed to do. It’s written by Philip Lymbery, the head of Compassion in World Farming, so it comes as no surprise that the author disapproves of many of the methods used in intensive farming. But what might be a more shocking revelation from the book is the mutation involved. Dairy cows in China have been injected with human genes in a bid to make them produce ‘human-like’ milk – an alternative to formula or cows’ milk. Again, in China in 2011, pigs were pumped full of illegal muscle-building steroids which made the animals so big that their legs couldn’t support them – and 300 people were poisoned by the tainted pork. Israeli chickens are being bred without feathers – surely plucking them is just a waste of time? After all, the more efficient the animal, the more money can be made from it.
There have been numerous attempts by celebrity chefs to try to inform children about where their food comes from. But maybe instead of encouraging cookery classes in schools, we ought to be teaching them about what is in their food. It might not be nice, and it might not be pretty, but surely it’s kinder in the long run if the next generation knows what, exactly, they are using to fuel their bodies. And if they still choose to eat cheap meat, at least they’re aware of their decision.