When the owner of a burger chain panicked about his climate impact
INTERVIEW. Tom Barton, co-founder of Honest Burgers, shares with Field7 what it takes to get beef to 44 restaurants from regenerative farms.
Tom Barton tells us how he turned his back on industrial abattoirs, the complexity in doing so and why he’s now spending 20 per cent more on beef.
It’s a revealing picture of a restaurant chain embarking on a profound re-orientation after the co-founder became deeply troubled about the climate crisis and the deleterious effects of industrially reared cow meat.
Read the interview here. Let me know what you think of what Tom Barton is doing. (Just reply directly to this newsletter).
Welcome to the Field7 newsletter
Before we get started, a word on a key bit of terminology in this week’s newsletter. This short descriptor from the excellent Netflix documentary Kiss The Ground is hard to beat:
Regenerative agriculture describes farming and grazing practices that, among other benefits, reverse climate change by rebuilding soil organic matter and restoring degraded soil biodiversity - resulting in both carbon drawdown and improving the water cycle. (Specifically, it is a holistic land management practice that leverages the power of photosynthesis in plants to close the carbon cycle, and build soil health, crop resilience and nutrient density).
I’ll be looking at food and climate over the next few weeks. The beefburger feels a good place to start. An icon for everything wrong with super-sized junk food diets, globalisation and McJobs in the 2000s. Now symbolic of how our meat-heavy diets are overheating the planet. (Donald Trump didn’t help with the image of him lying in bed in the White House of a night, wolfing down burgers and ranting at his TV).
You can jump straight to the full interview with Tom Barton here, but, as Logan Roy would say, here’s the protein.
Honest was spending £40,000 a week on beef but couldn’t find a supplier.
A trio of farmers formed a collective, emboldened by the promise of Honest Burgers as its launch client.
The switch has meant 20 per cent extra cost, and buying whole cows.
Honest isn’t increasing prices for customers, instead cutting gross margins.
30 per cent of Honest’s beef currently comes from regenerative farms. A complete switch is expected by the end of the year.
£600,000 has been spent so far in the transformation.
The ideological underpinning: Barton argues that a binary ‘meat bad, plant-based good’ stance is a simplification. (There’s an obvious self-interest here - meat vendor defends meat. This is what he says:
“There is a world of difference between the climate impacts from a regenerative farm and an industrial one. The truth is we all have to eat way less meat, and we support that on our menus. People who’d never eat a plant-based burger are happily doing that and that’s brilliant.
“What annoys me a bit is that we’re trying something really difficult here and with really good intentions and we get hammered by some people who see us as awful greenwashers.”
Barton (right) alongside fellow co-founder Phil Eeles (left) listening to a regenerative farmer.
The problems with cows
Barton can’t be surprised by the opprobrium he gets on social media. There are few issues as divisive in the climate conversation as meat. For many people the only way forward is getting as many people eating only plants, as soon as possible. Any legitimising of beef and dairy eating is, they would say, a backwards step. Barton’s argument goes: weaning off meat while adopting regenerative methods to improve soil health and carbon capture is a step forward.
At COP26 in Glasgow, the topic of methane was flagged as a more urgent priority than carbon dioxide given methane has a stronger warming power over the near term - by a factor of eight in fact (although CO2 will be more damaging longer-term). Livestock is estimated to account for a third of all of methane production. And it’s the burping and farting of cows that’s been identified as the most toxic, not least because of the scale of our appetites for beef, the vast land use, soil poisoning and the industrial farming it’s tied up with it.
It was estimated this week that 10 per cent of the UK’s total greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture. Bill Gates this week invested in an Australian startup developing a dietary supplement for cows which, it claims, stops methane being produced.
How will Honest know if it’s worked
True success will be Honest losing its competitive edge. It might sound counter-intuitive but Honest has to show other food businesses what’s possible with an attractive operational and commercial blueprint in switching to regeneratively farmed meat.
The area of responsibility lying with consumers is, however, problematic.
Asking a consumer to negotiate the climate impact of a regeneratively farmed burger against a vegan one, calculating emissions, water use, transportation, soil degradation and land use feels unfair and unhelpful. It deflects from scrutiny on government policies and how companies choose to operate.
Whether it’s deliberate or a function of modern culture, progress on how we eat and its effects on the climate and hunger crisis is going nowhere if it spins people into an infinite whataboutery vortex, leaving them so bamboozled they throw their arms in the air and just give up.
Further reading and watching
Two outstanding books on the go for me at the moment. George Monbiot’s widely acclaimed Regenesis definitely lives up to the hype. Also The Age Of Resilience by Jeremy Rifkin opens up a fascinating contrast between the implications of the model of efficiency which has governed our food system, and one of resilience; one which Rifkin argues will be required in the coming years.
Also in the interview, Barton shares the five books and documentaries he says were instrumental in motivating him to adopt regenerative farming principles. Here’s a trailer for Kiss The Ground.
Other stuff
🔌 Residents in a street in Walthamstow are working together to form a collective power station, via a grid linked through solar power panels. (Thanks to
for sharing this on her excellent newsletter.)🥫 Climate-led food labelling is being presented as a solution to help people make decisions.
🧮 Google is under scrutiny for how it calculates emissions on flights, food and heating.
👩🏽💻 One in three 18 to 24 year olds are turning down jobs because of an employer’s poor climate credentials, termed ‘climate quitting’.
🇩🇰 A massive $8.7bn wind and solar energy park is being developed in Western Denmark. Likely to be operational by 2030.
🍴 Don’t try and break down compostable cutlery at home.
💰 Tory MPs are receiving donations from climate denying groups, notably Net Zero Watch and a fund backed by BP.
😷 Policy works. India’s terrible air quality has led to a ban on coal burning in New Delhi, which in turn has triggered widespread adoption of cheaper, cleaner biomass.
😎 Coal’s share in producing electricity for Gujarat fell from 85% to 56% in the last six years. Solar is making a dent in many Indian states.
🪫 The beleaguered battery company Britishvolt could be given a lifeline through an Australian company which wants to take its gigafactory sites after the company fell into administration earlier this month.
✈️ The founder of hydrogen-powered planes talks on how his company is progressing with clean air travel.
🎮 The rise of climate-based board games and video games.
🏡 One of the UK’s big housebuilders, Redrow, said it will make heatpumps standard. This story about the early-adopting heat pump fitters is fascinating. Also, the brilliant @WanderingGaia shared the chart below on increase in take up of heat pumps in cold Norway.
🚰 Conserving water and producing new sources of water is becoming a big investment area.
🥱 Upshot from Davos: leaders still aren’t working together on climate.
🐍 The farcical situation of the Abu Dhabi Oil Company’s CEO being appointed president of the next COP was best captured by Private Eye: Town arsonist put in charge of fire brigade. It also noted how Tony Blair was an enthusiastic supporter of the appointment and also happens to be on the payroll of the Abu Dhabi regime.
🪧 A follow up to last week’s newsletter on effective protesting. These US climate activists in New England have managed to elect six of their number onto the committee of a power grid operator that has been slow in adopting renewable energy. They get to face down the management four times a year.
Coming next…
For the next few weeks, the spotlight is on how we eat. I’ll be speaking to people trying to make a dent into the $13bn agriculture industry and the even bigger $9.4trn food industry. New ideas are germinating at an incredible speed, sparked by awareness of the outsized role food has had on the climate emergency.
A surge in research, innovation, creativity and funding is going on today into every facet of how food is grown, produced, packaged, delivered and even thrown away. I’ll be talking to people developing some of these new projects.
I was really touched by people who emailed me after they saw my rather self-indulgent article on my spine surgery.
Please email me with feedback, ideas or just to say hi.
Thank you.