Environmental Graffiti

A quarter of a million Welsh hill lambs will be burned or turned into biofuel.

An extremely low market price for lamb meat, coupled with high prices for feed, has left farmers with little option but to take the £15 per animal offered by the Welsh government. Foot and mouth disease scares have kept flocks trapped in pastures, raising concerns about overgrazing and fears about the wellbeing of next year’s animal stocks.

The lamb meat, known as light lamb, is unpopular in Britain and fetches only 60 to 70p per kilo. A rapid influx of all these lambs into the market would cause prices to bottom out further. Feed costs are prohibitively high, meaning it makes no economic sense to feed the lambs for slaughter in the future. Feed prices have rocketed as farmers grow more crops for biofuels and less for foods, driving up prices.

Source: The Ecologist

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