DancingThroughChaos

The millionaire farmer is the only millionaire in Britain who cannot spend a penny of it. On paper, he is a millionaire. He drives a pickup older than his grandson. On paper, he is a millionaire. His last holiday was a funeral in Cumbria. On paper, he is a millionaire. His wife has done the books for 30 years and never drawn a wage. On paper, he is a millionaire. He calved two heifers last night by torchlight. On paper, he is a millionaire. The government's own survey puts his return on all of it at half a percent a year. On paper, he is a millionaire. The only way to touch a penny is to sell a field, and the farm is smaller forever. Every other millionaire can sell a slice and go on holiday. He sells a slice and next year's milk cheque is smaller. Since April, everything above £2.5 million each is taxed at 20% the day he dies, on a number he never once got to spend. The land is the millionaire. The farmer just works for it.

Children who eat dinner with their family most nights do better in school, have fewer behavioural problems, and are less likely to develop eating disorders. A 2023 umbrella review in the journal Nutrients combined the results of 57 reviews and found that family mealtimes were consistently linked to better outcomes across every domain measured. The review found that children who ate with their families regularly had higher fruit and vegetable intake, lower rates of obesity, better academic performance, and fewer symptoms of depression and anxiety. The association held after controlling for income, parental education, and family structure. The mechanism is not the food. It is the conversation. Family dinner is one of the few remaining settings in modern life where a child sits with adults, without a screen, and practises talking, listening, and being heard. The vocabulary exposure alone is significant: children at the dinner table hear a wider range of words than children who eat alone, and vocabulary at age five is one of the strongest predictors of academic success. The review also found that the quality of the meal mattered less than the fact of sitting down together. A takeaway pizza eaten at the table with conversation produced similar benefits to a home-cooked meal. The key variable was the shared time, not the menu. Nobody has time. Everybody is tired. The research says that twenty minutes at a table, phones off, food on plates, talking about nothing in particular, is doing more for your child's brain, body, and mental health than most interventions that cost money and require appointments. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3744…

A cow burps 100kg of methane a year, and every atom of the carbon in it came out of the air above the field. Nobody disputes the 100kg. Big number, sounds awful, looks tremendous on a placard. The question is where it came from. Not in a spiritual sense. Physically. Atom by atom. Where was that carbon 18 months ago, before it was a burp in Shropshire? In the air. Carbon dioxide over a field, until a blade of ryegrass grabbed it, stuck a bit of sunlight to it, and made itself out of it. A cow ate the grass. The cow did what a cow does. The methane went up, sat about for 12 years, broke down into carbon dioxide again, and came back down onto the same field, where the grass grabbed it a second time. That is a lap. Coal is a different animal. You dig it out of the ground, where it has been minding its own business since the Carboniferous, set fire to it, and it joins the atmosphere for the first time in 300 million years. A meaningful chunk is still up there in the year 2325. Nothing takes it back out. There is no grass on earth that grows coal. Fossil carbon is a taxi with the meter running for three centuries. Remove every cow in Britain tomorrow. Lorries in, gates open, the lot. Is there less carbon in the sky? No. The grass still grows. The grass still dies. It rots, or it burns on a moor in July, and the carbon goes up anyway, having produced precisely nothing on the way. You have deleted the part of the cycle that made dinner. And GWP100, the number on every press release, overstates the warming from a steady herd by about a factor of 4. The physicists who built the replacement have been saying so for years, to a room that would rather not hear it. The cow is the only part of the carbon cycle that hands you dinner on the way round. Go and look at a hill. Something has to eat it.

Seven years of West Oxfordshire District Council's decisions on Jeremy Clarkson's farm shop, in order, so you can watch a man be slowly prevented from selling a steak grown three hundred yards away. 2019: shop permitted, on condition it sells produce from the holding or from within the district. Application to widen that to 30 miles: refused. Given 16. January 2022: restaurant refused. Out of keeping with the Cotswolds Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. August 2022: enforcement notice. The operation called unsustainable and incompatible with its countryside location. Dining areas shut. June 2023: appeal. Shop, cafe and car park allowed. Restaurant refused again, in a lambing shed, on a farm. Same ruling: six weeks judged ample to strip the barn back and put the ground as it was. Grain store, to hold his own harvest instead of selling at whatever August offers: full application required. Car park, for people already blocking the lane: refused, then granted temporarily on appeal. 2026: still wrangling over the parking. Seven years, one farm, one shop selling food grown in the field behind it. Then look at what the same country waves through elsewhere. In October 2025 central government overruled Lincolnshire's objections and approved Tillbridge Solar across 1,214 hectares of farmland, an area the size of Heathrow. Springwell Solar, 1,280 hectares, went the same month. Different authorities, so no cheap comparison intended. The machinery above them is the point. Cover a thousand hectares of English farmland in panels and Whitehall overrules the locals who object. Sell a steak out of a lambing shed and you get six weeks to take the building down.

Stanford researchers scanned teenagers listening to their mothers, having already shown that in young children her voice lights up half the brain. Something had switched. In children under about twelve, the reward circuitry fires harder for their mother's voice than for a stranger's. In adolescents it flips. The reward regions respond more strongly to unfamiliar voices, and her voice stops being the sound the system reaches for. The crossover happens somewhere between thirteen and fourteen. Nothing has gone wrong. The circuitry has not broken and she has not been demoted. It is being retuned deliberately, because a person who is going to leave home needs to start finding other people interesting, and the brain arranges that by making everyone outside the house more rewarding to listen to. Which means the thing every mother of a teenager describes has a mechanism. He is not ignoring her out of contempt. Her voice is no longer arriving at the part of him that used to light up for it. Two things worth holding onto here. The first is that the hearing and processing regions are still there and still working. He hears her perfectly. What changed is what his reward system does with the sound. The second is that this is temporary, and there is a whole literature on adult children and their mothers to say so. The circuitry is being repointed outward for the years he needs to build a life away from her. It is not being deleted. So a woman finds herself talking to somebody who used to run toward her voice across a car park, and who now barely registers it. That is her son's brain doing exactly what it is supposed to do, on schedule, and it is a horrible thing to be on the receiving end of. jneurosci.org/content/42/20/…

Jeremy Clarkson's farm shop is legally forbidden from selling food produced more than sixteen miles away. One in ten British farmers now drives more than sixty miles to reach an abattoir. The animal travels four times further to die than the meat is permitted to travel to be sold. Britain had around 2,500 abattoirs in the 1970s and has 203. In a Commons debate last May an MP put it flatly: over ninety percent have closed, and family farms now face round trips of a hundred miles to kill a handful of animals. The small ones are nearly finished. About sixty were left by 2023, closing at ten percent a year on the Food Standards Agency's own figures, which puts the whole tier inside a decade. What killed them is the part worth sitting with. CCTV in every plant. Head restraints. Electrical stunning equipment. Each written for animal welfare, each a capital bill a small operator cannot carry, each perfectly affordable to an industrial plant killing several thousand a week. So the rules made in the name of welfare closed the places where welfare was easiest, and the animals now spend two hours in a lorry instead of fifteen minutes. One farmer told Country Life he used a plant fifteen minutes away until it stopped taking his cattle, because their horns were too wide for the race. He drives ninety minutes to Gloucester now. Having horns has become a logistical problem, which means the native breeds are being quietly designed out of their own country. In 2024, almost half of all British cattle went through thirteen plants. The smallest fifty handled three percent between them. And every farm shop in England depends on the tier that is vanishing. Fifty-eight percent of small producers say their business would not be profitable without selling direct, and selling direct means somewhere local willing to kill one animal for one farmer and hand back the carcass. A man can have the shop, the queue, the licence and the name above the door, and still find there is nowhere within an hour that will take his cow. Britain has spent five years arguing about whether a farmer may sell his beef. It closed nine in ten of the places where the beef gets made and nobody said a word.

Jeremy Clarkson's farm shop was ruled by West Oxfordshire District Council to be incompatible with its countryside location. The countryside location is a farm. Those are close to their own words. The nature, scale and siting of the operation was found to be unsustainable and incompatible with its countryside location within the Cotswold Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The building at the centre of it was a lambing shed. Built for lambs. In a field. Next to other fields, which contain sheep, which is what the shed was for. The council's other findings, over three years of this: - A farm shop may not sell food grown more than sixteen miles away. - A lambing shed may not become a restaurant. - A car park for the people who come anyway was refused. - Six weeks was judged ample to put the barn back the way it was. Sixteen miles. Meanwhile the supermarket eleven miles down the road sells Peruvian asparagus, Kenyan beans and Brazilian beef, and no council has ever drawn a circle round it. And consider what the Cotswolds actually are. Stone walls, stone barns, cropped green hills. It looks the way it looks because for a thousand years men kept animals on that ground and built things out of the rock underneath it. The beauty under protection here was manufactured, slowly, by farming. Every wall in the view was put there by somebody doing precisely what the council has now determined is out of keeping. They are not protecting the countryside from industry. They are protecting a picture of the countryside from the countryside. The shed offended nobody while it held sheep. It became an eyesore the day somebody put a till in it.

Two hundred of the thousand acres at Diddly Squat grew nothing at all this year. That was a decision taken in advance, on a spreadsheet. Wheat or barley on that ground was a guaranteed loss before the drill left the shed, so Jeremy Clarkson left it bare and explained why in his Sun column this week. One line from it went everywhere. Farmers have reached the point where it is quite simply impossible to make money from growing food. Every paper carried that sentence, and every paper stopped there. The list underneath it did not get printed anywhere. Because he went on to set out what two hundred acres of good English ground could do instead of feeding anyone, and there were four items on it. - Rent it to a global agri-company growing crops for anaerobic digesters. - Cover it in solar panels. - Put a data centre on it. - Sell the farm to a Chinese company for a multistorey high-intensity piggery. Every one of those pays. The only use of that land which reliably loses money is the one that puts food on a British plate. He added that he was not being ridiculous, and that anybody in 1926 would have laughed you out of the room for suggesting the factories would be gone by 2026. Now the bit with a date on it. From 1 January 2027 the UK's carbon border tax applies to imported fertiliser. The Treasury's own costings put the take at £140 million in 2027-28, rising to £180 million the year after. Estimates of the hit run from around £33 a tonne to £75, which is a fifth to a quarter added to the largest input bill an arable farm carries. The Central Association of Agricultural Valuers has warned that a typical 500 acre cereals farm could be down as much as £70,000 once fertiliser and fuel costs land. So the fertiliser that grows the wheat gets taxed on a known date, in writing, by a government that says out loud it wants food security. Nobody in Whitehall has ever signed a policy to stop Britain growing food. They have signed a great many that make every alternative pay better, which arrives at the same field. And understand whose field this is. Diddly Squat has a television crew, a farm shop with a queue down the lane, a pub, a lager brand, a bestselling book every autumn and one of the best land agents in the country. It is the most commercially advantaged thousand acres in Britain, and two hundred of them were left bare this year because putting seed in them was the losing move. Every arable farmer in England is doing that same sum this autumn. Almost none of them have a production company to cover the difference. Those two hundred acres have not gone out of production. They are waiting to hear which industry wants them more than you do.

The BBC has had thirty eight years and £3.8 billion a year to explain British farming to the British public. The job was eventually done by an American shopping website, in eight episodes, fronted by the man the BBC itself dropped over a row about a steak. Countryfile first went out on 24 July 1988, and its origin is the part nobody brings up. It replaced Farming, a programme that had spent thirty years making news for the people who actually did the work. The new show was deliberately widened to take in everybody who merely liked the countryside as well as those who lived off it. Widened meant softened. In 2009 it moved to Sunday evenings, where five to six million people still watch, and it has been settled ever since into an hour of scenery, a ramble, a calendar competition and the weather. Then in June 2021 a company best known for selling doorbells put out a series about a man failing to farm a thousand acres, and within a week the British public understood the subsidy system. Look at what an American retailer put on screen that thirty eight years of Sunday nights had not. A thousand acres, a full year of work, £144 profit. A crop drowning in the field with nobody coming to help. A farmer selling at a price he is not allowed to set. A council able to shut a restaurant standing on a man's own land. The accounts, open, with jokes over the top. James Rebanks, who keeps sheep for a living rather than for a segment, reckoned Clarkson did more for farmers in one series than Countryfile had managed in thirty years. The NFU said the same thing in nicer words. Now the funding, which is where it gets genuinely funny. Countryfile is paid for by £180 a year, rising on 1 April, taken from every household in Britain that watches live television, on pain of prosecution. Twenty three million licences. Three point eight billion pounds. Guaranteed money, a captive audience, a national mandate and a prime Sunday slot. Clarkson's Farm is paid for by people voluntarily pressing play, and it goes out in more than 240 countries. The nation's farmers had one broadcaster legally funded by them, obliged to serve them, sitting on the biggest slot in British television. It gave them a weather forecast and a photography competition, and when a bloke with a Lamborghini tractor did the actual job for free, the same building's stars went on a sofa to complain about his opening credits. The BBC had the money, the mandate, the Sunday night and thirty eight years. It used them to film the view.

The last overseas shearers Britain intends to let in are on the fells right now, working out the final weeks of their leave. The door shut on 30 June. No vote, no debate, no announcement, just a date passing quietly in a summer when everyone was looking elsewhere. Those still working the Borders this week are here on leave that expires on 1 October, and when they fly out that is the end of it. Understand what is walking out. Six New Zealanders spent three months in one Northumberland valley last year and sheared nearly 90,000 sheep. Fifteen thousand head each, across farms from the Scottish Borders down to County Durham. They have been coming into Coquetdale for over thirty years. Since 2011 a concession has let up to 75 of them in each spring, and between them they take the wool off one and a half to two million British sheep in a window a few weeks long. The Home Office rejected the application on 2 February. Twenty-six days of farmers writing to their MPs got it reinstated on 10 March for one final year, with a line about the sector having had fourteen years to train British workers and now being expected to transition to domestic labour. Here is what that sentence is standing on. British Wool trains over 800 people a year, most of those courses are basic level, and most of the people on them are sheep farmers learning to do their own flock. Training was never the bottleneck. A top shearer clears a ewe in two or three minutes, calm hands, no panic in the animal, hundreds a day for weeks on end, and reaching that standard takes years of conditioning and a place in a global trade that follows the season around the planet. Fourteen million breeding ewes. A few weeks to do them all. A sheep left in fleece gets eaten alive by maggots, so the job is not optional and the date is not negotiable. Next spring those farms make phone calls that nobody answers. Seventy-five shearers, once a year, and a government that could not find room for them.

A man who spent thirty years reviewing sports cars has taught this country more about its own food than every minister, union and campaign of the last fifty years combined. Here is what five series of Clarkson's Farm put in front of the public, and not one line of it is opinion. - A thousand acres, worked flat out for a year, made a profit of £144. Under forty pence a day. - By year six the same farm was losing money, weather and prices turning a projected £37,000 into a five grand loss. - A crop can drown in the field after months of work and take everything with it, and nobody is coming to help. - The farmer is the only man in the food chain who sells at a price he does not set. The supermarket sets it. He takes it or he takes nothing. - The council can shut his restaurant, refuse his car park and stop him selling his own food off his own land. - The subsidy he was told to lean on can be closed overnight, the big estates first through the door, the small farms locked out. - One outbreak of bovine TB can lock a farm down for months, banned from buying or selling a single cow, through no fault of its own. - Rear pigs with real care and the butcher's maths can still make them a loss, so the animals go and the loss stays. - The margins are so thin that a rich man buys farmland not to earn from it but to shelter money that earns elsewhere. The shelter exists precisely because the farming does not. Now hold that against the story you were sold. Greedy farmers. Subsidised for doing nothing. Wrecking a countryside they are somehow also the custodians of. There is no profit. That was the reveal. A show that set out to be funny accidentally filmed the slow strangling of the people who feed us, and the country watched it happen and finally understood what its cheap food actually costs. Clarkson has now admitted the plainest part out loud: it is the television money keeping Diddly Squat alive, and most farms do not have a television show. Britain grows about sixty per cent of its own food and the average farmer is past sixty. That is why both numbers are heading the wrong way. It took a Lamborghini tractor and a man doing it for a laugh. Fifty years of earnest campaigning could not manage it.

Petition To Make Hospice Funding A National Priority: Corin Darby, Chief Executive of @BoxPowerCIC , has launched a public petition to make public support for making sustainable hospice funding a national priority. It is now live and, in just over a day, more than 1,400 people have already added their voice. Supporters can also leave their own comments or upload a short "Dear Prime Minister" video @andyburnham, allowing people from every community to add their own voice in a positive, united and non-political way. Details here: change.org/Everyhospicematte…

This is a statue of the only man in Troy who saw the trap. He tried to warn everyone, and this is what the gods did to him because of it... His name was Laocoön, a Trojan priest. When the Greek army vanished and left a giant wooden horse outside the city gates, all of Troy celebrated. Only Laocoön refused to believe it. He warned his people the horse was a trick and, to prove it was hollow, hurled his spear into its side. In Virgil's telling, he spoke a line that has outlasted almost everything else about Troy: "I fear the Greeks, even when they bring gifts." He was right. The horse was packed with soldiers, and Troy was hours from destruction. This sculpture shows what he got for it. Two enormous sea serpents rise out of the sea and coil around him and his young sons, dragging all three down together. The father's whole body is knotted in the struggle, every muscle straining, his face locked in a scream. The gods wanted Troy to fall, and Laocoön was in the way. The Trojans watched him die in agony and drew exactly the wrong conclusion: they decided the gods were punishing him for attacking a holy gift. So they pulled the horse inside their own walls, and that night, Troy burned... The statue is called Laocoön and His Sons. It is the work of three Greek sculptors from the island of Rhodes, Agesander, Athenodoros, and Polydorus, and dates to the Hellenistic period, making it well over two thousand years old. Buried for more than a thousand years, it was dug out of a Roman vineyard in 1506, and Michelangelo rushed across Rome to see it the day it was found. It has been called the single greatest depiction of human suffering in the history of art, but it endures because of what it is really about: the man who sees the truth, says it out loud, and is destroyed for being right while the crowd watches... It is one of the oldest patterns there is, and it has never stopped repeating. There is nothing new under the sun.

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The crime they see: 15,415 litres of water to produce one kilogram of beef. Every campaign, every documentary, every leaflet through the door since about 2012. The crime they do: not reading the paper. The figure is real. It comes from Mekonnen and Hoekstra at the University of Twente, and it is careful, peer-reviewed work. What the campaigns strip out is that the same authors split that number into three parts, because the three parts are not the same thing at all. Green water is rain. It falls on the grass. The cow eats the grass. For beef, green water is about 94 per cent of that headline. Blue water is the stuff that matters. Rivers, lakes, aquifers. The stuff that gets pumped, metered, fought over in court, and does not come back. So here is the blue water, in litres per kilogram, from the same authors, same method, same units. - Pistachios: 7,602 - Almonds: 3,816 - Walnuts: 2,451 - Dates: 1,250 - Cashews: 921 - Beef: 550 Read that last line again, then go and look at what is in your granola. The 15,415 counts rain that fell on a Welsh hillside as a cost, against an animal that was standing in it, on land where nothing else grows, in a country where rain is the one thing we have never once been short of. The pistachio is drinking fourteen times more of the water that actually runs out. She is outside in the rain right now, getting blamed for it.

Noruega elimino a brasil y el ejercito subió un video haciendo el festejo vikingo

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A pasture grazed by cattle alone is a good pasture. Put cattle and sheep on it together and it becomes something else. The cattle take the long grass, the coarse stems, the rough patches. The sheep come behind and clear what the cattle left: the short regrowth, the wildflowers, the plants a cow won't touch. Two heights, two mouths, two patterns. Twice the use, none of the waste. Add a goat and the bramble line retreats. Add a pig on the woodland edge and the parasite cycles break. Add a few geese and weeds you never knew you had quietly vanish. Each animal eats what the others refuse and breaks the worms the others carry. The system tunes itself. The result is about as biodiverse, productive and low-input as farming gets. More carbon in the soil. More birds. More wildflowers. Less disease. Less spent on feed, wormer and fertiliser. Ground that would grow no crop at all turns into meat, milk and wool. This is the oldest idea in farming. Nearly every working agricultural culture has done it since the beginning: Roman estates, medieval manors, Mongolian camps, Welsh hill farms. The single-species, single-field, single-product model that shoved it aside is barely a century old, and it is running out of road on every measure you can name. The fix is older than the problem. A Welsh farm with cattle on the low pasture, sheep on the high, a goat on the bramble line and a couple of geese in the orchard. The farmer would explain the whole thing in four minutes, if anyone asked. The policy paper never has.