The “meat dilemma” was once again the subject of conversation this week, with an Oxford University study calling for a national plan to cut meat consumption and production to “reduce environmental harm” and to make more space for plant-based proteins.

Meat production is already dropping. Cattle and sheep numbers have fallen 40% in the last 30 years in the UK, but demand for meat remains high with 98% of British households consuming meat.

If we continue to press for a drop in production which is faster than a drop in consumption, that demand will only be met by imports from abroad, which not only increases our food miles but irresponsibly draws on other countries’ natural resources. Countries which are also facing the same climate emergency.

It is important to note that over 80% of Scottish farmland is not suitable for growing cereals and vegetables – due to the topography and nature of the terrain – but is perfectly suited to grazing livestock, which can turn rough grassland into delicious, nutrient-dense protein.

A much higher demand for a plant-based diet could not be met by local Scottish farming systems and brings us back to the same issue as above: a higher dependency on imports and exporting our carbon footprint elsewhere.

However, my main concern with the report is this dangerous narrative that keeps being perpetuated that meat is bad and plant-based proteins are good. There is no nuance to a debate which requires much wider understanding and detail way beyond a series of numbers collated on a survey.

It dismisses some of the amazing work being done by farmers to regenerate their soils and make space for nature, let alone the wider societal benefits that producing local, nutrient dense, affordable protein can deliver.

Most farmers are already on a journey to improve the way they farm, others need to quicken the pace, but the stick over carrot approach will serve only to divide and disengage the very people who have the capacity to make a real impact.

Environmental activist George Monbiot has been at the root of much of the divide for many years, gaining momentum as a disruptor and increasingly outspoken in his demands for an end to livestock farming, instead advocating for our rural areas to be turned over to wildflower meadows and our plates filled with lab-grown meat.

In a recent debate at Oxford University on whether livestock grazing is essential to mitigating climate change, Mr Monbiot managed in the space of an hour to completely dismiss the lifetime work of Allan Savory, one of the world’s greatest leaders in regenerative agriculture. It wasn’t a debate; it was a blinkered attempt to rip apart someone’s entire work with not even a semblance of respect or a willingness to engage and listen.

My biggest challenge with Mr Monbiot is not specifically with the messages he is sharing but in the way he is undermining, devaluing, and attacking people in the process and paving the way for his often extremist online following to degrade those who do not align with his views.

I agree with Mr Monbiot that our lands have been over cultivated, our soils depleted for many decades, because farming was incentivised to over produce and over work the land after the Second World War to strengthen domestic food security. But where he gives no ground or isn’t willing to listen is in recognising that farming must be enabled to catch up, to adapt, to begin to restore nature and habitat degradation and is in a unique position to do so.

Farming activist and author Joe Stanley put it very succinctly: “We’ve reduced agricultural emissions by 15% since 1990 and frankly we haven’t been trying. It’s not been on the agenda. Now it’s front and centre. Imagine where we can be in a decade?”

Over the past weeks, I have been visiting inspiring farm businesses across the UK as part of a Nuffield Farming Scholarship and have seen firsthand how farms of different systems and sizes are making space for nature, whilst also providing food.

On the hillside of Malham Cove in the Yorkshire Dales National Park, I met with Neil and Leigh Heseltine who have been regeneratively grazing their Belted Galloway cattle for the past 20 years and have witnessed the diversity of flora and fauna recover at an amazing rate. They have seen the return of bird’s-eye primrose, early purple orchids, black knapweed and bluebells and by conservation grazing their cattle, they have created habitats for curlews, snipe, redshank, skylark and meadow pipits.

I visited Holkham estate in Norfolk where conservation manager Jake Fiennes took me around the National Nature Reserve and explained how careful management of the land and wetlands, alongside livestock grazing, has created a thriving haven for wildlife. Avocets, spoonbills, red kites, cormorants, and black tailed godwits have boomed under his stewardship in the past four years.

I would challenge the extreme environmental lobby who too quickly jump on the Monbiot anti-livestock brigade, and ask them what are they doing to solve the climate and nature debates? Are they restoring our soils, planting hedgerows, integrating nature with food production, and delivering a whole host of societal benefits? How are they playing their part?

Scientists and researchers can gather the data, conduct surveys, make recommendations to government, but just remember they are the shoes on the carpet telling the boots on the ground what to do.

The absurdity of it all is that most of us are aiming for the same goal: we want to see nature return in hoards to our countryside and more carbon to be sequestered and stored in our soils, so why can’t we move on from the dangerous narrative being spread, that livestock farming is bad, and divert our passions and energy behind a common objective?

I’m happy to agreeably disagree with Mr Monbiot because the current path we are headed on ends in resistance. Wars are won by inspiring action and it is a war we are fighting to address the climate and nature emergencies and it is going to take unification not division to win.