FerryDen

[Sunday Sport @thesundaysport]

Perfectly healthy democracy latest...

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Jeremy Clarkson lets slip a number on Clarkson's Farm that explains almost everything wrong with British food. A sausage from his own pigs costs 74p. The identical sausage made from imported pig meat costs 18p.

Most people hear that and assume the foreign farmer is simply better at it.

Britain outlawed the sow stall in 1999, alone in Europe bar Sweden, because the public here decided a pregnant animal ought to be able to turn around. The national pig herd then fell by roughly half.

British people did not eat half as much bacon.

Work out where the difference went. Twenty-seven years on, the National Pig Association reckons around 95 percent of the countries selling pork into Britain still permit the stall. Most of the EU allows four weeks of every cycle. Much of America allows the full sixteen-week gestation. Brazil allows it outright.

The sow was never spared. She was moved abroad, into a shed with looser rules and no British inspector, and the farm that would have kept her shut its gate.

Now watch the same thing happen to beef and lamb, on a far bigger scale.

British beef is grass. Native cattle standing out in the rain on ground that grows nothing else, doing what they have done on those hills since before the language was written down. What the NFU says we are being asked to compete against is a feedlot finishing up to 50,000 head on one site, which it called unacceptable here on both moral and environmental grounds.

The deals were signed anyway. Australian and New Zealand beef rises to a quota of 110,000 tonnes by 2033, and after that there is no tariff at all. Lamb runs to 60,000 tonnes this year and climbs from there, and we already import between a quarter and a third of what we eat.

Every one of those deals was announced with a firm assurance that food standards would not fall. That assurance is true, and it is beside the point.

The standards enforced at our border cover what is in the meat. Hormones stay banned, and rightly. What crosses untouched is how the animal lived. There is no border check for a feedlot, no tariff on a gestation crate, no form anywhere asking whether the thing we made illegal here was used to make the thing arriving here.

So a minister can say food standards are protected and back British farming in the same breath, and be telling the truth twice, while signing the document that finishes the job.

The pattern runs through the lot. Barren cages banned here in 2012, egg products still arriving from countries that use them. Force-feeding outlawed in 2007, foie gras on sale every Christmas.

And the campaigners who won those bans never once came back to see what happened next, because the victory was legislative and the consequence was six thousand miles away. Nobody counts sows in Iowa. Nobody films a feedlot in Queensland.

Clarkson absorbs that 56p on every plate that leaves his kitchen, on television, which is the only reason anybody can see the number at all. Inside a supermarket price it has been invisible for a quarter of a century.

Fifty-six pence is what this country charges a man for obeying it.

He is not competing with foreign farmers. He is competing with his own ban, on a shelf, standing next to the version of himself he was forbidden from being.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

In North America the herbicide goes on the crop deliberately, shortly before harvest, to kill the plant while the food is still attached to it.

The practice is called desiccation. A standing crop of lentils, chickpeas, peas or beans does not ripen evenly, and an uneven field is expensive to combine. Spray it and the whole field dies at once, moisture pulls into the seed, the harvest date becomes predictable and the machine goes through cleanly. It is a scheduling tool.

The residues that follow are not a theory. Canadian authorities tested 7,955 samples of food from Canadian retail between 2015 and 2017 and looked specifically at pulses.

Detection rates:

- Chickpeas: 41 per cent.
- Beans: 40 per cent.
- Lentils: 33 per cent.
- Peas: 22 per cent.

Highest concentrations found:

- Chickpeas: 13 parts per million.
- Beans: 8.6 parts per million.
- Lentils: 2.6 parts per million.

Pulses came back with a higher detection rate than any other food category in that survey. Canada exports more than 85 per cent of its pulse production, and the industry's own grower advisories tell farmers to check with the buyer before spraying, because several importing countries set residue limits lower than Canada does and have started testing more often.

Note what that advice is protecting. Not the eater. The container, at the far end, at the border.

The World Health Organization's cancer agency classified glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen in 2015. Bayer, which bought Monsanto, has paid out around 11 billion dollars settling claims from people who developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

The chickpea goes in the hummus. The lentil goes in the dal that replaced the mince. The pea goes into the protein powder.

Nobody sprays a cow with a herbicide a fortnight before you eat it.

[Peter Clack @PeterDClack]

It must now be seen as the greatest blunder in human history. And it was all done on purpose. No public relations campaign can change that.

Yes, the world is still a bit warmer. CO₂ is still a bit higher. But NASA satellites have revealed the recent rise in carbon dioxide has sparked the greatest expansion of green leaf area 'in recorded history'.

The entire human story has been about our dogged survival in a harsh, dangerous world, thanks mainly to sheer luck. Our species is thriving in today's warmer Holocene interglacial cycle, which has lasted 11,700 years. This covers the entire rise of all human civilisation, every single empire, every invention and everything that makes us modern, from razor blades to spaceships.

The observable data throughout geological history suggests that today's cooler temperatures lie mostly within natural variability. The natural world invented the miracles of multicellular life and DNA on its own. It doesn't need human intervention. The Earth will run its course despite our interference.

However, many are unaware that we still are living in the Late Cenozoic Ice Age, beginning 33.9 million years ago when permanent ice sheets formed on Antarctica. Ice ages may be rare, but we are in one, whether we like it or not. Earth has seen just five major ice ages in its long history - the Huronian, Cryogenian, Andean-Saharan, Karoo, and today's Late Cenozoic Ice Age.

Today's global average temperature is estimated at 15°C, but this is not hot in geological terms. Our modern era sits deep within a major cold trough. It is up to 10 degrees cooler than the long-term average range of 18–26°C.

It was the Industrial Revolution though, that kicked off the modern world, beginning around 1750. And the discovery of coal, oil and gas created the most successful period in human history. We have medical miracles and the astonishing technology to prove it.

CO₂ levels over 250 years from 290 ppm to 426 ppm have created a massive spreading green canopy. Agriculture has exploded beyond anything ever seen before. It has not caused a global disaster.

And Net Zero, by the way, has never been fully explained - other than swapping promissory notes at annual summits worth trillions of dollars. There is every likelihood it will not change a thing. It's nothing more than a throw of the dice. Yet the error strewn 'transition' to wind-solar is expected to cost $275 trillion - equal to 2.5 times global GDP.

This could have built up to 27,500 nuclear power stations worldwide, ending any doubts about pure energy.

Global temperatures have risen by around 1.4°C since the Industrial Revolution 250 years ago. This came after the end of the 500-year Little Ice Age in Europe, the coldest spell in 10,000 years. Cold usually brings famine, misery and an early death.

Until the past few decades, most people only learned about CO₂ in biology classes at school. It is where we discovered this trace gas is the building block of complex life, the engine of photosynthesis and the oxygen we breathe.

The CO₂ miracle isn't taking a bank holiday.

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

Nauseating hypocrisy. You and your party’s green mongering over the years have driven BP and others away. You gave virtue signalling priority over jobs, families, communities. And now you express concern for them. Pass the sick bag. Scotland is truly run by a kakistocracy. But Scots only have themselves to blame. They keep electing self-serving numpties.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

For anyone who likes their food thoroughly doused, the EPA approved three new ones on 1 July 2026, and there are four more in the queue.

The three are epyrifenacil, diflufenican and trifludimoxazin. Two of them had never been used in the United States before. All three are now cleared for corn, soybeans, wheat, canola, citrus and peanuts, which is over 70 million hectares of farmland and very nearly the entire foundation of the plant-based aisle, signed off in a single afternoon.

The agency's own review of trifludimoxazin recorded suggestive evidence of carcinogenic potential.

It approved it anyway.

Two of the three break down into trifluoroacetic acid, currently among the most widespread and least removable contaminants in the world's water supply. The EPA's technical work found that trifludimoxazin degrades into twelve separate PFAS compounds, which is generous. Most products manage only the one.

The official position is that none of these are forever chemicals, because the definition the agency itself wrote in 2023 requires a molecule to carry two or more fully fluorinated carbons. All three carry precisely one. The chemistry is identical, the persistence is identical, and the paperwork is immaculate.

Fifth approval of its kind under the current administration, against one in the whole of the previous four years. It landed a fortnight before the comment deadline on relaxing drinking water limits for other PFAS compounds, which is either very poor scheduling or very good scheduling.

No press release.

Posted quietly in the Federal Register on a Tuesday, the way you announce a car park closure.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Carnivore is the diet that breaks people's brains, because every warning ever attached to it has come back facing the other way.

They said the fat would make people fat. It's the only thing that switches hunger off.

They said the cholesterol would wreck the panel. It improves it.

They said saturated fat clogs arteries. Seed oils do.

They said red meat causes cancer. Sugar and refined oil do.

They said no fibre would wreck the gut. It settles it in a fortnight.

They said no plants means scurvy. Not one case has turned up.

They said the vitamins are in the vegetables. They're in the yolk.

They said protein that high takes the kidneys out. It builds shoulders.

They said the whole thing falls apart inside a year. I'm six years in and thriving.

One wrong answer is a mistake. Every answer wrong, same margin, same direction, for fifty years, is a design.

The emperor has no clothes. He's also on three medications and wondering why his knees hurt.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Britain now pays a farmer roughly ten times more to stop farming a field than to farm one.

Grazing land rents for about £90 to £110 an acre. A solar developer will pay £850 to £1,350 an acre for the same ground, index linked, on a lease of twenty five to forty years. Battery compounds pay tens of thousands.

Look at what that means for a man with three hundred acres and a bad year behind him.

Farm it and he is at the mercy of weather, disease, a supermarket buyer who sets a price he cannot argue with, and a subsidy scheme the government keeps redesigning. Sign the lease and the money arrives quarterly, rises with inflation, and does not care whether it rains.

He is not being greedy. He is being offered ten times the money to stop, by the same country that will call him a custodian of the countryside at a ceremony in the autumn.

There is a sting in it nobody mentions at the kitchen table. Ground under a solar lease is generally no longer in agricultural use, which means it can fall outside the inheritance tax relief farmland gets. So the man who takes the panels to survive the death bill can lose the protection that made the farm survivable.

Now follow it out past his gate.

The field itself goes quiet. Deer fenced, gated, no stock, no muck, no man walking it at seven in the morning. The hedge that was laid because an income paid for it stops being laid. Nobody is in there at lambing because there is no lambing. Forty years is long enough for a working field to become a site.

Then it takes the neighbours with it. The contractor who baled it loses the acreage and puts the kit on the market. The man next door who rented the summer grass has to sell twenty cows he can no longer carry. The vet's round gets longer and thinner. The abattoir forty miles off loses another handful of weeks' throughput and closes, which finishes off six more farms who now have nowhere to kill. None of that shows up in the planning application, because the planning application only ever looks at one field.

And the country puts its food supply down another notch. Britain grows around sixty per cent of what it eats. Solar capacity is set to roughly treble by 2030. Every acre leased is production gone for four decades, and a lease is not something you can break because there is a war, a blockade or a bad global harvest. Electricity we can import. So is food, until the week nobody will sell you any.

The people go last and they do not come back. A farm that stops carrying stock stops needing a stockman, and the knowledge that took three generations to build walks off to a job in logistics. The son does not come home. The school loses a family. The chapel loses four. The mart that has run since 1874 loses another dozen entries and starts opening fortnightly.

The average British farmer is past sixty.

The lease runs forty years.

He is signing away ground he will never see again, on behalf of a grandchild nobody thought to ask.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Honest translations for the labels on a bottle of seed oil.

"Vegetable oil" is code for "no vegetable was involved at any point in this."

"Canola" is code for "rapeseed, renamed by a marketing board in 1978 because rapeseed tested badly."

"Cold-pressed" is code for "spared the heat in the factory, so it does its oxidising inside you instead."

"Refined" is code for "refined, bleached and deodorised, and have a think about why a food needs deodorising."

"Light olive oil" is code for "light on the olive oil."

"High oleic" is code for "bred to survive the fryer, not bred for you."

"Trans-fat free" is code for "swapped for interesterified fat, which nobody has written a rule about yet."

"With added vitamin E" is code for "the process stripped the vitamin E, so we put some back."

"Contains omega-3" is code for "ALA, which converts to the useful kind at about five per cent."

Everywhere else in the shop, the front is marketing and the ingredients list is the document.

On a bottle of seed oil the ingredients list says one word.

Everything worth knowing happened before it went in the bottle, and none of that is printed anywhere.

[The Heartlands Tribune @HeartlandsTrib]

There is no clearer image of British politics than this: the camera shows you the man, the wider frame shows you the machine.

In Orwell’s Britain, the lie was printed. In ours, it is lit, framed and carefully edited.

[Robbo @owlrobbo]

At least they stayed and watched this one

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Eight people sealed themselves in a glass dome to prove humanity could feed itself on plants, and spent two years starving in front of the world's press.

Biosphere 2 cost a hundred and fifty million dollars. Three acres of Arizona desert under sealed glass, eight crew, door shut on 26 September 1991, nothing in or out for two years. The farm inside was worked intensively and by any agronomic measure it was superb, out-producing the most efficient smallholder farming on earth by a wide margin.

It produced 83 per cent of what they needed.

Which left Roy Walford, the crew doctor, in a sealed box with seven hungry colleagues and his own life's work. Walford was a UCLA pathologist who had spent thirty years arguing that severe calorie restriction extends lifespan. He had doubled it in mice. And here was reality handing him his own hypothesis with the door welded shut.

So he called it a health programme.

The menu became vegetables, half a glass of goat's milk a day, and meat or fish about once a week. The men lost close to a fifth of their body weight, the women about a tenth. And the markers Walford cared about behaved impeccably: blood pressure, glucose, cholesterol and triglycerides all down at least twenty per cent, into ranges any doctor would frame. He published it in PNAS in 1992.

The bloodwork was magnificent. The people were falling apart.

Jane Poynter wrote the book afterwards. Fatigue, depression, mental fog, and a preoccupation with food that ate the entire interior life of the crew. They stole from each other. They split into two factions that stopped speaking. The ecological research the building had been constructed for was largely abandoned by people who no longer had the headroom for anything past the next meal. The ants and cockroaches, by contrast, were thriving.

The air was leaving too. Oxygen started at 20.9 per cent and kept dropping and nobody knew where it was going. Columbia eventually worked it out: the concrete was quietly eating it. So oxygen had to be pumped in from outside, which is an interesting result for a sealed world.

Walford's verdict on the mutiny is the whole thing in one sentence. He said afterwards that any other physician aboard would have panicked and declared they were starving, but that he knew they were on a programme of health enhancement.

He knew. Seven other people, visibly wasting, were simply mistaken.

He came out in 1993, developed ALS, blamed the conditions inside, and died in 2004 aged 79 after years on 1,600 calories a day in pursuit of a longer life. The mice got double. He did not make it to average for an American professor.

Every argument you have heard this decade was already in that building. Grow it locally. Take the animals out. Eat less. Watch the numbers improve.

Eight of the most motivated humans alive, handed three acres of the best-managed farmland on the planet and no meat, could not feed themselves.

The press reported the fighting as a personality clash.

[Matt Cartoons @MattCartoonist]

My latest cartoon for tomorrow's @Telegraph

Buy a print of my cartoons at https://t.co/ILFJjPmckx

Original artwork from https://t.co/bVPAkgE34y

[Burnside @BurnsideWasTosh]

When you look past the two tier judiciary, the cost of living increases, the diminished relationship with the US, David Lammy, the failure to implement the Supreme Court ruling on women only spaces, the restarting of the trial of puberty blockers, the closure of 100 private schools, siding with Hamas, the murders of Wayne Broadhurst, Henry Nowak,Rhiannon Whyte, the hosepipe bans, the pissing rain, the appointment of Peter Mandelson, the Chagos Islands surrender, the battle to bring an Egyptian terrorist to the UK and give him citizenship, the prosecution of veterans, the bombing of UK sovereign territory in Cyprus with no response, closure of our last blast furnace, youth unemployment that would shame a Spaniard, the Chinese Embassy being hooked up to MI6s servers, twenty Ministerial resignations, the return of James Corden from the US, Mrs Browns Boys recommissioned, the a303 remaining unwidened, the tax take hitting a record high and still borrowing grew, a third of our electricity coming from foreigners, GB Energy, taxing farmers to suicide, rape gangs being replenished in every town and city, apart from that Lewis it has felt we've just lived through a golden age. You pillock.

[Miodrag @MIL0SEVIC]

Slavko Vincic, Slovenian who will referee the World Cup final, was arrested in Bosnia six years ago in one cottage where sex orgies were organized with the starlet Tijana Ajfon.

Cocaine, guns, and 20000 euros were also found. Vincic said to the police that he came only to lunch.

[Bob M 🇬🇧💫 @bobmca1]

🤭😂📉💷

[SnoopDeg @SnoopDegB]

You can literally see 2 groups of crack dealers in this video 🤦🏻‍♂️

[Bernie @Artemisfornow]

Right then … as Ross Clark points out, the claim that 2,700 people were killed by the heat is bollocks. (Technical term)

It was presented as an actual death toll. It wasn’t. It was a modelling exercise and er.… not actual mortality

UKHSA found NO excess mortality during the May heatwave.

And in the 2 published ONS weeks covering most of June’s heatwave, death registrations were actually 918 BELOW expected.

But the hysterical headlines pushed the narrative as if it was fact. As always, question everything.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Where a glass of raw milk stands with the law in 2026:

- England, Wales and Northern Ireland: legal, farm gate and vending machine, from around 80 registered farms
- Scotland: total ban since 1983, no exemptions of any kind
- France: legal from street-corner vending machines and organic shops, nationwide
- Italy and Germany: legal from vending machines
- Slovenia: legal, and running close to 70 farmer-owned machines
- United States: legal to sell in roughly 30 states, banned in about 20, and a federal offence to carry across any state line
- Utah, this year: just legalised it in ordinary grocery stores
- Australia: one of only three countries on earth with a total blanket ban

Same animal, same milk, and eight different legal verdicts on it.

The biology has been settled for nine thousand years.

The only thing that changes at each border is the paperwork, and the paperwork cannot agree with itself.

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

Aren’t you the minister for safeguarding women against violence?
And you have to apologise for what you tweeted after a fellow female politician was violently murdered?
Isn’t that a resigning matter?