The Role of Livestock

The SFA believes that grazing livestock have a crucial role to play in sustainable food systems due to their unique ability to digest grass and forage legumes, which take carbon and nitrogen out of the atmosphere and store them in the soil. There is an increasing need for information about sustainable livestock production, particularly because misconceptions and major factual inaccuracies are leading the media and campaigning organisations to call for a reduction in red meat, without distinguishing between different production methods and their different influences on human and environmental health.

We have supported the Sustainable Food Trust’s work in this area. In February 2015, the Sustainable Food Trust hosted a symposium in Bristol entitled The Role of Grazing Livestock in a World of Climate Change and Diet-Related Disease, and subsequently co-hosted an event in November 2015 in San Francisco entitled Positive Pastures alongside Animal Welfare Approved.