Please note this event will take place online via Zoom. Attendees will need to have a Zoom account to access the webinar, a free Zoom account can be set up at registration.
Speaker: Fidelity Weston, Farmer and advocate for grass-fed livestock farming
January is the designated month for “Veganuary,” an annual campaign run by a UK non-profit organisation of the same name that promotes and educates about veganism. Fidelity will talk about the experience of being a beef farmer in Veganuary, and explain why, in her view, raising livestock on grass and then eating the meat can play a part in restoring nature, maintaining healthy diets and reducing farming’s climate impacts. She will tell us how there are many different ways of producing beef, with different effects on the environment. The consumer needs to be able to appreciate and understand those differences so they can make positive choices over what they eat. With the introduction of the UK Government’s 25-year Environment Plan and the post-Brexit Agriculture Act, there are huge opportunities but also potential difficulties for farmers needing and wanting to change their farming methods. Farmers are often seen as ‘the problem’, but they are also key to the solutions needed to restore our biodiversity and help combat climate change. Realistic support – from policy-makers and the public – is needed during this period of great change. She would advocate for “Regenuary” as the way forward.
Fidelity Weston manages her family’s 200-acre farm in Kent, UK. Certified Pasture for Life and organic with the Soil Association, they farm with Hereford cattle, sheep and poultry, and improving their farm for nature is central to their approach. The farm business is being grown around grazing land away from the farm that is being brought back into good heart, with improved biodiversity, through cattle grazing.
Fidelity is also Vice President of the Pasture-Fed Livestock Association, a membership organisation of mainly farmers but also academics, butchers, restauranteurs, vets and others who support the environmental, animal welfare and human health benefits of raising ruminants (cattle and sheep) entirely from pasture. She is also Chair of CLEAR – the Consortium for Labelling for the Environment, Animal welfare and Regenerative farming – a growing consortium of 40 food, farming and civil society organisations which is campaigning for mandatory, clear and honest method-of-production food labelling.
The talk will be followed by an online Q&A session.
Attendance at City events is subject to our terms and conditions.