Speciality Food Feb/March 2024

30 @specialityfood W hen we first started our sustainability journey I remember an old adage coming home to roost. “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”. It was one of those omnipresent phrases that would arise when any new business activity was being considered. And how true it is and how very annoying at the same time. Because it meant the dream of new initiative was tempered by degrees of hard calculations to get it off the ground. My thinking was that being entrepreneurial was supposed to be creative and inspiring, hopefully financially beneficial and, at times dare I say it, fun! At least that’s what it said at the entrepreneur recruitment centre when I signed up. But as we all know, the measuring process can become the very opposite of all those things – time- consuming, frustrating and even soul-destroying. In fact, the mere mention of “data submission” even to this day is enough for me to start reviewing retirement arrangements. And it applies to concepts that you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alleyway. Business rates, pensions regulations, service charges, insurance policies, VAT computations, which all conspire to add an industrial language answer to that meaning of business life question. It would perhaps be easy for sustainability to fall into the dreaded category, especially every January when our thoughts turn again to this vitally important element of our commercial and also personal lives. But I have been pleased to see that this has not been the case for us. Mainly because some members of the Partridges team are clearly made of stern stuff, and have taken on the sustainability challenge with full throttle enthusiasm and dedication. So, firstly, it has been very helpful to build on this naturally evolving platform and allow sustainability leaders in the team to come to the fore. JOHN SHEPHERD PARTRIDGES It tookus about eightweeks tomeasure andcollate thedata for a one-year period relating to buildings, travel, waste, water and procurement. Thiswouldprovideus with the basis for reduction targets ‘Measuring sustainability is key tomaking improvements’ Secondly, sustainability is not an exclusive club open to only highly trained professionals and academics - although their advice and support are invaluable. Everyone in the workforce has an element of control over their jobs, and will keep thinking of more efficient and sustainable ways of improving their working life. It is in their best interests to do so. Thirdly, by creating goals and achievable targets, and through internal dialogue and communication, there has emerged a common sense of purpose in almost everything we do on a daily level. This does not mean that we are in any way ‘achieving’ sustainability, but it does mean we are moving towards that goal in a more unified manner. This is where the measuring comes into play. Using the very helpful Planet Mark organisation as our mentors, it took us about eight weeks to measure and collate the data for a one-year period relating to buildings, travel, waste, water and procurement. This would provide us with the basis for reduction targets. The results once broken down into illustrative examples by Planet Mark make fascinating reading - at least for me. For example, the current energy we were using in our two food shops could power 209 UK homes for a year. The waste we produced from the shops per year was the same as the weight of eight London buses, we used 133lts of water for each member of staff per day, and we got through 134 sheets of stationery per day. In terms of company travel we have completed a one-way journey to Carlisle (by my calculations). Only through the measuring exercise of our consumption has the scale of the challenge come to life. Our next targets are to reduce annual power emissions to under 200 homes, reduce waste to six London buses, shorten our ‘travel’ to Blackpool or even Manchester, and cut back on water and stationery in any ways we can. And each year reduce further. The result of all this may soon be the equivalent to days or even weeks less to pay a year in rent. And that would be fun for entrepreneurs everywhere. A nimal-sourced foods (taken here to meanmeat, milk and eggs from livestock, but not fish or wild game) are a key component of diets the world over. They supply us with a third of our protein and significant quantities of other essential nutrients that can sometimes be relatively difficult to obtain from plants – just one of the reasons why livestock are particularly vital in parts of the developing world where undernutrition remains a debilitating problem. Livestock can also produce food from grasslands and other resources that humans can’t cultivate or eat, while the manure they supply (although amounting to little more than a toxic waste stream inmany intensive farming systems) remains a key and sustainable source of fertility across millions of acres of cropland – a positive relationship that could be reinstated across much of the developed world if livestock and cropping systems were to once again become better integrated. Food-feed competition At the same time however, the way in which we currently rear much of our livestock represents a major drain upon the global food supply. The reason for this is ‘food-feed competition’, an often-overlooked trade-off between intensive livestock and crop production, brought about by the increasingly widespread practice of feeding human-edible crops to animals. It’s an approach that generally improves the productivity of livestock systems, due to the high energy and protein concentrations of arable crops, and whichmany would argue also improves their sustainability, as it allows farmers to increase production while using less land and producing fewer methane emissions per kilo of product. While this has enabled us to keep satisfying our near-insatiable appetite for animal-sourced foods, it comes at a heavy cost. Livestock are highly inefficient at converting human edible crops into food, and this means we have ended up in a situation where vast quantities of calories and nutrients potentially available for human consumption are instead lost from the food system. The scale of this wastefulness is frightening: 40% of global arable land is now used to produce feed for livestock, an area which, if it were to be used instead for human food cropping, could feed an additional four billion people. This isn’t to say that giving any human edible crops to livestock automatically constitutes a crime against food security. Livestock can still make a positive contribution to our food supply when they are being fed a very limited quantity of human edible ingredients, as is the case as a global average with cattle, the majority of which obtainmuch of their feed from grass. Pigs and poultry, on the other hand, represent a net drain on the world’s protein supply, as they are muchmore reliant upon arable crops for feed. This holds true, of course, for intensive beef systems as well. The value of grazing livestock Some argue that we should stop eating animal-sourced foods altogether. But while eradicating livestock altogether would clearly resolve the problem of food-feed competition, this argument fails to account for the ability of grazing livestock such as cattle and sheep, to produce nutrient-dense foods from grass and other feedstuffs, such as crop by-products and food waste, that we can’t or don’t want to eat. Well-managed livestock provide other benefits too. Probably the clearest example of this comes with the vital role grazing livestock play in the management of many important wildlife habitats, including grassland, heathland and coastal marshes. When integrated with crop production, livestock can also play a hugely beneficial role in the restoration of degraded arable soils, and in reducing nitrogen fertiliser and other agrochemical use, by enabling systems that generate and recycle much of their own fertility through rotations designed to break weed, pest and disease cycles naturally. The arguments around the role of livestock in sustainable global food systems are complex, andmany other significant factors including food quality, culture, health and accessibility, need to be considered. Determining the value of livestock to food security is also partly a question of resilience, especially in the face of climate change and the slew of problems it will inevitably exacerbate. Rising undernutrition, increased barriers to trade, steadily degrading arable soils and declining crop yields: all of these are likely outcomes over the coming century that point strongly towards a continued need for livestock – providing, of course, the animals are reared in ways that augment, and therefore relieve the pressure upon, what will be an increasingly stressed supply of plant foods. Achieving this positive vision of livestock production won’t be easy. Quite apart from anything else, it will require a major reduction in the consumption of intensively produced animal- sourced foods in a society hooked upon cheapmeat. If we succeed, however, then we will have taken a major step towards building a food secure and sustainable future. ‘What role do livestock play in feeding theUK?’ Robert Barbour of The Sustainable Food Trust, delves into a controversial topic