Interesting! Does anybody have access to reliable information about the environmental impact of UK sheep farming then?
When I tried to look it up a while back, I found wild claims about the amount of water used to produce a kilo of meat. However, when I delved deeper, it turned out the method used was to calculate how much rain fell annually on an acre and then divide that by the weight of beef produced by that acre (both as grazing and to grow wheat). That just strikes me as nonsense, since the lion's share of the water must surely end up in rivers etc, rather than being 'used' by the cows?
I have a personal interest in this, since I have been working for a company which is developing a meat alternative product, and where phrases like "unsustainable meat" are used as fact. However, when I look at my sheep, I don't see unsustainable. Sure, there's an environmental impact - they're continually burping and farting. However, they're also turning grass which we can't eat into meat which we can. The counter to that is that we should plough everything up and plant cabbages, but actually I doubt that would be sustainable over the long term without serious chemical inputs.
It strikes me that we should be making a distinction between sustainable meat and unsustainable meat (e.g. factory farmed grain fed cattle). As ever though, it's hard to tell what's really true, particularly in the midst of the current PR war stirred up due to the ulterior motives of the animal rights lobby.