Redesigning Animal Agriculture

210 D.L. Swain and M. Gill
economic pressures for the UK dairy industry.
Aligning the broad economic direction
with community needs through a combination
of government intervention and market
alignment can create economic stability.
The Environment and the Impact of
Livestock Production
It is important to recognize that natural
ecosystems are in a continual state of flux
due to a range of pressures. If modern agriculture
had never existed, there would still
have been natural changes that would have
shaped the landscape. Throughout the last
3.5 million years there have been a series
of ice ages which have covered vast areas of
the planet under ice and influenced global
climate. The palaeoecological records show
that as the global temperature rose and the
ice retreated, so natural succession occurred
and previously barren areas became highly
productive, species-rich environments (Lowe
and Walker, 1997). Therefore change is an
ongoing phenomenon and the natural environment
has evolved diversity to continually
adapt and exploit new opportunities that are
created through change (Shugart, 1998).
Agriculture has accelerated the rate of
change in the landscape and the environment
in general. The change has been driven by a
need to increase food production either to feed
expanding national populations or to respond
to international markets. The question we are
addressing is; who is responsible for the cost of
that impact? It could be those who initiated the
change (which may be generations back), those
who currently own or farm the land, or those
who reaped the benefits of the outputs (i.e.
policy makers and consumers). This section
considers some of the factors which affect community
perceptions and values in relation to
shaping the landscape, and changing the environment,
before exploring the implications.
Environmental values
There are wide and varied cultural differences
in society’s concerns about environ-
mental degradation (Ignatow, 2006). The
value society puts on the environmental
landscape is in part linked to an aesthetic
appeal. The appeal with the natural world
has been termed biophilia (Wilson, 2003),
in other words our environmental preferences
are determined by our ancestral origins.
Although there is still debate over the
exact environmental conditions that shaped
our evolution, there is general consensus
that there is a direct link between our ancestral
interactions with past environments
and our current innate environmental preferences
(Potts, 1998).
Good or bad environmental changes are
commonly considered in relation to human
values and perceptions (Ignatow, 2006).
Previous agricultural practices which utilized
natural resources for society’s benefits
have created what are now considered as
resources of high environmental value, for
example coppice woodland or species-rich
grasslands, which encourage biodiversity.
Therefore, understanding and quantifying
community environmental landscape value
is not easy. Our historical and cultural affiliations
combined with our knowledge and
understanding of environmental impacts
will shape our individual core values.
Whether these values are articulated through
government policy or by consumer buying
preferences, they are an important consideration
for redesigning animal agriculture.
Who is responsible for landscape
and environmental change?
Farmers are traditionally viewed as custo dians
of the land and their activities shape the
environmental landscape (Firbank, 2005;
Zurlini et al., 2006). The broader community
may therefore consider the farmer as having
a responsibility to pre serve the landscape in
its current form or for converting it to a perceived
‘better’ form. In a previous section
we considered how economic incentives
were powerful drivers for change. Farmers
have responded to the drive to produce
cheap food through increased agricultural
intensification, higher stocking rates and