Push to Cut Livestock for Climate Goals Worries UK Farmers, Ecologists

Ecologist Pablo Manzano said there is a ‘tension between people caring about climate and people caring about biodiversity.’

Sheep in a pen ahead of a shearing competition on the first day of the Great Yorkshire Show in Harrogate, England, on July 11, 2023. AFP via Getty Images/Oli Scarff/

UK government advisers have urged deep cuts to the country’s cattle and sheep numbers to reduce the overall levels of methane emissions.

Officials insist that no mass cull is planned.

But farmers are concerned that it is part of a growing push to reduce livestock levels, which could sacrifice traditional grazing and damage the fragile ecosystems that it supports.

The UK’s net zero policies go further than those of the European Commission. Cattle farms in the European Union remain outside regulatory crosshairs until next year.

In February, the UK’s independent adviser on climate action, the Climate Change Committee (CCC), whose advice strongly guides government policy, recommended a 27 percent decrease in cattle and sheep numbers by 2040 in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

According to the UK government, agriculture is the country’s largest source of domestic methane emissions, accounting for 49 percent of total emissions. Of this, about 85 percent of agricultural methane comes from cows and other ruminant animals through enteric fermentation and is released mostly as burps, but also as flatulence.

One discussed option in the House of Lords Environment and Climate Change Committee’s 2024 report as a mitigation strategy was “reducing ruminant livestock numbers, enabled by dietary change and reduced food waste.”

‘It’s Completely Backwards’

The UK’s livestock farms, which are mostly grass-based, are integrated into the iconic patchwork countryside. Sheep and cattle graze in open fields divided by hedgerows and stone walls as part of a complex natural ecosystem.

Alan Hughes, a fourth-generation tenant farmer who is part of the Farmers to Action agricultural rights campaign, told The Epoch Times that wider net zero proposals on livestock ignore the ecological function of grazing.

“It’s completely backwards to stop grazing,“ he said. ”It causes fires, which then releases far more [carbon dioxide] than the livestock sequence by grazing.”

He noted that without sheep grazing, “sheep don’t eat the dry matter,” which then turns to kindling.

“This then starts wildfires, from the peat and from the crops which should have been eaten by the sheep, which causes a massive release of [carbon dioxide],” he said.

Beyond fire risk, Hughes said, reducing livestock also damages food security and degrades natural ecosystems.

“The biggest issue we’re going to have before long is not enough protein to feed our population, which is why they’re looking at bugs,” he said.

“If they force us to do more, I call it ‘less natural’ ways of production. If you don’t have livestock grazing, you don’t have the manure or improve the biodiversity of soil, and that’s when you get soil erosion, which causes deserts, or you’re forced to do vegetable crops.

“Now, when you plow up a field for vegetable crops, you kill the root structure of grass. Now that then turns to methane and carbon dioxide, which is actually released.”

When asked for comment, the Tenant Farmers Association pointed The Epoch Times to a statement made in February by Chief Executive George Dunn that also pushed back against the CCC’s recommendations.

“Livestock farmers are merely recycling carbon sequestered from the atmosphere in the grass that they grow, together with the hedgerows and trees existing on their holdings,” the group stated.

“However, they are also the custodians of a massive carbon bank in their soils that have locked up carbon for the benefit of the nation and the world.”

Campaigners

The CCC’s recommendations carry legal and political weight because of the UK’s 2008 Climate Change Act, which legally commits the country to net zero by 2050. The UK is one of only a few countries to tie net zero objectives into law with a statutory obligation.

Campaigners are using this law to enable government action.

Chris Packham, a naturalist and BBC TV presenter, used the act in 2023 to challenge then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s delay of heat pump and electric car targets. The case reached a legal settlement in October 2024 after the new Labour government said the previous administration had acted unlawfully.

Packham and the group Wild Justice, which he cofounded, are now focusing on Dartmoor, a vast moorland in the county of Devon, Southwest England. They blame sheep for biodiversity loss in the area.

The presenter said in a July Guardian op‑ed that “livestock—particularly sheep—continue to destroy what little heather moorland is left.”

The group, represented by environmental law firm Leigh Day, is taking legal action against the Dartmoor Commoners’ Council, which represents local farmers with traditional grazing rights. Wild Justice is pursuing action under environmental and conservation regulations rather than the Climate Change Act.

Supporters of sheep farming, such as The Moorland Association, say sheep have been grazing Dartmoor for thousands of years.

“They have been quietly grazing Dartmoor for around 3,500 years, long before the Industrial Revolution left its mark,“ it stated. ”It seems unfair to lay today’s environmental problems at the hooves of animals that have coexisted with this landscape for millennia.”

‘Tension’

By contrast, the EU has so far targeted only the largest pig and poultry farms with binding emissions rules.

Cattle farms remain outside the current scope, pending a formal evaluation by 2026.

A 2023 research paper published in peer-reviewed journal La Revue de l'OFCE suggested that EU cattle herds may need to shrink by about 16.3 million head to deliver about 30 percent greenhouse gas reductions by 2030.

Ecologist and rangeland researcher Pablo Manzano said the wider debate could be overlooking ecological realities.

“They want to go against livestock, and particularly against extensive, grazing livestock, because they consider it something that triggers climate change,” he told The Epoch Times.

However, he said grazing livestock are needed to maintain biodiversity in Europe.

“This is widely understood by the people that work on ecosystems,” he said.

“So at the end of the day, there is a tension between the people caring about climate and the people caring about biodiversity—in the sense that biodiversity protection allows for a climatic burden to be born in order to protect biodiversity.”

Manzano’s research has found that historic populations of wild herbivores on the planet were at similar levels to domestic herbivore biomass across the world, demonstrating that they have played an ongoing role in balancing ancient ecosystems for millions of years.

But he said the U.N. Convention on Climate Change classifies managed lands as emission sources without factoring in key ecological dynamics.

“If they were reverted to the natural state, it means that its emissions should not be considered as anthropogenic, because they are part of the natural emissions of an ecosystem,” he said.

“And it not only happens with grazing livestock, it also happens ... for example, when we plant rice in a wetland. Wetlands have a lot of emissions also. They don’t differ much from the emissions of rice.”

To prevent livestock emissions, some policymakers are promoting intensification rather than traditional grazing as the solution.

“To intensify them ... so that you would lower the footprint per kilogram of products,” he said. “That’s definitely in the discussion.

“You don’t only need to understand a little bit of your gas concentration in the atmosphere, you also have to have a little bit of understanding on ecology: niche ecology and wide ecosystem ecology. So I think a lot of people also get lost in these things.”

‘A Symbiotic Relationship’

Author and farmer Jamie Blackett told The Epoch Times that he shared Manzano’s view that anything “that is a natural process is something that should be encouraged as much as possible.”

“There is a symbiotic relationship between grazing cattle and the insects that live in their dung, the birds that eat the insects,“ he said. ”Without cows, there are no cow pats, and without cow pats, there are no insects. Without insects, there are no birds. That’s how it works.”

He said his own farm is not yet directly affected by net zero livestock rules but that “there is always the threat.”

A spokeswoman for the CCC pointed The Epoch Times by email to a statement in its Seventh Carbon Budget, which urged the government to provide “incentives and address barriers for farmers and land managers to diversify land use and management into woodland creation, peatland restoration, bioenergy crops and renewable energy.”

The report also recommended providing “long-term certainty on public funding for farming practices and technologies which reduce emissions from managing crops and livestock.”

A spokesperson for Wild Justice told The Epoch Times by email, “We will pick this one up again when we have our legal decision later in the year.”