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…

RIP Robin

When he was pointing in the right direction he was a force of nature - and a formidable warrior for it

He was an absolute rascal.

A man of fierce (sometimes dodgy) beliefs but went at life like a terrier and I couldn’t help but like him. telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/05/3… Had some great chats with him

You never knew what he’d come up with next - and had a strange knack of making impossible things seem possible

Condolences to Robin’s family and friends.

Thought @Mark_Spencer was very jolly this morning on @BBCFarmingToday and I’m sure he believed all he said

But he’s wrong and here’s why…

https://twitter.com/jake_fiennes/status/1634446940392902656

He said I was going in to Higher Tier and I was alright

Actually I’m TRYING to get in to it - it’s expensive to apply for (about £700 in fees so far), and you need @NaturalEngland staff to judge you as being good enough - and to have the capacity - they often don’t have this

Amazing to me to see how different farmers and some environmentalists see this

The idea that upland farmers will all go green and lower inputs if you drop their income from the state is one of the strangest/most unlikely ideas I’ve ever heard - but clearly sincerely held

https://twitter.com/herdyshepherd1/status/1633780408037912576

It seems to be based on the idea that farms are what they are because of the past subsidies

And taking those away will lead to everyone falling in to line with low input greener business models

I knew traffic wasn’t great… but jeez this book shows that it’s an absolute disaster for nature

If we are having the Britain is the most nature depleted country conversation then we are gonna have to talk about roads - fascinating how disastrous roads are for so many species So much bigger than I’d understood

Fragments habitats
Isolates populations
Reduces survival rates
Pollutes soil and plants
Changes species mix and behaviour
Changes birdsong (they have to shout)
Noise pollution stresses and kills
Air pollution stresses and kills
Affects DNA

We have to make decisions now about the future of our business - how much production, how much nature recovery, what kind of mix is optimum

Totally impossible without clear information from our goverment about future agri-environment schemes The cynical (sensible?) £ has always been on production and more livestock or more intensive crops

Years of blather and fucking about since 2016 at least - and absolutely nothing to show for it

Bunch of clowns
I’m done being polite about it
And I’m done with being consulted