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Dear George,

I am a long-standing fan and an admirer of the stances you have adopted on many key environmental issues, so I hope you won’t mind if I take public issue with you on some of the points that you made in your recent Guardian article about Allan Savory and his advocacy of holistic grazing management systems.

I should first declare my various interests: I am a farmer of ruminants myself, with 85 Ayrshire milking cows, plus their various offspring on my mainly, but not exclusively, grassland farm in West Wales, (which you visited very briefly back in 2007); I have a long-standing interest and engagement with developing improved systems of pasture management, although none of these experiments have been monitored; and, while you were in the library checking out the science on Savory’s claims, I was attending and speaking at the Savory Institute International Conference in London last week, which provided the hook for your Guardian piece.

As I understand it, your key critique of Savory is that he is has made a series of unsubstantiated claims relating to the capacity of holistic grazing management systems (which you referred to as Intensive Rotational Grazing, or IRG), not only to increase ruminant stocking densities but also to build soil carbon in the form of stabilised organic matter.

What clearly rattled you most was his assertion that were such systems were to be applied on a global scale, they would have the potential to sequestrate a significant percentage of the current levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.

In summary, my response is that whilst accepting your points about the relative scarcity of the scientific evidence supporting his claims, and the possibility that he may have been over claiming on his assertion that such methods could have the capacity of ‘reducing CO2 to preindustrial levels’, I still think he may well be right on both counts.

The reason I particularly wanted to write to you about this is because I am very worried about the anti-ruminant bandwagon, which seems to be gaining momentum daily, based on three assertions, all of which need to be challenged: the inefficiency of feed to meat conversion, the unhealthy nature of red meat and methane emissions.

You may be aware that my colleague Richard Young has been countering some of these charges in a separate series of articles, but for the purpose of this exchange, I shall focus on my assertion that ruminants will need to play a central role in the development of more sustainable food systems. This is because they alone are able to digest and turn into food the cellulose based plant material, which constitutes the fertility building phase of sustainable, rotational farming practice.

This unique capacity is very important, partly because if the world is to wean itself off our current addiction to nitrogen fertiliser, then producing food from arable land during its fertility building phase, which in most cases will constitute a mixture of legumes and grasses, will be of critical importance in developing strategies for feeding a peak world population.

Another, and possibly even more important factor relates to so-called ‘rangelands’ the vast areas of predominantly grassland ecosystems, which cover a quarter of the worlds land area and on which the ruminant animals that form the basis of Savory’s observations have evolved and coexisted over millennia.