Karen Blackadder

[Karen Blackadder @KbBlackadder]

@JohnBarrowman Sorry to hear this. Your parents were such a fun part of your UK concerts.
Will always remember your Mam as a cop and Dad as 'Bob the Builder'!

[GB News @GBNEWS]

Farmers across Britain are set to open the gates to their farms, allowing thousands of families to learn more about how British food is made.

GB News Reporter @SophieReaper has the latest...

[David__Osland @David__Osland]

In the last year, the cost of living has gone up £55 a week across the UK and £96 a week in London. Pensions have gone up by £11 a week. Tell me again about the 'too generous' triple lock.

[Save Redland Library @SaveRedlandLibr]

The garden housing the original Bramley apple tree has been sold, leaving campaigners aiming to turn it into a heritage site “gobsmacked”.

The tree, which is over 200 years old, was the very first Bramley from which millions of saplings have been grown. https://t.co/390IPqDrW6

[FarmingUK @FarmingUK]

Cows in the mist. Photo taken on a Dumfries and Galloway farm! 🐮 🇬🇧

📸 Murray Hamilton

[Ger Hogan @GerHogg]

These guys got breakfast in bed this morning cos it’s lashing rain here this morning. We will probably sell 20 of these, so if you’re looking for weaned/reared send me a message. Retweets etc are appreciated

[Farmers Guardian @FarmersGuardian]

Milk: Nutritious. Versatile. Natural.

So why is it still one of the most undervalued products in the supermarket?

#WorldMilkDay 🥛🐄

[Jen k 🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 @Jenny_1884]

The law needs to be changed to declassify a Pension as a benefit.

I find it grotesque that having paid into a system all your working life that it’s deemed as a handout rather than something you deserve for working hard all your life.

Benefits are for people that don’t work

Pensions are for people who worked hard & earned their pension.

A pension is not a benefit.

[Michael Layton QPM @MichaelLayton13]

Police Dog Heroes https://t.co/NFUuKpFQB1 #Amazon via @Amazon Charting the #history of the #uks #first #police #dog #section with recollections from retired #BTP #police #dog #handlers . #railway #K9 @amberleybooks @BtpHistory #mansbestfriend #truestory #landsharks #Hull 1908.

[martin williams @loosecollie]

If the Hawkstone Choir win @BGT tonight, @JeremyClarkson you are a genius, and the folk in the choir, you are fabulous.
Putting farming, and mental health on the map.

Go Choir!!!
The farmers are behind you!!

[Robbie @Robbie_Reasons]

It's a matter of national security.

[The Farmer's Dog @FamersDog]

What an amazing atmosphere!! And again a well deserved win!!

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The pig is the most democratic animal that has ever lived.

Everything that follows is built on that. A pig needs no pasture, no hillside, no shepherd, no barn full of winter feed. It eats what you cannot. Acorns, windfall apples, kitchen scraps, the peelings and the whey and the spoiled milk headed for the midden. You feed it nothing and it gives you everything: a year of fat, lard, protein and crackling from an animal that turns household waste into the richest meat a poor family will ever taste.

One sow. A back garden. No land, no lord, no permission.

That is the problem with the pig. Not hygiene. Not parasites. Not the desert heat, though you will have been told all three by someone confident and wrong. The problem with the pig is that it made the poor man independent, and independence is the one thing the powerful have never been able to abide in people they mean to keep.

Walk it back. In Bronze Age Mesopotamia and Egypt, pork was everywhere, thriving in the muck and crowded backstreets of the cities, above all the meat of the urban poor. Protein from almost nothing. And, crucially, protein the tax collector could not see. A field of barley is visible. A herd of cattle is visible. A pig in the yard, fattening quietly on scraps, is wealth that appears in no ledger.

So the herders who chased status moved to cattle and sheep. Cattle you could drive, count, tax, lend and inherit. The pig was wealth you could hide, and a ruling class has never had any use for wealth it cannot count.

The taboo did not fall from the sky. It crept in. In the southern Levant, pork consumption had been eroding since around 3000 BC, long before a word was written against it. By the early Iron Age the pig was a flag: the Philistines, migrants from the Aegean, ate it; the Israelites, native to the hills, largely did not. You could tell whose a settlement was from the bones in the midden.

Then comes the part we can date. When the Biblical texts were codified, the priestly elite of Judah took a custom that already existed and carved it into law, hardening a soft regional habit into a line of identity you would die rather than cross.

And men did. By the time of the Maccabees, under Greek rule, it was no longer about cuisine. Hellenistic officials forced Judeans to eat pork precisely because they knew what refusing it now meant. To refuse was to declare who you were. Men chose death over a single mouthful. The animal had become a border drawn through the human body.

The Greeks ate pork happily. The Romans ate it by the wagonload. So refusing it became a way of being Not Them, and the taboo grew in power because it was useful: every time an empire pressed down, the pig was a way to stay yourself. Centuries later Islam inherited the line and hardened it again, and now some two billion people will not touch the most efficient protein a poor household can keep.

Notice what is absent from all of it. Nutrition. Health. The body. The pig was banned not for being dangerous to eat but for being dangerous to own: an animal that let the landless feed themselves without asking, invisible to the men with the ledgers.

Power has never minded what you put in your mouth, only what you can do without it.

The pig let people do without.

That was the sin. It always was. It quietly still is.

[J Stewart @triffic_stuff_]

🚨 JEREMY CLARKSON RIPS INTO KEIR STARMER AND “TRULY USELESS” LABOUR OVER FARMING CRISIS! 😡

Rural Britain Turns Its Back On Labour As Young Farmers Flock To Reform 😳

Jeremy Clarkson has unleashed a fierce attack on Keir Starmer and his government. The Clarkson’s Farm star declared, “I don’t think there’s a farmer alive who’s Labour anymore!” He slammed Starmer directly, saying “Starmer is damaging farming” and branded the whole government “truly useless”.

Clarkson revealed that his farmhand Kaleb told him all his young friends are now backing Reform UK.

This comes after Starmer’s inheritance tax raids and anti-farming policies left rural communities feeling completely betrayed. Farmers will not forgive Labour for this.

The countryside is shifting fast, and it looks like Reform is winning over the next generation. A major rural collapse for Labour now looks unstoppable.

[Harman Singh Kapoor @kingkapoor72]

Carrying a kirpan like this also solves the issue of religious belief.
We don’t need a long and sharp blade to fulfil our need to carry a ceremonial dagger.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

In 1984, Britain produced enough food to feed itself for 306 days of the year.

Today the figure is around 233 days. The country grows about 60 per cent of the food it eats, down from 78 per cent in the mid-1980s, and imports very nearly half of what ends up on the plate.

This is a country with some of the best grazing and dairy pasture in the world, a long coastline, and a climate that grows grass nine months of the year.

The decline was a choice, made gradually, in favour of cheaper imports. British farms were undercut, then handed welfare and environmental rules their foreign competitors did not have to meet, then left to watch the supermarkets fill the shelves from abroad.

The beef comes from Ireland and South America. The bacon from Denmark and the Netherlands. The lamb, out of season, is flown from New Zealand. The cheese from anywhere with a spare tanker.

The land that could feed the nation is still here. Each year a little more of what the nation eats is grown, raised, and slaughtered somewhere else, and the gap between the field outside the window and the food in the fridge widens by another notch.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Keith the Apocalypse Bringer received a visitor this week. A young woman with a clipboard, a fleece bearing the logo of a national rewilding charity, and the kind of clear-eyed certainty that comes from having read three books about ecosystems and never having stood in a wet field in February.

She had come to assess the farm for what she described as "rewilding potential."

Keith was eating a bramble at the time.

Visitor: Hello. I'm here to talk about transitioning the land away from livestock.

Farmer: Keith does most of the talking.

Visitor: I think we could really restore this landscape if we removed the grazing pressure.

Farmer: Have you noticed Keith.

Visitor: The goat? Yes. He'd be moved.

Farmer: Where to.

Visitor: A sanctuary, ideally.

Farmer: Keith was at a sanctuary. They asked us to take him back.

Visitor: Right. Well. Without the grazing, the natural succession would take over. Scrub, then woodland.

Farmer: That's bramble.

Visitor: Yes. Scrub is part of the natural process.

Farmer: Bramble is what Keith eats.

Visitor: The whole point is to let nature take its course without human interference.

Farmer: Keith is a goat. Goats are nature. Goats have been on this hill for several thousand years. The hill is the way it is because of goats.

Visitor: Domesticated goats aren't really wild.

Farmer: Neither are the trees you'd plant. Neither are you. What's your point.

Visitor: I think we could see the return of some really exciting species without the grazing.

Farmer: Like what.

Visitor: Well, eventually, lynx. Wolves.

Farmer: To eat Keith.

Visitor: ...

Farmer: You want to remove the goat to bring back the predator to eat the goat.

Visitor: When you put it like that.

Farmer: When you put it any way at all. Keith is doing the job. Keith is doing it for free. Keith has been doing it since the Neolithic. The bramble eats the field if Keith doesn't eat the bramble. You can hire a contractor to come up here once a year with a strimmer and do half as good a job for several thousand pounds, or you can have Keith, who works seven days a week for cheese.

Keith, at this point, kicked over the clipboard.

The visitor packed up. She left a leaflet.

Keith ate the leaflet.

The leaflet said "Wild By Nature."

So is Keith. Nobody at head office had thought about it for quite that long.

[FarmingUK @FarmingUK]

🛑 Take land from farmers, and you take food from tables

It’s that simple

📸 Gareth Wyn Jones

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

There is a legend about how the world found coffee, and it begins with a goat.

Picture a hillside in the Ethiopian highlands, somewhere around the ninth century, dawn coming up over the forest where the wild coffee shrub had been quietly growing since long before anyone thought to give it a name. A goatherd, remembered as Kaldi, watches his flock wander in among the glossy green bushes and start working through the little red cherries. And then his goats, ordinarily content to chew and doze, refuse point blank to settle. They skip. They butt. They dance about the slope at an hour when every sensible animal should be drowsing, lit up with the unmistakable glow of something that has just changed its mind about the morning.

Kaldi, the story goes, tried the cherries himself, felt the same bright lift rise through him, and somewhere in that moment the most consequential beverage in human history opened one eye.

It is almost certainly a tidy tale. Nobody wrote it down until 1671, a thousand years too late to check, and the goatherd may never have drawn breath. But it has outlasted a dozen drier accounts for one simple reason. It sounds exactly right. A goat is the most fearless investigator of the edible world that nature ever produced. If there was a bush of stimulant berries glowing red on an Ethiopian hillside, a goat absolutely found it first, ate it without a flicker of hesitation, and stood there gently vibrating on the slope until somebody wandered over to ask what in the world had got into the goats.

And what the goat found, humans took and carried to the ends of the earth. The first people to use it crushed the berries and bound them with animal fat into a dense little ball of fuel, food for a long walk before it was ever a drink. Then the Sufi mystics of Yemen learned to roast and steep it, and drank it through the long nights to hold themselves awake and clear at their prayers, and from those quiet monastery cups it spread. To Mocha and Cairo and Damascus. To the coffee houses of Constantinople and London where empires were argued into being over the rim of a cup. To the espresso bar, the campfire tin, the chipped office mug, the flask carried out into the cold. Billions of cups a day, every one of them descended from a curious animal on a hill who simply could not be told.

Half of what our species knows about which plants will heal us, feed us, or wake us up, we learned by watching the animals get there first and taking notes. The goat has been our scout for ten thousand years, eating the untested world on our behalf and reporting back through sheer enthusiasm.

So tomorrow morning, before the day takes you, lift the first cup an inch off the table toward a hillside in Ethiopia and the small, greedy, fearless creature standing on it.

It found this for you. It very probably found it first.