LETTER: Let’s hope the government is subsidising food that is good for us

Modern farming practices have been accused of contributing to global climate change – a controversial and much debated issue.

Let us not lose sight of what’s really important. Regardless of whether man made climate change is real or whether climate shifts are the result of wholly natural warming and cooling cycles, the fact remains that our weather and our environment are changing and these changes pose challenges to our food security and survival. Pressing world problems include: water scarcity, soil erosion and degradation, land turning into desert, loss of biodiversity, pollution, increasingly toxic foods and decreasing food safety, agricultural overuse of antibiotics leading to the development of drug resistant disease.

Regenerative agriculture addresses these and other problems. It optimises soil quality and benefits to air, water, ecosystem, food, animal welfare and human health are downstream results of this optimisation. Also, without diversity, crop failures become more serious and so do the environmental ramifications.

The separation of crops and animals into two distinctly different processes has also proven to be flawed in some ways.

Waste becomes pollution rather than a valuable part of the ecological cycle and a whole host of land maintenance services that animals serve for free have to be replaced with chemical and mechanical means.

There are many subsidies in agriculture. One hopes that the government is subsidising food that is actually good for us!

KATE TRAVERS

Sutton