Alex Green

Agronomist in N/E Yorkshire

[Alex Green @AlexJGreen95]

@PhilNash2 @Ed_Miliband Mad Ed picturing the solar panels on it as we speak!! Whilst more industrial units are put up without any!!

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

A tenant farmer in the Cairngorms says land that sold for £500 an acre a few years ago now goes for £5,000. He is being moved off ground his family has worked for generations, because he cannot outbid the people buying it. The buyers are corporations, and they have no intention of farming a single acre of it.

Here is how the trick works. A company keeps emitting carbon exactly as before. Same factories, same flights, same supply chain, same product. Then it buys a Scottish hillside, plants some trees, and announces to the world that it is now carbon neutral, or, if it is feeling brave, carbon negative. The emissions never fell. It simply bought a landscape to point at.

Take BrewDog. In 2020 it bought a 9,300-acre Highland estate, propped up with public grant money, and promised a million trees and the crown of the world's first carbon negative beer business, removing twice the carbon it emitted, forever. By 2023 roughly half of the 500,000 trees it had managed to plant were dead, killed by drought, with critics noting the planting was drying out the peat and releasing carbon of its own. The advertising regulator ruled its carbon-negative claims misleading. In 2024 it quietly dropped the badge and dismissed the entire carbon credit market as a flood of cheap schemes whose benefit was "questionable, maybe even non-existent." Then it sold the estate to a firm whose actual business is selling carbon offsets.

That is the whole model in one story. Public money in. Dead trees out. A green halo worn for four years and then dropped. The farmer who used to be on that land, gone. The hillside passed to a company that exists purely to sell other people the right to keep polluting.

This is no fringe case. In one recent year, half of every estate sold in Scotland went to investment funds, corporations and charitable trusts rather than anyone who would farm it. A third of the deals for plantable land are now done off-market, in secret, precisely so the local community never gets the chance to bid.

So this is what net zero looks like on the ground. A man who produced food is priced out of his own glen. A corporation that produced emissions buys the glen, calls itself a force for good, and sells the carbon. The land stops feeding anyone. Nobody's emissions actually went down by a gram.

The food was real. The farmer was real. The carbon saving is a line in a slide deck.

And we have somehow decided the villain in all this is the man with the sheep.

[Alex Green @AlexJGreen95]

@russbmckenzie Graham, Arnie, Scope - old dog still seemingly doing the business

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

A farmer dies in April 2026.

His son inherits the farm. The farm has been in the family since 1847.

The farm consists of: 300 acres of grazing pasture, a farmhouse built in 1892, a barn, a milking parlour, two tractors of varying ages, a Land Rover that runs about 70% of the time, and a herd of 180 Hereford-cross cattle.

On paper, the farm is worth approximately £3.2 million. This is because land near him has been bought recently by a London hedge fund looking for carbon credits, which has dragged the comparable value of every field within forty miles upward to a number nobody local can justify.

In cash, the farm produces a profit of about £28,000 a year in a good year. In a bad year it loses money. The son also works as a fencing contractor three days a week to keep the operation viable.

The inheritance tax bill on a £3.2 million estate, even at the reduced 20% rate, comes to approximately £140,000 after the increased threshold is applied. The son does not have £140,000. The son has never had £140,000. The son has £4,200 in his current account and an overdraft.

The son sells 60 acres to a developer to pay the tax. The developer puts solar panels on the 60 acres. The remaining herd cannot be sustained on the reduced land. The herd is sold. The barn becomes a holiday let.

A different family eats Brazilian beef this Christmas without knowing why the price went up.

The Treasury collects £140,000.

The land never produces British food again.

[Alex Green @AlexJGreen95]

Serious solar panels on this @KWSUKLtd Arnie … let’s hope it yields as definitely one of the stand out varieties this year in East Yorks.

[Alex Green @AlexJGreen95]

Playground politics reaching an all time low…. 🤡

[The Labour Party @UKLabour]

Our latest Party Election Broadcast cannot be shown in full on TV. But we think you should see it anyway - uncensored. https://t.co/bp91qJnyP2

[Alex Green @AlexJGreen95]

@KWSUKLtd Tardis looking a picture on the Yorkshire Wolds

Awns surely only 10 days away…

[Alex Green @AlexJGreen95]

@russbmckenzie Agreed. My cleanest is a Arnie/Beowulf/Extase blend which is interesting

[Alex Green @AlexJGreen95]

@natalieben Please educate yourself

[Alex Green @AlexJGreen95]

@Kathrynstyan @AgriiUK Yellow dustbin lids starting to appear 🫣

[Alex Green @AlexJGreen95]

@hanslope @jimclark67crop @FarmplanUK Glad this is the case. Have been struggling when issuing recs on GK to Telus and important info not copying across I.e timings and reasonings!! (From agronomy side of things)

[Alex Green @AlexJGreen95]

@atownie22XXX @SawyerMerritt It’s free pal. Same with Qatar

[Alex Green @AlexJGreen95]

@Notablogger16 @FrenlyFrenchBoi All in dry dock 🫣

[Alex Green @AlexJGreen95]

Pilot schemes, 2 lots of SFI23, SFI 24, extended mid tier CS and extended HLS, plus two phases of SFI26. RPA have their own work cut out 🫣😬 #SFI26

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[Rupert Lowe MP @RupertLowe10]

Giving DEFRA civil servants the honest truth on behalf of every farmer in the country.

[Alex Green @AlexJGreen95]

@AdrianRamsay I guess we just let the sows roll onto their piglets and suffer higher mortality rates then. EU and meat from further afield will still be imported for ready meals etc - once again your half baked government putting UK farmers at a massive disadvantage. At war on the countryside

[Alex Green @AlexJGreen95]

@BBCPolitics You just wouldn’t touch him as an employer would you

[Alex Green @AlexJGreen95]

@Bayer4CropsUK A