At this moment of reckoning with the destructiveness of the human taste for animal flesh, small, family-run farms are emerging as the cause that everybody from Prince Charles to the European legislature wants to champion. But are they really the environmental panacea everyone makes them out to be?

Prince Charles recently wrote in the Guardian that small-scale family farms “must be a key part in any fair, inclusive, equitable and just transition to a sustainable future,” illustrated with a picture of some lambs in a field. The EU has also announced that it will be reforming farming subsidies to try to stop the decline of small farms, the numbers of which have been decimated across Europe by agricultural intensification. As reported by the Guardian, this was framed against an analysis by the newspaper that “the number of poultry and livestock animal farms alone in the EU, excluding Croatia, fell by 3.4m between 2005 and 2016, to 5.6m.” The Guardian also just published a story about the loss of small dairy farms in the US to mega-dairies. 

While neither Charles nor the EU was explicitly or only talking about animal farms, it is implied by what they say and how it has been reported that small animal farms are seen as the solution to industrial animal agriculture, as opposed to actually cutting the number of animals being farmed overall. Clearly, farmers and rural communities would benefit from a reversal in the trend found in Europe, the UK, and the US towards agricultural intensification. Families being able to make a living from running their own farms without being squeezed out by large agribusinesses sounds like an ideal everyone should be able to get behind.

But the same issues always arise when talking about farming animals. How would it be possible to meet the current demand for animal products with small-scale farms? More than 900 million animals are farmed in the UK every year alone. Without a significant reduction in consumption of their meat and milk, it is hard to see how that number could be farmed sustainably across many small farms rather than large intensive ones.

Some small-scale farmers do recognise the necessity of cutting back meat consumption. Chris Jones, who has a herd of 60 cows on an organic farm in Cornwall, told me that he believes we should stop producing beef cattle and instead “have really good native dairy cows that can eat just grass. We’ve got a little Jersey cow here and she’s giving us averaging probably 15, 16 litres of milk a day, just off that one cow ... And she’ll have a calf every year. Now, if the calves are what become the basis for the beef, rather than having specialist beef animals, that would probably be a sensible sort of national way to go.”

But some issues would remain even if animal farms downsized and became organic, such as the amount of manure produced by grazing livestock, which amounts to 73 million tonnes a year in the UK according to government data. Globally, in 2018 livestock manure contributed 20 per cent of agriculture’s emissions of nitrous oxide, which has 300 times more warming potential than carbon dioxide. Run-off from manure also causes eutrophication and acidification of water sources and are overall worse from organic farms than conventional ones. And 39 per cent of agriculture’s total emissions in 2018 was in the form of methane from ruminant animals.

In a larger country like the US, it is unclear how a reversal of agricultural intensification will benefit the climate or environment. Regenerative grazing is touted by many in the US as the sustainable alternative to industrial farming, but this requires significant land use since the grazing animals are supposed to mimic the activity of roaming herds of bison. In doing so it raises the question as to whether such grazing is even compatible with the idea of small-scale farms. Furthermore, this form of livestock farming does not address the methane emissions from grazing ruminants and causes a lot of other ‘collateral damage’, including the extirpation of predators and the displacement of native animals like elk.

Small-scale farms are also often viewed as being better for the farmed animals. This may be the case compared to the conditions that animals are subjected to on intensive farms, but as long as they remain a commercial product their welfare will always be compromised to some extent. This needs to be pointed out again and again to counter the romanticisation of small family farms as some haven for animals who will still experience certain kinds of harm. For example, the UK’s Ahisma Dairy Foundation does not slaughter its cows, but bulls are castrated without anaesthetic. Other practices like artificial insemination may also still be used on small farms. And at the end of the day, most of these animals will still die by having their throats cut. 

The promotion of small-scale farms as an ethical alternative to industrially-produced animal products is problematic too. Meat is so cheap because of greater efficiency on intensive farms and significant government subsidies. Meat that has been produced more ‘ethically’ from, for example, grass-fed cows, tends to be more expensive. But being able to afford more ‘ethical’ meat does not make a person more ethical themselves, and it would be unfair to view people who can only afford cheaper intensively-farmed options as less moral. In transforming our food systems, we should aim to make healthy, nature-friendly food accessible to everyone, not create further inequalities by insisting that everyone should both eat animal products and be willing to pay more for them. Nutritious plant-based foods are cheaper to produce and offer a more equitable solution.

Moreover, there is no guarantee that the more expensive produce from small farms will appeal to enough people to make them economically viable. Other factors such as the proposed post-Brexit trade deal with Australia, which could see a flood of cheap meat imported into the UK, and the rise of plant-based and lab-grown meat may soon be cheaper than meat made from animals. Returning to the small-scale animal farms of yesterday won’t set the clock back on the other changes taking place in our political and food systems.

So what about small-scale crop farms? A recent meta-analysis of the literature on the relationships between farm size and different indicators of production, environmental, and socio-economic performance found some positive results. According to 79 per cent of studies reviewed, smaller farms have higher yields, which increase 5 per cent per hectare decrease in farm size. Smaller farms also have “higher crop species richness” and that “non-crop biodiversity increases with decreasing farm size, with 77 per cent of studies finding that smaller farms have greater biodiversity at both farm and landscape scales.”

But small is not necessarily superior in all cases. According to a study by the University of Exeter, “it would be just as dangerous to assume that all large farms are environmentally damaging as it would to assume that all small farms are environmentally beneficial. Ultimately, rather than privileging one set of farms structures over another, it is a question of maintaining a diversity of farm size structures.” Even larger plant-based agriculture may have the edge on small-scale animal farms, since producing plant-based foods also takes up 100 times less land than equivalent amounts of animal products, freeing up more space for rewilding and nature restoration. Reducing farm size may in some cases be good policy for the EU, the UK, and the US too, but it should be combined with growing more crops for human consumption, particularly using regenerative methods such as ‘no till’ and crop rotation, and a plan to phase out animal farming.

Claire Hamlett is a freelance journalist, writer and regular contributor at Surge. Based in Oxford, UK, Claire tells stories that challenge systemic exploitation of and disregard for animals and the environment and that point to a better way of doing things.

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