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The cow stands accused of drinking the planet dry. The headline number is 15,000 litres of water for a single kilo of beef. A monster, apparently. Let us settle her bill, line by line, and see what the planet is actually owed.
Line one, the big one: rainfall. That 15,000-litre figure is what hydrologists call a water footprint, and for beef more than 90 percent of it is green water, meaning rain that fell on the grass the animal ate. Rain that was going to land on that hillside whether a cow stood on it, a sheep stood on it, or nothing did. We are billing the animal for the weather. Strike it out.
Line two: the blue water, the stuff that actually comes from taps, rivers, and aquifers, the water humans genuinely compete over. For beef this runs to roughly 50 litres per kilo as a global average, and in rain-soaked Britain, where cattle drink the sky and graze unirrigated grass, the figure for a kilo of beef carcass is around 67 litres. A bucket, give or take. The honest consumptive figure for beef lands somewhere between about 300 and 1,300 litres a kilo, not fifteen thousand.
Line three: what she did with the bucket. She drank it, ran it through, and returned almost all of it to the field as urine, dung, and breath, where it rejoins the same cycle it was always in. Water is not consumed the way petrol is; it is borrowed and handed straight back, very slightly warmer.
For perspective, a single glass of dairy milk carries a water footprint of about 126 litres, and a glass of the almond milk sold as its virtuous replacement about 74. Both, like the beef, are overwhelmingly green water. Rain. The same rain.
So the final, honest invoice for the planet-draining beast reads: a bucket of borrowed water, returned to sender, plus a very large charge for rain that fell on a Welsh hill of its own accord.
The 15,000-litre number is, in the main, a bill for the sky. Send it to the sky.
"Soy de las Naciones Unidas y vine del Líbano hace 2 semanas, como nadie hizo nada en Gaza, Israel está haciendo lo mismo en Líbano, no han dejado ni un pueblo en pie. 3 compañeros mios fueron asesinados y a nuestro gobierno le importa una mierda".
Un trabajador de la ONU en Canadá, denuncia el genocidio de "Israel" en Líbano y Gaza mientras enfrenta a la policía canadiense que reprime a los manifestantes que protestan contra los sionistas en las calles.
@Keir_Starmer@PGAChampionship Kier Starmer, I’m sure you feel a great weight on your shoulders. You may even feel quite lonely & question who you can trust. If you could see just how many people have huge admiration for your commitment, maturity, service & integrity, you’d realise how many ARE loyal to you.
Moment When Radoslaw Sikorski reminded America, UK, France and Russia that they guaranteed Ukrainian security and borders in 1994!
- Sikorski:
“As you know, Russia, the USA, and Great Britain guaranteed the security of Ukraine and its borders.
In exchange for Ukraine giving up what was then the third largest arsenal of nuclear weapons in the world. In 1994.
So you have an obligation to Ukraine to help them defend their freedom.”
Net Zero is just a bad name for the opportunity of the Century - the Green Economy. This latest report from the CBI (not some leftie leaning think tank - the Confederation of British Industry..) makes this clear - already our Green Economy supports 1 million jobs and adds £100 Billion a year to our economy - half a Trillion £s of investment is poised to take place due to our commitment to this Net Zero thing. Net Zero suggests giving stuff up, the green economy is actually all about opportunity, jobs and GDP. Tony Blair and Nigel Farage have at least one thing in common - being dead wrong about Net Zero.
https://t.co/g7qHLn5Rrn
Graham Platner: “We should never tax someone into poverty. We should also still raise taxes on billionaires and corporations. Bezos wants us to think if you raise his individual taxes, that money isn’t going to pay for all the things you want. That’s why we’re not raising it just on you. We’re raising it on all 930 billionaires in the US. It’s why we’re also not just going after your income, but the wealth as well. The wealth they sit on, the wealth they never actually bring into the real world so they never pay capital gains on it, but they borrow against it so they can have liquidity. Of course Jeff Bezos is gonna tell us if we raise his taxes things won’t get better. He doesn’t want us to raise his taxes. He’s a greedy person. That makes perfect sense to me that he would say that. He’s just entirely wrong and self-serving”
Activist: "Leather is a cruelty industry. Animals die for handbags."
Farmer: "Die for handbags, or for dinner?"
Activist: "For the leather."
Farmer: "The hide is what's left after the animal was eaten. It comes off a beast raised for meat. If nobody used the skin it would go to landfill or the incinerator. The handbag is the bit that would otherwise be binned."
Activist: "Then go vegan leather."
Farmer: "Which is plastic. Polyurethane on a fabric backing, straight off an oil rig, sheds microplastic in the wash, cracks in five years, sits in the ground for centuries. My grandfather's belt is older than you and still holding his trousers up."
Activist: "There are mushroom leathers now."
Farmer: "There are, good luck to them, and most still need a plastic coat to survive a shower. The day one lasts forty years and composts at the end, I'll throw it a party. The hide already does both."
Activist: "It still came from a death."
Farmer: "A death that happened for the steak whether the hide was used or thrown away. Refuse the handbag and the cow's outcome is identical. You've just sent a good skin to the tip."
Activist: "..."
Farmer: "A binned hide saves no animal. It only tidies your conscience and fills a landfill."
'They think it's OK to use names we got rid of in the 90s and hang flags to intimidate people.'
Caller Nathaniel says he's scared about what 'Reform UK are doing to his neighbours'.
This video was deleted from Facebook yesterday.
You know what to do ‼️
Trump in 2008: Anyone who invades the Middle East under false pretenses should be impeached.
I called it. I opined the teenage r@pists would have a history of offending against girls. No one starts with r@pe. Just days before the r@pe, Hampshire Police were called - two of the boys assaulted two girls. One put his hands around the neck of a girl, the other put his hand up her skirt. One of the boys, who was 10 at the time, cornered a girl using his bike and said sexualized things to her. There’s more…one boy killed a duck, they’ve destroyed property and threatened people. This is likely just the tip of the iceberg. WATCH the video. Shout out to Sophie Wilkinson stellar reporting. Take action now:
✍️ SIGN the petition:
https://t.co/dtkHwksNlM
✍️ WRITE to your MP, Justice Secretary David Lammy, PM Keir Starmer and AG Richard Hermer. Templates -do use them 🙏🏼
https://t.co/rDcoYnEaIJ
💜 JOIN the Crime Analyst Squad to rally and for more knowledge, insight, support and advocacy: https://t.co/rMI8Pd4wDm
#CrimeAnalyst #expert #Accountability #Misogyny #MaleViolence @laurarichards99
I’ve been asked
Why don’t you get behind Burnham he’s the Labour candidate
My answer, we had a Labour MP. He resigned for the sole reason to bring Burnham back to challenge our
DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED PRIME MINISTER
I’m sticking with #TenYearKeir
SHE REPORTED RAPE AT WORK
Jan Cruickshank (@LittleJanhere) came to me this week with her story and a file of evidence she has spent years building. What she went through is one of the most shocking workplace cover-ups I have come across.
Jan worked as an apprenticeships officer at the Construction Industry Training Board @CITB_UK. Shortly after she started, a male colleague began subjecting her to sexual harassment that lasted over three years.
Explicit texts. Exposing himself to her at a hotel. Sending her an indecent photograph. A phone call during which he committed a sexual act while she was on the line.
In March 2015, at a conference in a Highland hotel, he came to her room and raped her.
Jan reported him. CITB believed his version instead. He claimed they had been having a consensual affair for three years and that Jan was hitting back because he had ended it. He was put on gardening leave for one week. Then he came back. He was also allowed to continue visiting schools while the investigation was ongoing.
CITB then launched a campaign to remove Jan from the business entirely. Two separate internal whistleblowers later confirmed this was deliberate. CITB's own legal team had calculated that a trial would cost them seriously.
So they chose to destroy her credibility instead. An HR investigation was initiated with the outcome already decided before it concluded. Jan was eventually sacked. The stated reason was misuse of company time by having an affair.
Her criminal case was dropped after @PoliceScotland were told by CITB that the relationship had been consensual. That lie closed the case.
The Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority looked at the evidence independently and reached a completely different conclusion. They awarded Jan compensation as a victim of serious sexual assault.
Jan took CITB to an employment tribunal. They offered her 15k pounds. She refused. She eventually settled for 60k pounds and refused to sign a non-disclosure agreement.
She said there was never any way she was going to agree to be gagged.
In November 2024, SNP MP Seamus Logan @SeamusLoganMP raised her case in the @HouseofCommons. He told Parliament that Jan had been pressured into a settlement far below what she was owed and that the man she accused was never held to account.
CITB responded with one line saying the matter was settled and they had nothing further to add..
A tribunal ruling recently reported as thrown out with no prospect of success has since been overturned. That decision has not yet reached the press.
Jan is now represented by well know to some of us John Robertson, the same investigator who stood beside Glenn Cottingham Smith before his death and who is currently fighting for my friend John Galajsza in his case against Barclays.
Jan asked herself one question:
"How did a woman who reported sexual misconduct at work end up spending the next decade fighting to defend her own reputation and reclaim a life that was stolen from her."
She was not broken. She documented everything. She refused the gag. She is still standing.
If this story made your stomach turn, share it. Jan has been fighting this alone for ten years.
The least we can do is make sure the right people see it. If you believe cover-ups like this should have consequences, put this in front of your network.
One share might reach the person who finally makes the difference.
Let's help her to be heard!
Sources: @Daily_Record Dec 2018 | @CNplus Nov 2024 | @BylineTimes Aug 2024
The Knepp Estate in West Sussex is the most famous rewilding project in Britain. It is on Springwatch, in the broadsheets, in a bestselling book. It is the place everyone points to when they want to show you what the land does the moment humans step back and stop farming it. Look at the nightingales, the purple emperors, the storks. Proof, apparently, that we should get the animals off the land and let it go wild.
There is one problem with using Knepp this way. You have to never look at what is standing in the fields.
Knepp is full of animals. Deliberately, by design, as the entire point.
When Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree gave up on intensive farming around 2000, on heavy Sussex clay that had run the estate £1.5 million into debt, they did the reverse. They brought more animals in, of more kinds, took down seventy miles of fencing, and let them roam. Old English longhorn cattle. Tamworth pigs. Exmoor ponies. Red, fallow and roe deer. Stand-ins for the wild aurochs, boar and horses we wiped out long ago. Their grazing, browsing, trampling, rootling and dung is the engine that builds the whole mosaic of scrub and wood pasture the rare birds need. Too few animals and it chokes into dense woodland. Too many and it flattens to bare grass. The cattle are the reason the nightingale is there at all.
And Knepp does not leave nature to it. There are no wolves in Sussex, so the herds would breed until they ate the place bare. So Knepp culls them every autumn. The deer are shot by a licensed stalker. The cattle and pigs go to a small organic abattoir. Knepp calls this, without flinching, stepping into the role of the missing apex predator.
A managed herd, grazing grass, culled before winter for meat. There is a word for that, and it is a very old one.
Then comes the part that should end the argument outright. They sell the meat. Knepp Wild Range: an online butchery and a restaurant, longhorn beef aged on the bone for weeks, Tamworth pork off pigs fattened on autumn acorns, venison, charcuterie cured in house. Heston Blumenthal calls the longhorn the best beef in the world. Knepp markets the lot as the most sustainable meat you can buy, and its own website argues, in words any carnivore would recognise, that pasture-fed meat is good for you and that grazing ruminants are one of the best carbon sinks on the planet.
So Britain's flagship rewilding project is a former arable farm, gone broke under the plough, rescued by swapping the crops for free-roaming cattle, pigs, ponies and deer, then counting them, culling them, and selling them as premium grass-fed steak.
This is the thing held up as the case for taking animals off the land.
Post a Knepp turtle dove with a caption about what nature does once we stop eating meat, and you have it exactly upside down. The turtle dove is sponsored by the longhorn. The green cathedral was built by a herd of cattle, and paid for, in part, by selling the surplus as steak.
None of which means we should turn all of Britain into Knepp. We shouldn't. It grows a fraction of the food the land could, and nobody lives on nightingales. But on the one principle it actually demonstrates, it is unanswerable, and it is the precise principle the people quoting it want dead. Put the grazing animals back and the wildlife pours in. Take them away and it drains out.
The poster child for the end of livestock is a working meat farm.
Go and read its menu.
The stupid thing is people putting up flags are being told to be patriotic by media that is either owned by foreigners or billionaires (with their own agenda.) The most patriot thing they could do is not buying into this foreign/biased viewpoint. Just an idea I've been pondering