What do you feel, confronted with an image of living animals caged in neat grids on a bare floor, as though in a giant metal spreadsheet? Do you wonder at the efficiency with which these living production units can now be managed, or do you shudder at the claustrophobia, the minutely calculated minimum amount of space allocated per animal to just-about lie down, and the cold indifference this system evinces to the needs and instinctive behavior of sentient animals trapped in its bars?

In practice, most feel a queasy mix of the two, and prefer to look away. But within the ideological Right, the split is starker. And we may be about to see that split at scale, as Robert F. Kennedy Jr faces his confirmation hearing this week. This longstanding critic of Big Pharma, now Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health, has long viewed food additives as part of a cartel that profits from making Americans sick. But how far can he go in Making America Healthy again, when Big Ag is pulling in the other direction?

Across much of the world, farming is a low-profit sector. Producers often struggle to stay afloat; to do so they need to scale up or become more efficient, which gives them every incentive to adopt every technology that will help them do so — including polluting industrial processes, cost-saving chemical additives, and other efficiency measures.

The foremost casualty of this relentless pressure is what’s farmed: that is, plant life, soil quality, and livestock. No wonder, then, that Trump’s Department of Agriculture pick Brooke Rollins told Congress during her hearing that she will support farmers — including by repealing a measure that allows states to restrict the sale of factory farmed meat.

Is this going to Make America Healthy Again? The side-effects of such methods wouldn’t suggest so: for example, both America and Britain are currently afflicted by large-scale outbreaks of avian influenza, which have long been linked to the cramped and often unsanitary conditions of factory farms. Similarly, antibiotic overuse and polluting runoff from intensive livestock compounds create further impediments to improved public health, by incubating superbugs, for example, and fueling toxic algae blooms.

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But the incipient tension between making America healthy, and keeping farmers afloat, signals more than a potential inter-departmental spat within the Trump administration. Sustainable and healthy food has long been associated with progressive politics — at least in the days when the Left was more unambiguously anti-capitalist — but has more recently been adopted on the Right as well. And yet the paradox of MAHA and factory-farming reveals, Trump’s coalition is far from unified on this issue. On the contrary, it’s split between instincts we might characterize as “organic” and “Promethean”: that is, defenders and disruptors of the natural order.

On one side, “organic” conservative advocates for place, belonging, and the natural order, such as the late Roger Scruton, jostle with more esoteric Right-wing advocates for animal welfare, and critics of junk food. In this view animal welfare is, properly understood, a conservative cause — and intensive livestock farming an atrocity. In the “organic” corner, American farmer and author Wendell Berry is beloved of the “post-liberal” faction, for his evocative writing against technological hubris and in favor of small-scale farming, and the embrace of natural limits. In this view, our relation to the natural world may be one of dominion, but this should be linked to“stewardship” — and certainly not merely a matter of tech-enabled exploitation.

The meme version of Wendell Berry percolates through the e-Right ecosystem, too, for example in one proposal for “Ice Cream Nationalism”: all cowboys, buxom milkmaids, and beekeeping monks. Translated out of this whimsical register, the argument is a meme-inflected case for re-enchanting food production as stewardship: an activity not separate from social, moral, and religious praxis, but integrated into them.

This very online radical Right abuts more conventional green conservatives on animal welfare as well. There is some debate as to whether Hitler really was a vegetarian; but the Greek-English Nazi mystic and writer Savitri Devi, perhaps the most influential continuer of Hitler’s postwar far-Right legacy as “esoteric Hitlerism”, was also a vocal animal rights activist. Devi denounced human exceptionalism, and emphasized the continuity of humans with other sentient creatures; her fictionalized autobiography is a truly surreal mix of Hindu-tinged race theory, animal welfare polemic, and loving depictions of favourite cats. Devi’s “esoteric” current on the radical Right flew below the radar for many years, but has resurfaced recently among its more colorful online proponents. The Right-wing poster and InfoWars author “Raw Egg Nationalist” is a vocal critic of chemical additives along RFK lines, for example, and has also denounced factory farming.

In the world of electoral politics, this Right-wing caucus for Making Agriculture Green Again is perhaps best embodied by the Romanian eco-nationalist Călin Georgescu, who advocates a “radical ecologism” critical of pesticide and antibiotic overuse, and argues that the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy should be re-ordered to supporting small-scale farming.

But there’s a Promethean counter-argument, also internal to the 21st-century Right, which dismisses such considerations in the name of efficiency and technological innovation. At best, as the “anti-woke” utilitarian Richard Hanania has argued, factory farming is cruel but unavoidable — at least until we can innovate our way to a lab-grown alternative. Others assert that factory farming is good, actually: any reform is politically impossible as it would make food more expensive, and never mind what the animals experience: innovation means human progress and should be embraced, not shunned.

This isn’t just about animals. It’s a whole worldview, as articulated by the ebullient ‘Tech Right’ end of the Trumpist coalition, which is as enthusiastically in favor of Promethean progress as it is indifferent to concerns such as small-scale land stewardship or nostalgic paeans to “rootedness”. Led by figures such as Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen, this group broadly believes, in Andreessen’s own words, that “there is no material problem — whether created by nature or by technology — that cannot be solved with more technology”. Thus for this caucus, animal cruelty can be solved by lab-grown meat. Raw Egg Nationalist, meanwhile, is unconvinced.

This organic/Promethean dichotomy runs through the whole of the Western civilizational order dominated by America, at least as Berry sees it — but with the dice always loaded in favor of the metal spreadsheet and the “progress” it encodes. In Unsettling, he identified the conflict between organic and Promethean instincts as one that that has animated the American project since settler days: a fidgety and always-lopsided standoff between the urge to embrace a bounded, organic order, and the urge to keep pushing the frontier.

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Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series provides a classic depiction of this tension: on one hand, the family’s day-to-day subsistence labors, a rough-and-ready home that slowly becomes more comfortable and homely. But on the other, throughout the series, Pa’s restless yearning to move on, to settle once more, to begin the whole process from scratch. And it’s not as though closing the frontier ended this habit of mind. Published four decades after Little House on the Prairie, Berry’s Unsettling homes in on the modern-day version of these competing instincts. As Berry sees it, the energy just moved from the literal to countless figurative frontiers: a dynamic in which those who “settled” found themselves repeatedly “dispossessed and driven out, or subverted and exploited where they were, by those who were carrying out some version of the search for El Dorado.”

Who is right? The pragmatists and tech-optimists alike will say it doesn’t much matter, as all real-world politics means balancing competing interests and ideologies. This suggests the dice will end up loaded the way they always have been: in favor of El Dorado. It’s surely better politics, from Trump’s perspective, to ensure that pork producers in Iowa don’t go bust, than to save Californian progressives from eating bacon that violates their welfare standards. (Even if some of those pork producers are Chinese-owned and not really “family farms” at all.)

Just as the balance of money and influence lies overall with Right-wing progressives, so in a face-off between the Rightists of Big Ag and those advocating clean food and animal welfare, we can expect the big metal spreadsheet to put up a hell of a fight.

And this will have knock-on effects beyond the Land of the Free. Trump’s recent Davos address made clear that any fiction of impartial international trade has been abandoned, in favor of a mercantilist “America First” trade policy. In due course, then, we can expect this to translate into renewed pressure on the UK and Europe, to open their markets to American produce, and with it America’s lower-welfare farming practices.

Nor should any incipient Right-wing defender of sustainable farming expect much support from the EU and its notorious Big Ag lobbyists. Faced with potential electoral victory by Călin Georgescu in Romania recently, for instance, the apparatchiks of Brussels simply ensured the election was canceled. I doubt this was because of his views on beekeeping, but it surely indicates that simply being a keen environmentalist is not enough to cancel out otherwise unacceptably Right-wing views.

Britain’s younger rightists, many of whom are entirely unsentimental about Britain’s agrarian heritage, may not particularly care if our outdoor farms are obliterated by the American spreadsheet variety. And Starmer’s inheritance tax raid suggests he isn’t particularly bothered either what happens to British producers. But those on the Right with any residual concern for animal welfare, or scruples about submitting our country wholesale to the resurgent Prometheanism of a Trumpian New Right, may soon find their erstwhile Left-wing hippie opponents suddenly looking more like allies.

So reading the spate of reports regarding its imminent death is like receiving bad news about a friend. It is not even a gentle demise: the Wye is being murdered. It is the totemic case of our national pollution problem as two newspapers launch campaigns to clean up rivers. Fair enough. I learned to swim in the Wye, and fished it for silver minnows; now I would not go into its waters wearing chest-waders. In 2010, the Wye was voted the nation’s favourite river — and celebrated with adjectives including “magical”, “timeless” and “unspoilt”’. In 2020, a thick algal bloom caused by pollution extended along more than 140 of the river’s 155 miles, blocking out sunlight and killing much life below the surface. Now, the Wye’s local cognomen is “shit creek”.

But such was the river’s beauty that following the publication of the Reverend William Gilpin’s Observations on the River Wye in 1782, the British tourist industry was born. The long watery southing miles enthused Wordsworth (“Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”) and prompted JMW Turner to get his brushes out several times. It was renowned across the globe for its Atlantic salmon. Kings and prime ministers have fished from its banks of appropriately salmon-pink sandstone. Once, rod catches exceeded 7,000 a year, with the record fish being a 59lb 8oz leviathan — landed by Doreen Davey at Winforton on March 13, 1923. In 2021, only 326 salmon were caught from the Wye, the smallest number since records began.

That was the year the spotlight on the Wye’s parlous ecological state was switched on with Rivercide, a documentary by George Monbiot, which was complemented by his Guardian article, “Britain’s rivers are suffocating to death”. Plaudits to Monbiot for bringing the death of the Wye to public attention. But his forensic environmental investigation immediately hits the banks.

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Monbiot’s argument, which now dominates the “Why oh Wye” discourse, flows roughly thus: the 20 million chickens intensively farmed in the Wye’s catchment area produce more than 2,500 tonnes of excrement a year, and this mountain of manure is “the most intense and extreme cause” of the Wye’s pollution. It’s the phosphates in the manure. When it is spread on fields, they leach and leak into the river, and promote algal bloom.

Monbiot is not totally wrong. Indisputably, the phosphates in the run-off from intensive poultry units (IPUs in the jargon) are harming the Wye. The Ithon, one of its tributaries in mid-Wales, contains phosphate levels up to 10 times higher than what you’d expect in a healthy upland river, according to an analysis commissioned by Fish Legal, a non-profit organisation of lawyers who fight water polluters. However, when it comes to the question of who is killing the Wye, simply pointing the finger at poultry farmers lets other culprits off the hook. The gallery of rivercide rogues stretches from the Wye’s source on the bleak slopes of Plynlimon to the Severn estuary.

Humans have been killing the Wye for centuries. If you wished to really get to the bottom of whodunnit, you’d begin with the Romans, who introduced the watermill to these isles. Watermills produce pollution — for instance, if used for fulling, the making of woollen cloth — and hamper the spawning of key fish species, including the Wye’s renowned Salmo salar. Salmon in the Wye, and other rivers in the Palaeo-Rhine basin, may have been reduced by as much as 90% between 450AD and 1600AD.

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Then there was overfishing in the 19th century, with 100,000 salmon traps in the Severn and net after net up the Wye to Hay; in 1906, the rod catch of salmon was about 500 fish. Fast forward to the 20th century and acid rain from heavy industry in South Wales was severely impacting the Wye’s headwaters, the quiet brooks where the salmon spawn. Indeed, had The Wye and Usk Foundation not started liming the waters to restore the pH balance in 2003, Wye salmon might well be extinct. The ecosystem of the river has yet to recover from past acid rain.

And there’s the human crap. This year, the Wye has achieved the dubious distinction of appearing at number 14 in the Top of the Poops chart, which ranks England and Wales’s most sewage-polluted rivers. An ITV News analysis of data from Dŵr Cymru Welsh Water, the water company responsible for the areas through which the Wye flows, revealed that in 2020 alone, raw sewage entered the river system for 17.4 million minutes — that’s the equivalent of 33 years. Endlessly blaming the death of the Wye on chicken shit is chicken shit. Environment Agency modelling suggests that raw sewage is the source of 28% of the Wye’s pollution, which is no small matter.

Sewage is also known to cause algal bloom: in 2021, the United Utilities Staveley sewage works, near Windermere, spilled untreated sewage into a nearby stream 80 times for a total of 1,172 hours. The result was a literally sick-making algal bloom on Lake Windermere. But sewage isn’t only to blame. If we are to save the Wye, we may also need to look to the Heavens. Climate change is expected to make algal blooms more common.

So how guilty is the notorious chicken excrement? So extreme is the phosphate runoff from poultry farming that George Monbiot requires us to give up eating chicken to save the Wye. “We do not NEED chicken”, he says, adding: “It’s time conservationists became bolder and spoke out against the world’s greatest cause of ecological destruction: animal farming.” But let’s pluck the Wye’s chicken problem a little. The expansion of IPUs in the Wye’s catchment area over the past five years is clearly a driver in phosphate pollution, but the phosphate overload in local soil is a legacy issue, dating back decades.

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The most authoritative analysis, “Re-focusing Phosphorus use in the Wye Catchment”, attributes 60-70% of said mineral pollution to agriculture, but is careful to enumerate the various culpable parts of agriculture, not just the IPUs. The major culprits include potato-growing, which, last time I checked, was a vegan-approved crop. Phosphate is an ingredient in the artificial fertilisers widely used in large-scale potato-farming, and excess runs off the fields along with the soil when it rains. It all goes into the river. With not a chicken in sight.

Monbiot’s anti-poultry agenda is a diversion, not an answer. You absolutely can have your chicken and your Wye. Small-scale poultry production, with organic free-range hens scratching around apple orchards, naturally manuring the earth: there is no evidence whatsoever that this model is anything but beneficial to the environment. Having your intensively-farmed, £3.50 chicken from Tesco and having your Wye is another matter. It’s not the chicken, it’s how you farm them.

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The greatest environmental problem for the Wye is not the warming of the planet, acid rain, or excrement, whether human or avian: it is chemically-addicted conventional farming. The phosphates in chicken manure leach into the upper Wye for the same reason that phosphates from artificial fertiliser on potato fields enter the river downstream near Ross: the parlous state of the soil, caused by overuse of pesticides, herbicides, molluscicides, fungicides and compaction from machinery. Some potato-growing farmers I knew — whose liking for herbicides and pesticides always made me think of them as “The Chemical Brothers” — lost tons of topsoil per annum from a single 40-acre field. Into the brook, which ran brown, which joined the Wye, which ran brown. There are fields in Britain losing 47 tons of soil per acre per annum. As Natural England notes, “soil and nutrients washing off agricultural land is the most common reason for our rivers and streams becoming unhealthy”. Good, healthy soil, by contrast, can hold huge amounts of water, and is not saturated with phosphates — or indeed that other chemical killer of fresh water, nitrates — because it has been “husbanded”. That is, farmed properly.

Call me cynical, call me biased, but doesn’t the “It’s all the fault of poultry farmers” argument stink a bit of a vegan agenda? In an age when whole cities are trying to erase meat from school menus, it’s fashionable and easy to blame the livestock farmer, and answer every complex environmental problem with: “Go plant-based!”

But you could close all the IPUs in the Wye catchment area and turn them over to cabbage production for vegans, and you would still have phosphates streaming into the river. It will continue to die unless the area’s agriculture, be it livestock or crop, adopts en masse soil-aware, sustainable and nature-friendly principles. What’s more, you could say the same about almost every river in the country. Meanwhile, quiet flows the Wye towards its grave.

I liked him. And I think he liked me. There were times when he would deign to let me rub him under his chin as he stood four-square, head jutting forward. He was imperious, as if conscious of the glorious history attached to his kind. Ryeland sheep: first bred in the fifteenth century by the monks of Leominster Priory. Robin Hood was not just a sheep in a Welsh Marches paddock. He had ancestry — breeding, you might say.

It is odd how little most of us know about sheep, given how deeply entrenched they are in our culture. The Greek astrological sign Aries is a ram. In nursery rhymes, “Mary had a little lamb”, and “Baa-baa black sheep” was asked if he had any wool. On the screen Aardman’s Shaun the Sheep has gambolled about entertaining families for decades. On Easter cards lambs are no less frolicsome each passing year.

Those same little lambikins get slaughtered before they are a year old. On the supermarket shelf they are reduced to abstract, packaged commodities. To cope with this glaring contradiction — Little Gambolling Lamb in Field v. Big Rack of Lamb in the Oven — we downplay sheep’s intelligence and individuality. Hence the traducing expression “to be a sheep”, meaning to be a dumb, passive follower. Even a man as sensitive and attuned to nature as George Orwell made the sheep in Animal Farm the stupidest of the stupid, who go from mindlessly chanting “Four legs good, two legs bad” to “Two legs good, four legs bad”. When it comes to sheep, then, we suffer what psychologists call cognitive dissonance.

Or we blank the treatment we give them. Once upon a time, sheep were always raised outside in the fresh air, in a system that would, in today’s terminology, be called “extensive”, even “organic”. More than ten million sheep are now stuck in factory farms worldwide; sheep are also used extensively in biomedical research. About 24,000 are used annually for a range of purposes, from the study of Huntington’s disease and heart conditions to orthopaedics, organ transplants and genetic research (including cloning). There was a time when sheep were used in Argentina as fuel, their bodies thrown into furnaces. Like logs.

My family began farming them 800 years ago. Since I started, 25 years ago, I have learned that sheep are curious things. And sheep farming is a curious old business, where one can become attached to, loving, even, of animals raised for sale, for the pot. That has always been the case. As the Old Testament, which knew a thing or two about shepherding, tells it in II Samuel:

The poor man had nothing, save one little ewe lamb, which he had bought and nourished up: and it grew up together with him, and with his children; it did eat of his meat, and drank of his own cup, and lay in his bosom, was unto him a daughter.

So, my fondness for Robin Hood was not unusual, and I believe spoke of the way we should treat sheep. With respect. That is how sheep farming used to be. And should be again.

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Robin Hood was easy to know and like because the species barrier between sheep and humans is gossamer thin. They are more like us than we may care to know. Sheep form friendship bonds, as well as family and flock ones.

I have made mistakes over the last 25 years, some terrible. I once had to put an injured sheep out of its misery. I did so in the corner of a field, but still in view of the flock. After the blast from the Lincoln 12-bore shotgun, the sheep changed their relationship with me. No longer was I the nice guy who gave them food; I was the killer. Far from crowding around me on my arrival in the field, they kept up the safety distance of wild animals. Our relationship had gone bust. It took months to heal, because sheep remember.

I understand the ethical objection to sending a lamb to the abattoir. (I don’t like the process either, and don’t do it any more.) In the good old days, a sheep would be raised to productive adulthood and only eaten when this time had expired, which was about the length of its natural life: five to seven years.

When I used to kill lambs, I would look into the eyes of each one, to remind myself of their value and their beauty. And they were gorgeous: spotted black and white, their tight curly wool gleaming, their horns curling in geometrically exact spirals.

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But now, I will no longer have lambs slaughtered for meat. I will, however, defend sheep, and sheep farming, together with the on-farm slaughter of (mature) sheep. It is the right way for a sheep to die, in the right place — which is its home. But today it is compulsory for all animals entering the food chain to be slaughtered at a licensed abattoir. The number of abattoirs is insufficient, however, meaning that animals have a long trip, packed tight in a trailer to the slaughterhouse.

Stress, as well as being cruel to the sheep, produces excesses of lactic acid, meaning the meat becomes ill-flavoured. Frequently, the animals sense their destiny at the abattoir and struggle to escape. To persuade sheep into the killing chamber, slaughterhouses use a trained “Judas sheep” to entice them forwards.

Sheep deserve a decent death, and there should be no more stressful, long-distance transport to a fear-reeking abattoir. “On-spot slaughtering” by high-velocity rifle has been successfully campaigned for in Switzerland by animal welfare association Four Paws (Vier Pfoten Schweiz). This method is already used in UK for “farmed” deer.

On-farm slaughter has the singular advantage that the sheep are less stressed before death. I’ve seen an apprentice butcher kill my excess rams while they were eating beet pellets as happy as Larry the Lamb. The shooting was so quick that the four were all mid-munch when they dropped dead, all in a row. I would not mind going the same way.

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Britons eat 306,000 tonnes of sheep meat each year. This equates to approximately 1,041,000 sheep killed per month. Paradoxically, this keeps sheep alive. Why do so few care about the sheep breeds that have disappeared off the face of the Earth as decidedly as the Dodo? Such as the Scottish Dunface. I have decided to eat more meat from our remaining native and rare breeds to do my bit to help preserve them. After all, I like sheep, on the plate and on the hill. It is possible to have your sheep and eat it. To have happy meat. It all depends on how the sheep are farmed.

I am not pretending to be noble. Being a shepherd has entirely selfish aspects; there’s a romance to shepherding which is entirely absent from pig and poultry farming. In a time of technology, in a time of cities and disconnect from the countryside, shepherds, male or female, feel themselves to be the last of a breed: hard, solitary individuals doing real graft out in the elements. It’s almost heroic.

I love cattle and pigs, I have a deep affection for chickens and geese, but sheep are special. It’s there in the Bible. Jesus is the “lamb of God”, not His calf, His piglet, even His kid. I suspect it’s the dependency, the fact that sheep require such close care. Humans are hard-wired to want companionship, but also to protect their kith, kin and charges. Sheep, especially their gentle offspring, fit the bill like no other farmyard animal.

Extracted from The Sheep’s Tale by John Lewis-Stempel, Doubleday