Because of my last book, I’ve been in discussions about mental health.

Particularly about how men live/think and how it can make things seem hopelessly too much, and suicide seem like a way to stop it.

I’m not an expert, but I’ve had those moments… and those thoughts…

https://twitter.com/jackoefc27/status/1994119024188522701

If you’re in that place, please please please talk to someone

There are (really) ways to help and to change things and make life better - it’s really not the best solution

And lads, and lasses, please look after each other and talk about this stuff…

Been looking at the @AHDB_BeefLamb data on beef cow profitability

The data is a little out of date now…

But here’s a few takeaways… The cost of production per calf is nearly four times greater for the bottom 25% of herds than the top

Calf weaning weight was almost irrelevant to profitability - because extra weight is often bought with too expensive a suite of inputs (more below)…

In December I heard an amazing woman called Felice Jacka speak in Tasmania

She’s a nutritional scientist - and told a horror story of what our diet is doing to us, and how we need to eat whole real foods from healthy soil There’s nothing about that which I haven’t heard before but the stuff about mental health effects of poor diet shook me

And her followers looked like the healthiest people I’d seen for ages

Plus I had a bad health check that said I was pre-diabetic

I’m calling it now… the last goverment was until recently one of the worst of all time for nature, farming and food policies

THIS GOVERNMENT IS WORSE

And I have a little theory about what’s happening…

🧵 When we were in the EU and the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) we didn’t need a grown-up politics that was about food, farming and nature, because the big decisions where made in Brussels

Some little things we’ve done (with help) to help nature thrive on our farm

A kind of update or summary…

🧵🧵🧵 We’ve planted way north of 40,000 trees

And we did it without using any productive land (or very little) as we redesigned the farm to have 60 fields instead of 12 - and used every edge/hedge and corner

Shame on you @Keir_Starmer

The choice wasn’t between funding the NHS and a tax break - a staggeringly ill-judged explanation

You just killed the last vestiges of any social contract with British farmers

Well done to the farmers who blocked him in today - escalate it If they are genuinely this thick

And this regressive on their environmental, food, and farming politics then fuck em

This fight is only just starting

It takes a remarkable shit show to be worse than the last goverment - and now we have it

You do realise that nature recovery is now a co-financed project with farmers?

And that most are barely viable?

That they were screwed in several ways in the budget that undermines any trust in your organisation? And makes it almost impossible for us to help you?

https://twitter.com/tonyjuniper/status/1860662159300026441

Please tell me why I should trust my agreement from @NaturalEngland to do ambitious nature recovery as I’m not sure I do anymore

The promises in it seem to be easily breakable - and you make the rules up as you go along

If you want to understand the economics of modern intensive crop farming watch this

You can skip ahead to nearly the hour mark on this film and see the math

I find the numbers remarkable

My Farm Has A $1,358,000 Problem via @YouTube Spoiler alert:
They are looking at a $300k+ loss on their crop this year

And they didn’t even buy any new machinery!

I care greatly about ‘food security’ but it’s being used in really crap and childish arguments that nothing can change on farms

With great design and imagination we can get much more from our landscapes - so simply don’t believe people that say any change is bad news For example - soil health is awesome for biodiversity & farm productivity

So is grassland biodiversity

Even hedgerows and shelter belts have productivity gain effects

As do field trees in the right place

The idea that is either nature restoration or food security is dumb

Recently we got chance to watch two really good documentaries about ‘regenerative’ agriculture

They aren’t in competition - but thought I’d review them so you can choose whether to watch them and which you might like The first was ROOTS SO DEEP from @CarbonCowboys made by Peter Byck

It basically focuses on a major science project that Peter got funded to study pairs of farms across the US

They paired conventional farmers and a ‘regenerative’ farmer - who were more or less neighbours

Five years of zero tolerance on lambing problems seems to be working

One problem case in the barn, and everyone else doing their job outside If a sheep comes in the barn we help them and their lambs and then later this year they all leave

Australians told me for years to do this and I resisted - it’s 100% right - livestock has to do it’s job without assistance and with minimal inputs

A little thread on one of the simplest ideas in farming but which has a massive impact on profitability

This is basically how forage (grass etc) grows and is available over the year

(The graphics are borrowed from a Kit Pharo presentation) This is the annual forage need of an animal - let’s say a cow for simplicity

The spike is when it calves and needs loads of food to grow calf and produce milk, the dip when the calf no longer needs mum

Profitability is only weakly related to increasing yield

In fact lots of yield beyond a certain point is bought too expensively and so significant numbers of cows and acres aren’t profitable

We are very discerning which stock/acres we take out of production

https://twitter.com/mendipandy/status/1763892879204794467

If you look carefully at what we do and what I’m saying

We are deadly serious about being profitable and deadly serious about getting the productive bits of the farm in good heart and sweating those assets

We find we are more profitable when we do that - not less

A little example

We bought this fourteen acres of land nine years ago

It was once four or five fields but had become one ranched block over the last 200 years…

https://twitter.com/herdyshepherd1/status/1763666559870882161

It can’t be very well grazed as one block

So we will use the schemes available to sub divide it again

Then we will only graze on parcel at a time - meaning four bits are left to grow flowers etc at any given time in the growing season

We will leave it for longer rests too

Right wing think tanks have been pushing this for years

This is why this ‘economist’ is as thick as mince

https://twitter.com/simonpease1/status/1757401687373885850

1) paying farmers to grow habitats or to allow nature to happen on land isn’t a ‘subsidy’ it is an outcome being bought because it has public/societal value

I guess she doesn’t care much for wildflower or birds

List of things I am happy to protest about as a farmer:

1. Goverment trade deals being deeply unfair - nothing should come in to this country that is produced beneath our production/welfare/eco standards 2. Goverment support for U.K. ag being withdrawn and not replaced quickly enough with a fair green transition package - some bits of what’s now available are good, but need to roll out to ALL farmers

River rewiggling - a nerdy wet day update

If you hate this kind of thing you’ll hate this - go dredging instead

This is a little upland floodplain on a very wet day - doing what floodplains are meant to do - flood





The river used to be canalised in to a tight channel like this upstream

That drained my land quickly but wasn’t 1) a natural river ecosystem and 2) increased flood speed downstream as it barrelled down

My grandad loved this - they worked hard to create a well drained valley

A thread on being a farmer

I grew up thinking that doing farm work made you a farmer

If you filled your time with farm work you were a serious farmer

… It’s bullshit

I now think you become a farmer when it’s your money on the line and when you make it work financially

Privately being told some really sad stories about farmers trying to do more for nature in their Higher Tier CS schemes and being turned down

Can’t emphasise how much this sucks - these are farmers being rejected who want to deliver MORE NATURE Imagine the psychology of this - you spend hours and hours and sometimes thousand of pounds developing a nature restoration scheme for the farm and the goverment bodies turn you down cold

After a lifetime of being criticised as farmers for nature loss

I am already seeing rapid intensification of farming in the uplands

Lime/nutrients on fells
Drainage
Glyphosate old grassland
Reseeding

When we look for the net effect of ELMS/SFI it is the whole picture we have to judge

Unless you buy/protect/enforce better you get WORSE There is an idiotic narrative that the uplands are already ruined for nature

And can only get better

It’s total nonsense - they can get much worse and often will unless we make better happen

Loved meeting Polish farmers this week. The most encouraging thing is that most of their amazing wildlife was trashed in the 1990s - It came back because they changed the way they farmed and managed land It’s a mix of agro-ecological (no chemicals or synthetic fert) extensive livestock farming, wilder rivers and lakes, strict conservation regulations and forest management, and reintroduced species that recreate missing habitats twitter.com/i/web/status/1…