Sometimes people ask us why we offer information about vegetarianism, veganism and livestock. Isn't it quite contradictory? We do not believe that, because our intention is a) to help reduce the total amount of meat consumed, and b) to help people make a living in small hamlets, which is much more difficult – if not impossible – without animals.

If the world became a vegan tomorrow, how much would life be complicated for small organic farmers?

They would certainly see their possibilities reduced and the number of small baserritars decreased. Basically, it would reduce its production possibilities on the market and perhaps the production of other sweets, such as mushrooms. After all, I would like to say that you would not be able to maintain a small estate in many areas that are not suitable for ploughing the land.

And to what extent would small baserritars find it difficult to live just from plants? Would they have to work a lot more for less income?

That is my opinion. This is very clear here in the Monkton Wyld community. Here I, with part of a working day, do everything that is dairy – that is, milk, yogurt, cheese – plus a production of sausages, and that for an average of 30 people a day. On the contrary, the orchard has two people working and yet we are not self-sufficient in vegetables, even by far. It is clear that, with far less work, more food is being fed to animal products.

I would like to understand the extent to which life would be complicated for small farmers if they did not have the opportunity to produce and sell animal products, competing with the giants of industrial cultivation.

Small farmers who don't have very good land to make fields would surely stay out of business. You can earn the life of the horticulture for the fair, but to do so your land must be of very good quality, plain, good soil, not too moist, etc.Pero to a small farmer who is dedicated to animal biology, it would be much harder for him to survive than a farmer who works with chemicals, as he would not have manure to give to his land – besides having lower incomes –. Most producers of biological crops, for example, have animals, because it's the smartest choice. On the contrary, most of the farmers who are engaged in chemistry have no nitrogen, made from fossil fuels, and do not build soil.

If you have fruit trees in your small farmhouse and also cattle, the grass under the trees is your first harvest: the trees may not yield fruit until September, but by June you have a crop with grass to feed the animals, because until then the trees did not have many leaves and they have been able to take advantage of the whole sun. This also helps you grow and survive your benefits. If you don't have livestock, then you have a problem: ask to be cut off the herbs with harvest (or worse, to be killed with medications) and you don't have an animal to pay for your trees.

In most of Britain, without animals, you wouldn't be able to make a living in a small hamlet. For this you should have good land to plough. And even then, if you're a small farmer who has land to plough, you'll find it harder to compete with industrial agriculture than if you're a small farmer who has a mixed farm, because in large farms, they use machinery and chemicals. If meat were not produced, there would be far fewer small baserritars – apart from the horticulturists at the trade fair – and agriculture would become much more industrialised.

Your book is full of arguments like the ones you mentioned. What do you think is the main conclusion it offers?

I have shown that about 50% of the world's meat and dairy products are produced with great environmental impact, feeding the animal with crops in the fields, a very inefficient system. On the other hand, however, there are a huge number of plants – by-products of agriculture specialising in the production of plants – that we humans do not eat. Therefore, they are food to waste – food waste, processing waste, damaged crops, crop surpluses, vegetation from areas that cannot be ploughed… – and it makes no sense not to feed the animals with them. Because animals produce manure, which guarantees soil fertility, and they also provide us with high-quality food. It makes no sense to leave animals out of the equation.

Above all this, to make sure that in a bad year there will be enough cultivation, you have to leave a plus every year, that is what is called a food store. Livestock brings elasticity to the food system. If I hadn't won -- or something else, for example, alcohol -- to accumulate your surplus wheat, barley and other crops, then people couldn't get enough together in a bad year, and that would increase the risk of starving a lot of people in the bad harvest years. To avoid this risk, you have to create a crop surplus each year and when you have done so, the most effective way to use it is by feeding the animals. You can also make gin or use it in your car, but the most effective way is for livestock to feed on it from afar, milk or pigs. Not doing so is a waste. Because you get meat with a very small environmental impact, because it's a by-product of the agricultural system.

You are critical of the industrial meat system. Would you say we eat too much meat?

Yes. I believe that in the industrial countries the amount of meat we eat today should be reduced to one third if we want to stop feeding the animals with cereals, apart from the surplus that I mentioned earlier for the bad years.

We take in a basket the organic meat that serves us a Yorkshire farmhouse. Rob, the farmer, tells me that if meat consumption goes down everywhere, it is the same people who eat less meat or who completely abandon the meat that normally buys the small farmers who work in the dusty. Small baserritars would therefore be damaged, but would not affect industrial farms.

I agree with him. If you become vegan, you forget about the strength you have to put pressure on the meat industry and create a dignified livestock. If you only eat sustainable meat – and like I others claim that you do not eat meat from industrial farms – then you are also creating the demand for dignified meat and you are willing to pay more for it, thus giving incentives to the baserritars to produce meat with more humanity and less environmental impact. But if you reject the meat completely, then you do not create any request for this dignified production, and that, as I explained to you earlier, is nothing good from an environmental point of view.

I agree, I agree, too, but Rob tells me that the only people who are interested in this message are those who care about it, most have no problem eating meat from industrial farms and they don't care about this message.

I think these ideas, however great they may be, are opening up. For example, in British shops there will soon be only eggs of chickens reared. It is becoming increasingly assumed that having chickens in cages is a bad thing. So things change.

Another thing I would say to vegans is that if the world became vegan tomorrow, we could not hunt rabbits or deer, which do not have natural hunters in the UK, or we could not feed animals between strawberries, or forests, and so we should become more natural habitat for the production of fields, crops and vegetables.

And surely that would also mean that of our food we would be obliged to import them from abroad: from soybeans, bananas, coconuts, rice, etc.

And if we stopped eating fish -- in some countries fish is much of the protein that people catch -- it would need much more rural land for the crop to replace these proteins with plants, which also means reducing natural habitats.

It's true. Much more land should be poured into producing human food. But at the moment a lot of farmland is being used to produce cattle fodder. Thus, [excluding the need for grass for animals] would be much more land available, which would alleviate the need to change natural habitats. Undoubtedly, if we lived completely on a vegan diet, we would need less land to feed ourselves. But grazing livestock has a beneficial effect on the soil. They make the praise-based ecology live, it has always been like this, by large groups of wild herbivores, but that is no longer today, at least in developed countries. What we need is an orderly mixture of trees, grasslands and aromatic fields. If we don't have livestock, we won't be able to have these kinds of mixtures if we don't play with fires and fossil fuels and machinery. And that doesn't have to be done. Animals do so much more effectively: they do better than any other biomass harvest and soil fertilization.

As we know from experience, vegans will probably answer that ecology did very well on their part for humans to create prairies before the rainforests were melted… or was that not a “good” ecology?

Before human beings there were animals that grazed in the prairies, and there has always been a “war” – if you want to call it – between the trees and the prairies. The trees are made to give shade to the grasslands, and the grasslands cover the land of the trees long enough that tree seeds do not grow in it. This is how grassland works in collaboration with herbivorous animals, which, by eating grass, form a rug so hard that neither trees nor shrubs can pass through. If you put a acorn on the grass, it won't germinate, because it won't find a way to get to the ground, before an animal will arrive and eat it.

Man did not invent the animals that graze, but domesticated them.

What do you think of the moral argument that it is wrong to raise livestock or kill a sensitive being (a feeling being)?

It seems to me to be a matter of moral distress (moral squeamishness). The end of most animals, including predators at the top, is that someday another eats when they get older or get sick. Nor do I accept that animals suffer less when they are wild than in livestock farming. Farmers take care of animals. The animals provide meat, dairy, eggs and fertilizer for the land, and the farmer guarantees them an orderly life, fed in winter and that gives them a quick death. They cannot be guaranteed in wildlife.

For example, wild boars breed between 5 and 6 pups a year. If everyone came alive to maturity, the world would soon be filled with forests. But not everyone survives. 90% of wild boar pups die before they reach maturity. This is how nature works: it creates a huge surplus of puppies, from which most or predators feed or die of disease or hunger. What man does is to reassure the animals that he will feed their pups to the slaughterhouse, and that then he will have a quick and painless death. They will not be killed by predators, who often give them long minutes of terror, and will not let them die of pain, disease or hunger. Fears, agony and fear of wild animals are far from those of farm animals. I believe that not accepting this has more to do with each other’s moral sensibilities than with the welfare of animals. All of this I say only about small farmers who are raising animals without cages and humanly, not about industrial agriculture, to which I am opposed.