Joe Stanley 🇺🇦 Profile picture
Mar 8, 2020 9 tweets 11 min read Read on X
A positive thread on the need for #aspiration for the #future of our #food & #farming industry...

🚜 🐓 🐄 🐑 🍎 🥦 🌾 🌳 🐝

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FARMERS 👩‍🌾

We’ve a lot to be #proud of in 🇬🇧 - but we can #aspire to #better.

More productive. More tech-savvy. More collaborative. More environmentally proactive.

Change is coming. We have to embrace it & lead the #change. Consumers respect us - that’s a big asset ✅

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FARMERS, II 👩‍🌾

With #NetZero we have to step up. It will be difficult; hard decisions will have to be made. But we must show #leadership.

We can’t complain about the consequences of #ClimateChange if we don’t play our part.

And only Ag can act as a carbon sink 💨 🌱

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CONSUMERS 👨‍👩‍👦‍👦

You have the real power & you must recognise your own #value.

#Aspire to the best - on food #safety, #quality, #welfare & #sustainability.

Don’t be fobbed off with the environmentally destructive dregs of the 🌎 food system. Demand better for your families.

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CONSUMERS, II 👨‍👩‍👦‍👦

Siren politicians will say the biggest benefit of #Brexit is ‘cheaper food’.

Perhaps. But at what cost? The cheapest food in the 🌎 is produced in the ashes of the Amazon 🔥 or via misuse of antibiotics 🦠

Don’t accept their faux paternalism. Demand 🇬🇧

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POLITICIANS🧑‍⚖️

You carry the privilege of #leadership - so #aspire to lead with #integrity.

This is your chance to help build a genuinely #sustainable food & farming system which could be the envy of the 🌍

Don’t squander that chance in petty politicking.

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POLITICIANS, II🧑‍⚖️

Regardless of our domestic #standards, you know that undercutting them with food it would be #illegal to produce here in FTAs would devastate 🇬🇧 farming.

All our aspirations would be for nothing.

Do not be complicit in this. #Serve to #lead.

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MEDIA🕵️‍♀️

Please, just report the #facts.

🇬🇧 agriculture is 🌍 leading in many respects, has ambitions to improve, and is vital to our #sustainable future.

You are the prism through which most people see farming. Don’t distort our positive message to sell copy 🗞

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A truly #sustainable 🇬🇧 food & farming system ultimately comes down to #aspiration.

We must aspire to prioritise our #health, the quality of our #food & wellbeing of our #environment, then close the gap between aspiration & reality.

We can do this.

#BackBritishFarming

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More from @JoeWStanley

Sep 9, 2023
We get the food system we pay for.

Without making any moral judgement on current production practices, the reason intensive poultry production takes the form it does is because of relentless pressure to be ever-cheaper, from retailers & consumers.

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bbc.co.uk/news/uk-englan…
But this isn’t just an issue for 🐓

Most of our 🌎 food system is predicated on a race to the bottom on retail cost. But this generates external costs; to welfare, climate & the environment.

Farmers = price takers in a free market system feeding on the planet’s natural capital.


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I’m proud to be part of an industry in 🇬🇧 which is already far more sustainable than the global average, with plans to improve at pace, from improving biodiversity to producing climate-friendly food.


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Read 4 tweets
Jan 29, 2023
Another piece on farming & the environment which makes no effort whatever to get into the detail.

It raises important Qs. But. Makes no attempt to provide solutions other than suggesting we either stop using neonics or stop growing 🇬🇧 sugar.

1/

theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
Ok. So what does that look like?

Sugar beet afflicted with virus yellows can have yield reductions of up to 80%. No alternative control methods are currently available. And if we don’t grow sugar, demand will stay constant. So we just import cane sugar, right?

Well…
It also makes no attempt to demonstrate the incredibly strict parameters of the sugar beet derogation (not the least of which are pest/weather thresholds which were not triggered one of the two years so far granted), very low rates used & 3 year lag time to a flowering crop.
Read 5 tweets
Jan 29, 2023
Polarisation on food, farming & the environment, a 🧵

Since 2016 food, farming & the environment have rarely been out of the news. And rightly so: they impact every single one of us. Yet the quality of national debate on these vital issues has been (mostly) dire.

1/
With the vote to leave the EU in 2016 the UK was presented with a blank canvas for agriculture policy for the first time in 40 years. But the problems began here, with a government needing to find Brexit benefits spinning a line of misinformation about the CAP.
This mostly centred around presenting the CAP as if:

1) it were still the 1980s, with milk lakes & butter mountains & no environmental or rural development funding

2) it only benefitted rich land owners, when in reality smaller tenants were most reliant on it
Read 25 tweets
Jan 26, 2023
There are so many basic errors in this piece, it makes me so frustrated that the public see what’s happening in the countryside through such a distorted lens. How can we have an informed discussion when we get the basics wrong - after 6 years!

bbc.co.uk/news/science-e…
- ELM is not a ‘farm subsidy’ scheme; it’s payments for environmental actions, largely on an income forgone basis, and will go far wider than farmers.

- It isn’t just for ‘landowners’

- There’s little to nothing in ELM about ‘producing food’.
- ELM was not intended to replace CAP: there is & will be a huge financial shortfall on every English farm, by design.

- CAP was not ‘based on how much land an individual farmer owned…benefitting the wealthiest’. It was based on land tenure, of most benefit to smaller tenants.
Read 4 tweets
Jan 24, 2023
.@CommonsEFRA unimpressed at government’s dismissal of its concerns for the impact of the NZ/UK FTA on 🇬🇧 farms, or of its call for MPs to have scrutiny of future trade deals as promised when we ‘took back control’.

committees.parliament.uk/committee/367/…
Unfortunately, some in government seem keener to back our competitors (in the name of ‘the free market’) than their own domestic producers, who underpin the rural economy & 🇬🇧 food security.
As for those who claim NZ doesn’t want to send meat here anyway ‘because China’, in the real world volumes are already increasing - before the FTA takes effect.

Frozen lamb, defrosted & sold as ‘fresh’…

fwi.co.uk/business/marke…
Read 4 tweets
Aug 9, 2022
⬅️ Left: a coal fired power station

➡️ Right: a wind farm

Both produce exactly the same electricity, but nobody would claim the ⚡️ from these two sites has the same emissions footprint.

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⬅️ Left: a monster truck

➡️ Right: a Tesla

Both transport people from A to B, but nobody would compare the two and claim their emissions footprint per mile was the same because ‘they’re both cars’.

You can see where I’m going with this.

2/ ImageImage
⬅️ Left: cattle in the ashes of some recently cleared 🇧🇷 rainforest

➡️ Right: 🇬🇧 sheep grazing a diverse herbal ley

Advocates of a shift to ‘plant based’ diets make no distinction between the two; they want you to think both are as bad as each other.

3/ ImageImage
Read 14 tweets

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