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Patrick Holden

Patrick Holden

Dairy farmer

Aug 14, 2026

14:01
So Patrick, just, just so I understood, your land use prescription when it comes to animal and ag- animal agriculture is as we are or less but better? What is it?
14:09
It's har- It's a mass extinction of factory chicken and, and factory pork.
14:16
So, uh, more than 50% of all the grain that is grown in the UK currently goes to feed chickens and pigs in basically horrible industrial conditions.
14:25
So it's the end of cheap white meat.
14:28
But paradoxically, because you're gonna put more arable land into fertility building as part of a proper rotation, you'd have a bit more mixed farming in the West as well, but overall, you'd, you're gonna have probably a slight increase in grassland, which is mean, which means less grain fed to, uh, dairy cows and beef, and ho- hopefully none to beef.
14:51
But you fatten the, the beef on grass, and so in terms of a post regen transition diet, we can eat quite a lot of, um, beef, lamb, and dairy products because we'll need those animals, uh, whose products can give farmers money and us food to eat, uh, to make it work.
15:13
So to all those on the climate side who say the biggest lever you can pull to reduce your climate impact yourself is to cut meat out of your diet, you'd say what?
15:23
I'd say if you look at the carrot fields of the fens, they're worse on carbon, for carbon than, say, my dairy farm in Wales, which looks as though it's carbon negative.

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