Air freight is 40-100 times more damaging to the environment than deep sea freight. If the entire contents of your veg box were air-freighted from Kenya the carbon footprint of the box would increase approximately 25 times. This suggests strongly that it is the sort of environmental madness that our planet cannot afford. But are there circumstances where some airfreight might be justified?

• It is the only way that certain produce, at certain times of the year, can arrive in prime condition. We think this is madness when such a rich variety is available either locally or using sea freight. It is an unacceptable aspect of consumer choice.
• The export of agricultural crops by airfreight offers a valuable source of income for developing countries. Whilst true in some circumstances the validity of this argument is reduced by the fact that :

- in the huge majority of cases the businesses are expat owned and much of the benefit exported, and
- rising fuel prices will soon make airfreight a thing of the past for all but the most expensive items. To be building industries reliant on cheap fuel will ultimately cause more poverty when they collapse.

It is our view that the poverty alleviation argument very seldom justifies the environmental cost, which is why we do not sell air-freighted produce. Instead we support growers and development projects, particularly in West Africa and the Caribbean, through the use of sea freight.

Better lorries than vans or cars. Trucks have a bad press. Far more traffic and emissions are caused by vans and cars moving food than by trucks. For us the figures are 26% for vans and 13% for lorries. Lorries are about seven times more efficient than vans in moving veg. The aim is to get the food as close as possible to its destination in a full lorry before transferring it to a full van. Obviously better still to produce the food as close by as possible, which is what we are progressively doing in developing sister farms in Peterborough, Yorkshire, Hampshire and soon Kent and Cheshire, each growing and distributing locally (use the buttons at the top of the page to visit these web pages). Even so, this will only reduce emissions by less than 10%.

For every kilometer that food travels the relative greenhouse gas emissions are: 1 For deep sea freight
2 For short sea freight
6.5 For HGV, and
40-100 For airfreight

In the past, many off-setting schemes have been misleading at best and at times an outright con. Things have improved hugely over the last two years, but we are still dubious of the validity of the science, in some cases the verification, and question the underlying philosophy of looking for a market-based solution to this problem. For us, studying and understanding the approximate measurement of our energy use and environmental impact is a precursor to doing something about it, rather than trading away our responsibilities. I do not have enough faith in the underlying science and accuracy of measurement to start trading carbon or comparing carbon footprints with others.

• Energy taxation. Forget about carbon taxation, as the bureaucratic burden will be horrendous. The most effective way to get businesses and people to think about their energy use and associated carbon emissions is by making energy itself expensive. There is no need for this to be punitive to the poor if the funds are used to finance public transport and reduce taxes for those on lower incomes. Such a policy would also stem the flow of funds to the oil rich, morally dubious regimes that our oil addiction is funding.
• A well thought out and nationally consistent policy of recycling; recyclabilitymeans nothing if packaging and other waste is not actually recycled because convenient facilities do not exist.

I am sure that many customers will want a categorical answer to this, but unfortunately it is very complicated to give one. However I am confident that unless you walk to your supermarket and buy only UK, unpackaged produce, your shopping trip will very rarely have a lower environmental impact than having a box delivered by us. Most of our customers tell us that shopping with Riverford has enabled them to substantially reduce the frequency of other shopping trips. If we can only reduce shopping trips by car by one a month we will have had a significant impact.

I think that we do better on most environmental issues; notably packaging, proportion of imports and local sourcing within the UK. (Supermarkets have been talking a lot of late about local sourcing straight into store. It is nigh on impossible to get hard data, but I would be astonished if even 1% of fresh produce was genuinely locally sourced and distributed). Our weakness would be if customers take a delivery from us without reducing their frequency of visits to a supermarket – in which case it could be argued that the delivery was an additional journey.

Most studies suggest that home shopping is usually better, but it is hard to compare like with like. Supermarket calculations of carbon footprint usually leave out packaging and their customers’ car trips to get the shopping home. The emissions associated with delivering a box to your door are about 1,055g CO2. This is the equivalent of driving an average car about 3 miles. However the fact that we do not deliver all the products in a typical supermarket shop would count against us. In our favour, our study is much more comprehensive and includes a more complete assessment.

Yes, and it is more complicated than just looking at the carbon footprint of the material, which is why you won’t see us rushing to abandon cardboard on that basis. The recyclability of a material is equally important. It is no use using plastics with a lower production impact if this is unbalanced by a product that cannot be reused or recycled. Sticking to commonly recycled materials such as HDPE and PET is a good place to start. As plastic bags cannot be recycled with most local authorities and we really have no sensible alternative to using them, we plan to take our bags back from customers and recycle them into more bags. For reasons of hygiene and practicality we cannot re-use plastic bags, but in the future we hope to develop a plastic bag with recycled content, perhaps even made from our recycled bags.

In almost all cases the answer is yes, because organic farming;

• Promotes biodiversity within fields, in the hedgerows and, most importantly, in the soil.
• Uses less energy per kg of food produced. Organic famers do not use synthetic nitrogen fertilizer which uses huge amounts of fossil fuels to manufacture.
• Avoids pollution from pesticides and fertilizers.
• Under organic management CO2 is normally removed from the atmosphere and accumulated as increased levels or organic matter in the soil, a process known as carbon sequestration.
• No use of GM and therefore avoidance of the unquantifiable environmental risks.

There is little doubt that in the developed world we eat more animal products than is good for our health, for the environment and for the wellbeing of the less affluent. Pigs, poultry and intensively produced (grain fed) cows compete with the world’s poor for grain produced on fertile arable land. In turn this increases the pressure for deforestation and intensification of production on existing land.

• For forage eating ruminants (cows, sheep, goats and grass-fed cows) the argument is much more complex for several reasons:
• They can graze on land that is unsuitable for growing crops for human consumption; as such it could be argued that they produce some food where there would have been none.
• By eating grass and clover they are an important part of a balanced rotation, allowing fertility to be maintained without using energy-consuming fertilizers. On our land (and all but the very best land in this country) it would be very difficult to farm organically without growing forage legumes and using the manure from the livestock that eat them.
• Ruminants belch and fart, releasing large quantities of methane (about 20%) of the world total. As methane is 21 times more potent as a green house gas than carbon dioxide it has been argued that ruminants contribute substantially to global warming. Indeed it has been calculated that a staggering 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions are the result of farm livestock, compared to 13% for transport, so this is obviously a huge issue. Furthermore it also seems to be true that extensive, grass fed animals (such as we like to promote, for reasons of health, animal welfare and flavour) cause higher emissions per litre of milk or kg of meat than intensive ones, though personally I think some of the calculations used to argue this are flawed.
• The calculation is made even more complex by the fact that the cultivations (e.g ploughing) needed to grow arable crops promote the breakdown of organic matter in the soil, releasing CO2. Under grassland, carbon is normally sequestrated, locking up CO2 from the atmosphere as soil organic matter. It could therefore be argued that maintaining grassland for animals to graze has the effect of reducing global warming.

Confused? There are no simple or authoritative answers to this question. We certainly do not feel qualified to give a definitive answer but there seem to be a lot of reasons for eating fewer animal products, making sure that we use all the animal (offal and all) and treating them with the respect that they deserve, both when alive and in the kitchen, rather than just wanting them to be cheap.