The founder of the Sustainable Food Trust and organic farmer, Patrick Holden, says he wants to see “a whole new debate on the role of livestock and animals in sustainable agriculture”.

Holden made the call at this month’s Food on Prescription Conference (part of the Integrative & Personalised Medicine Congress 2024 event).

He told the Conference: “We are actually a grass fed nation, if you now what I mean. I think this idea that we’ve all got to move to a plant-based diet is misleading. What we need is the right kind of plants and the right kind of animals. And animals will be needed if we are going to move to a truly biologically-based regenerative farming system.

“And I’ll give you an example. We cannot grow healthy carrots on our farm without a long-term restorative phase in our rotations, where we probably grow five years of grass and two years of arable crops – one of which might now be carrots. The only way we can turn grass into the fertility building period, and food that people eat, is through ruminant animals – that’s cows and sheep. A lot of people think they’re part of the problem. They think they are part of the climate problem, but our farm is carbon negative because the carbon sequestration achieved partly by the interaction with the ruminants more than offsets the methane emissions of those animals. So, I think there needs to be a whole new national debate on the role of livestock and animals in sustainable food systems. Because if we don’t eat the right kind of animal products the agricultural transition we need can’t happen.”

Touching on another often polarised debate – land sharing versus land sparing – Holden stressed that “the boost in diversity we have seen on our farm has been going on in the field, not around the edges”. He added: “I’m old enough to remember when the field used to be an extraordinary habitat, where crops could coexist with insects, small birds and butterflies and everything else. The reason that has gone is that we use chemicals in agriculture. All we need to do is move to a biologically based system and we will see wildlife coming back. So, I think we need a more educated approach to these ideas that we simply need to be rewilding and replanting forests.”

• This article forms parr of a longer report on the Food on Prescription Conference