What Now For The Cow?
Bovine Lysenkoism
The British Countryside is a place portrayed as a pastoral land of slow, sleepy grazing, rolling hills and neat hedgerows. Nothing signifies the UK faming industry like its grass fed cattle herds. It is an ancient form of farming that allowed sunlight to be converted into beef, milk, tallow, cheese and leather. It is a symbol of British harmony with the land—but modernity cannot allow the old world to persist in any capacity and as surreal as it may seem, those is power seem determined to destroy both the cow and the British pasture.
In February 2019, U.S. representative for New York's 14th congressional district Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez penned supplementary documents to what was dubbed The Green New Deal, a large congressional Climate Change bill. The news stories around the bill zero’d in on a claim surrounding “Farting Cows,” and the policies were roundly laughed at as unworkable fantasy epitomised by the focus on bovine digestion. A media debate then ensued over whether it was “cow farts” or “cow burps” that were killing the planet. The horror of potential mass animal culling and deliberate degradation of the food supply was washed away in a deluge of Clown World stories about the ‘Loony Left.’
If you’re laughing, you’re losing. This is one of our many mantras when dealing with the politics of Clown World. As the late, great Johnathan Bowden warned us:
“[Conservatives] never believed that [the left] were deadly serious in their humorlessness, in their ranting, in their dialectic, in what they wanted to enforce. They were completely serious, and the sort of “reactionary” view that they could be laughed at and scorned, which was largely the reaction to the 1960s for example, in certain respects, has been proved to be totally false. The cultural values are such that these people have taken over, and people who call themselves conservative are all at sea and don’t even know what’s happened.”
If the last 50 years have taught us anything then it is this: the unthinkable lunacy of yester-year is the grim reality of today—no matter how seemingly ‘unworkable.’ We are, once again, all at sea as the Welsh Government commands the effective seizure of ten percent of Welsh Farmland to grow trees and other non-productive Rewilding schemes. It also demands a 112,000 ‘livestock unit reduction’ in the number of animals, their euphemism for Welsh farmers being forced to get rid of their animals. No one is laughing about “cow farts” now.
The changes being made to farming within the EU are equally as disastrous, 5% reduction Europe wide in the number of pigs, with a small number of countries responsible for cutting the deepest. These dramatic reductions are one of the major the reasons for the current spate of EU wide farming protests.
It seems there is large-scale agreement that this process is unfair toward farmers Europe wide and endangers food security in a volatile world—and yet this process continues to push farming over the cliff edge. It is policy no one seems to want, barring an extreme activist fringe, and one which politicians all say is coming from a neutral class of omnipotent experts. Welsh farmers have begun their own, albeit more muted, protest movement with farmers presenting a coffin at a protest in Carmarthen to signify the death of Welsh farming these climate measures will bring.
I was surprised to see these very issues raised in a video by Harry’s Farm, run by Harry Metcalf founder of Evo Magazine, who has been a farmer since before founding his most famous business. In it he explains, in plain terms, many of the issues facing farming in the UK and Europe. Topics we have spoken about being reiterated by someone who is not a politics figure shows how pressing these issues are to those involved. As a farmer, he is able to see the insanity taking place in Wales and Europe through a non political and purely practical lens. But the politics of why this is happening are inescapable. See our previous work on the subject for more expansive detail:
The public in the UK have constantly been reassured that the wacky policy we see in proposal documents is not happening for the reason of social engineering:
“The UK government has 'no intention' of telling the public to eat less meat in the battle against climate change, claims the Environment Secretary.” -The Daily Mail, 8 June 2022
This is a half-truth, The UK will instead leave it to regional governments to to explicitly force people to eat less meat. One of the justifications for the reductions in Welsh livestock is directly based on the idea of forcing people into lower meat diets via lower meat consumption:
“The evidence clearly shows that for the sake of planetary and human health, global diets must converge towards much higher proportions of plant-based foods, such as those based on coarse grains, legumes, fruits and vegetables, and nuts and seeds, with significant reductions in consumption of meat (especially red meat) and little to no consumption of ultra-processed foods.”
“Food systems interventions that address diet change and seek to expand access to sustainable, healthy foods therefore have significant potential to combine climate mitigation with a range of broader benefits for nature, human health and societal inequality.”
This is not merely some fringe action group putting forth this report; The Wales Centre for Public Policy is funded directly by The Welsh Government and by the Economic and Social Research Council, which funded by the UK government. These are not policies that are theoretical or ethereal, the animals are already dead and they were killed explicitly so that you would have less meat to eat in a effort to control the weather. That is their own internal reasoning.
This represents a form of modern Lysenkoism, where politics is put above the practical realities of farming and runs counter to human knowledge about food production. Lysenko believed the Soviet Union could grow crops using proletariat will as a fertiliser. UK technocrats believe they can feed a country sustainably whilst reducing food production and drastically increasing the population via mass immigration.
What the UK Government has signed up by committing to a legally binding Net Zero target is the complete removal of cows from the UK as practical mass scale carbon capture currently does not exist. A report into the realities of Net Zero implementation with current technology advises that to meet the Net Zero targets ALL ruminants, that is sheep and cows, must be “phased out:”
“Food and agriculture: Beef and lamb phased out by 2050 and replaced by greatly expanded demand for vegetarian food. Electricity supply for food processing and storage will be cut by 50% […] leather production (which depends on cows) would not be compatible with Absolute Zero for the same reasons given for beef earlier” -Absolute Zero Report
Once again this process seems insane, you can’t simply phase out the cornerstones of British Agriculture and of many people’s diets without risking mass unrest and food shortages. To do so would require the wielding of the British state like a sword against its own populace who do not want to undertake these changes and the complete death of British livestock farming. But, in the absence of an organised minority, who is there to stop them? Many people have told me that they do not think they are serious about killing all the cows, but the process of doing so has already begun.
I am reminded of another communist farming project, the four pests campaign in Maoist China that aimed to eliminate rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows wholesale from the Chinese biosphere based on theories of public health officials and an offshoot of soviet Lysenkoist science regarding agriculture. This is one of the most famous cases of bureaucrats acting on dogmatic and politicised scientific theory that created an ecological disaster. This Maoist Science resulted in the death of 20-30 million Chinese. Mass starvation in aid of centrally planned state targets is a familiar tale in the modern world: The Sri Lanka Fertiliser Ban was nearly one such recent case, with food production collapsing due to a form of Organic Farming Lysenkoism.
I wonder what UK ecology will look like without the sheep and cows which have grazed this land for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. I hope we never have to find out.
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"To do so would require the wielding of the British state like a sword against its own populace" Yeah exactly!!!!