DEAR EDITOR,

Reading your piece last week on the Government review of Bord Bia’s carbon footprint, I think that, as farmers, we should not take a back seat on this and go along with the view often put out there that a healthy balanced diet based on meat and milk has a heavier carbon footprint than a plant-based diet.

It is a fact of geography and plant growth that most protein-producing plants do not grow well at higher latitudes such as ours – they require more heat and sunlight. So a properly balanced vegetarian diet will have to get most of its plant protein from crops grown in warmer latitudes and therefore imported.

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And in many cases, these crops need irrigation and energy to be grown, and certainly do not provide the same nutrient density as a balanced meat and veg diet, without being consumed in greater quantity to get the necessary nutritional density.

Certainly we can grow legumes and pulses here and that is to be encouraged, but these are generally more suitable for animal than human diets and don’t have great variety of protein.

Although I notice with interest the recent locally-based research (Queen’s University Belfast are partners) on varying the dietary product from pea-based protein.

The more home-sourced food we produce on this island for our food security and emissions profile the better.

In a peer-reviewed analysis published by the American Society of Nutrition (Am J Clin Nutr 2015;101:184–91) – see figure one on page 187 – the greenhouse gas emissions equivalent/100 kcal of energy of a processed plant diet is considerably higher than from a meat and milk diet. This is particularly so when this is a grass-based diet.

I believe our challenge should be to increase the proportion of our meat and milk that actually comes from grass and concentrate on reducing imported forage protein. We can grow crops for feed import substitution. But it will require a radical policy shift, I guess.