UNITED KINGDOM, May 30, 2022 (BBC): Laurence Candy is not only giving up farming animals, he is looking to get vegan accreditation. It was after Laurence Candy lost most of his dairy herd to bovine tuberculosis that he decided he would no longer send animals to the slaughterhouse. “It made me wonder if we can justify the industrial slaughter of sentient beings,” says the 50-year-old looking back on the event in 2017. “As a society, we have to question this.” Since last year, Mr Candy has been working with a Scottish-based organization called Farmers For Stock-Free Farming (FFSFF), which has been set up to support meat and dairy farmers who want to transition to animal-free agriculture. He is now in the process of selling his remaining animals – 35 beef cattle – and concentrating instead on growing cereals such as oat, wheat, barley and broad beans. Mr Candy is also switching to “veganic production”, which prohibits the use of manure, or any other animal product, to improve the soil. For this, he is working with a body called International Biocyclic Vegan Network, which promotes and certifies plant-based, organic farms around the world.
The statistics bear out his comments. The number of vegans in Britain quadrupled between 2014 and 2019, according to a survey for the Vegan Society. Meanwhile, almost half (49%) of Britons are now limiting their meat consumption, or not eating it at all, found research this year from market research group Mintel. This was up from 41% in 2020. It comes at the same time as the National Food Strategy, an independent review, said last year that the UK’s current appetite for meat was “unsustainable”. It concluded that intake needed to fall by 30% to help improve the environment. This call to reduce meat consumption, and a parallel increased interest in veganism, is replicated around the world.
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https://www.bbc.com/news/business-61565233