FARMING leaders have firmly rejected the 'myth' that meat is destroying the planet – and particularly not pasture and hill-fed Scotch meat.

Earlier this week, climate scientists, under the auspices of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, issued a report warning that mankind has no more than a dozen years to rein in global warming, beyond which point it will significantly increase the risks of drought, floods, extreme heat and poverty for hundreds of millions of people.

The authors of the report said that 'urgent and unprecedented changes' to everyday behaviour were needed to reach the target of limiting the man-made temperature increase to between 1.5C and 2C – and one suggestion that has since claimed headlines was that cutting red meat out of the global diet would save resources and cut emissions.

This simplistic conclusion was too much for Fife firebrand farmer John Picken, of Priorletham, St Andrews, who said that the 'highly charged emotion' about the IPCC had been 'overdone'.

“The IPCC has never recognised the contribution that farming has made to the carbon capture side of the equation and has only condemned farming for the gas emissions of methane and carbon dioxide from livestock grazing the world’s pastures and the nitrous oxide from the world’s fertilisers. They have repeatedly ignored that the levels of CO2 would be much higher than they are today were it not for farming," said Mr Picken.

“Every square mile of moss, acre of cereal and square inch of grass extracts CO2 from the atmosphere every minute of every day quite naturally and, in Scotland’s case, the story is even better because the area of high quality land to grow vegetables and fruit is in short supply. Instead, 99% of Scotland is used to grow and rear much needed plant and animal protein.

“Farming’s story is magnificent and continues to be part of the solution and we must dispel the myths that it is meat that is destroying the planet," he declared. “Modern science-based farming is the way forward to sustainable food production and presents solutions to the world’s environmental problems. And we can eat to survive as a bonus.”

Union land use policy manager Andrew Midgley added: “We totally agree with John and remind policymakers that, in our opinion, the way that agricultural emissions are accounted for in the greenhouse gas inventories continues to be misleading in that those figures fail to capture all the good things that farmers are doing across all farm types and land types in Scotland.

"The big worry is the misguided view that the simplest way to reduce domestic emissions is to reduce output from agriculture, and that would simply result in exporting emissions," he warned. "Also, there is the argument being touted that folk simply stop eating meat. For Scotland, with more than 80% of our farmed land classified as Less Favoured Area, and much of this unploughable, it is not the case that cereals can simply be grown instead of rearing livestock because of our geography.

"Thankfully, we have these fantastic four-legged animals that can turn our abundant supply of grass and heather into nutritious meat and milk."