By JAMES SPENCE
On Wednesday 12th February Cerno Capital hosted a dinner with Tracy Worcester, environmental campaigner and founder of Farms Not Factories.
Farms Not Factories is a non-profit organisation working through film-making and campaigning to support the ‘food sovereignty’ movement. Their works seeks to expose the true and hidden costs of cheap meat produced by animal factories, and the goal is to inspire consumers to only buy meat from local, healthy, high welfare farms.
Beneath the surface of cheap accessible meat purchasing lie devastating hidden costs.
The globalisation of the farming industry continues to undermine small-scale, high-welfare producers facilitating a loss of food sovereignty in the UK. The large-scale producers seek to maximise short term financial profit to the detriment of animal welfare leading to a multitude of abuse issues (e.g. overcrowding, neglect and denial of natural behaviours). Mass production intensive farms care little for the long term external costs associated with pollution of the air, sickening local residents, and of the soil and water table, rivers and sea. Further issues associated with these ‘factories’ include the rise of antibiotic resistance, a time-bomb threatening the future health of the population.
Tracy Worcester is spreading the word on the true extent of these costs and is working tirelessly to promote the ideals of ethical farming practice. Food sovereignty focuses on food for the people, it values local food providers, localises food systems, puts control of good practice back into local hands, it helps to rebuild knowledge and skills and ultimately it works in harmony with nature.
For more information, please visit: https://farmsnotfactories.org/