The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Community => Coffee Lounge => Topic started by: ben.mcgeorge on July 05, 2019, 11:52:06 am
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Dear Accidental Smallholder community,
I hope you are all well and looking forward to the weekend!
My name is Ben McGeorge and I am writing from a London based TV production company called Raw TV. We have spent the last few months producing a new BBC documentary on the environmental impact of meat production. This documentary is presented by wildlife biologist Liz Bonnin and is broadly a follow up to last year’s Drowning in Plastic which Raw TV also produced.
While we are looking at meat's impacts, I must say that we are not ‘anti-meat’, rather we have been working with scientists, conservationists and farmers from around the world to really try and understand the situation. We have been all over the place looking at some of the impacts including searching for ‘lagoons’ of manure in the United States and tracking Harpy Eagles in the Brazilian Amazon – where the expansion of cattle pasture is destroying pristine habitat. Also investigating potential solutions, such as rotational intensive grazing and even meat grown in the lab.
The scientific consensus is that meat is not inherently bad, we just eat a little bit too much for it to be truly sustainable. Many believe that this is caused by the general public (around the world, not just the UK) being disconnected from the rearing of livestock for meat production. For many, meat is something that just comes wrapped in cellophane from the supermarket. This demand for meat has led to unsustainable and environmentally damaging production practices around the world.
For the final scenes of our documentary, we are really interested in Liz meeting the owners of a smallholding who occasionally dispatch their chickens for meat, for personal consumption.
The message that we want to get across from this scene is not that we should all raise our own livestock (slightly tricky for many here in London!!). Rather, that if we all thought a little more about the meat we eat, and where it comes from, then we may end up eating smaller amounts of higher-quality, locally-sourced meat. Something that can only be good for our planet.
Ultimately, we are looking for great characters who rear their own livestock because they believe that, overall, intensive farming and the over-consumption of meat is bad for the planet. By seeing the whole life cycle of the meat they consume, they will understand the relationship between their meat and the local environment. This understanding allows them to appreciate the meat more than the average consumer currently does.
However, at this stage I am not booking people up for filming just yet! Rather I am just keen to start chatting with people who run smallholdings and rear small numbers of livestock, to get a sense of their thoughts and opinions in this area.
Any assistance that you could provide would be greatly appreciated. If you would like further information about all this, then please let me know and I could give you a call sometime, perhaps early next week? You can reach me on my email ben.mcgeorge@raw.co.uk or give me a call anytime on 077689 68185.
Thank you for taking the time to read and consider this message!
All the best,
Ben