Cattle and sheep grazed on natural grasslands produce tastier, healthier meat, new research has confirmed.

A study funded by the Economic and Social Research Council concluded that pasture-based farming is good for the environment, the consumer and the producer.

But it needs stronger support from British policymakers if it is to realise its full potential.

The research, part of the Rural Economy and Land Use programme, has been welcomed by Somerset-based author Graham Harvey, whose latest book The Carbon Fields, is a powerful argument for switching much of agriculture back to a grass-based regime.

"The great thing is that serious studies like this prove that those of us calling for this kind of change aren't just a bunch of cranks" he said. "But what we are doing is promoting a return to farming regimes which pre-date the modern model of agriculture and were in use for hundreds of years simply because they were so successful."

In the study, detailed analysis of the nutritional qualities of plant species present on natural grasslands showed they provided grazing animals with a richer, more diverse diet than the improved pastures used for more intensive farming.

And this richer diet translated into tastier meat: taste panels rated biodiverse beef from cattle breeds such as Longhorn – a traditional breed particularly well adapted to unimproved grassland environments – to be more tender and more flavour-intense than meat from conventional breeds.

Chemical analysis showed that the meat from animals with a more biodiverse diet was healthier, too. Meat from wild-grazed lambs, particularly those grazed on heather, had higher levels of the natural antioxidant, vitamin E, than meat from animals grazed on improved grassland.

It also had higher levels of healthy fatty acids including the long-chain omega 3 fatty acid, DHA, thought to play a key role in brain development and to protect against heart disease. And higher levels of the anti-carcinogenic compound, conjugated linoleic acid, were found in meat from lambs grazed on moorland and Longhorn cattle grazed on unimproved pastures than in control meat.

The study was inspired by observations of French rural communities where there is a long-standing tradition of associating the ecological quality of the land with the quality of the food produced on it.

Leader of the research team, Professor Henry Buller, from Exeter University, said: "Many French farmers actively maintain the biodiversity of their grasslands in order to protect the future of the high-quality food produced from it.

"We wanted to know if this approach could provide a model for more sustainable farming in the UK."

Although intensive agriculture dominates the British countryside, a growing number of farms are starting to use natural and species-rich grasslands such as salt marshes, heather and moorland to graze cattle, sheep and lambs.

T he findings from the focus groups in this study showed clearly that consumers are increasingly willing to pay for food with links to natural sounding places. But Britain has been very slow to take advantage of place-based labelling schemes: while France has 52 protected designations for meat products, the UK has only eight.

Professor Buller said producers and policymakers should give serious attention to the way local foods were labelled and promoted, and called for targeted support to help groups of farmers work together to link natural qualities of biodiverse grasslands to areas larger than individual farms.

"The British notion of local has become far too fixed on distance," he said. "Locality should be about the quality of the place and the relationship between the agricultural and ecological landscape."