From acorns to mighty oaks

#SwitchOffAI
#StandWithUkraine 🇺🇦
Scottish+British 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇬🇧
#WomensRights
All you need is love❤ #Truth #SciFi #Nature #TalkToSomeone

[From acorns to mighty oaks @SummeryJen]

The dumbing down of humanity has begun. The internet, computers, tablets, smartphones, social media and now AI are making students illiterate and unable to read books. Schools, colleges and universities need to get kids to read books again. Parents need to start speaking up now.

[Brandon Zicha @ProfBZZZ]

A student today at my elite university admitted to me today that she took a class so she could work on reading for more than 20 minutes at a time. She can't read. She mainly skims and summarizes, she says and still gets A's.

This student is, by professional standards, illiterate. Gonna have high GPA when she graduates.

This conversation was had after 6 of 22 students dropped my course because the maximum reading per week in one week was over 100 pages.

What people aren't grasping is that this is literally *dangerous*. These people are going to be come doctors, engineers, etc. They are - by any metric - vastly less capable than prior generations. These effects are cumulative over a lifetime.

This grade inflation is part of the problem, but not even close to the entirety. And the problem obviously starts in K-12.

Students don't know history because, you can't actually become historically literate on the advice of 'never assign more than 30 pages a week'. You can't develop any of the skills that came with literacy. This is, quite honestly, a civilizational catastrophe.

[Farmer Luke 🥔 @Ondaintreefarm]

The some of the Potatoes are not heading for the plate there heading to an A.D plant! ill be honest it’s soul destroying, but at lease I don’t have to try and spread them back on the field! What a year it’s been! 🚜🥔

You can order your posted potatoes or still donate a new bag of potatoes at: https://t.co/SYOW8H9rS9 🥔📮

#FarmerLuke #DownOnDaintreeFarm #Mrsfarmerluke #spudwife

[Sheep In Stitches @sheepinstitches]

Stolen from GL4 (Glos) between 9pm Wed 10th & 6am on Thurs 11th June. Landrover 90 TDI. N463 UUX.
V. well used and v. distinctive. Series 3 drivers door, Mercedes front grill badge, multiple scars and dents and stickers including #hawkstonefarmerschoir Please share. Thanks!💔

[SeaWindowCraster @SeaSkyCraster]

12th June 2026 04.51

[Emma Mitchell 💙 @silverpebble]

When the bumblebee in this film sounds as though her buzz has inhaled helium it’s bc she’s using floral sonication to dislodge the pollen in this poppy-she increases the frequency of her wingbeats to literally ‘buzz’ the pollen off the poppy anthers & on to her fuzzy body. Listen out for this as many bee species use this pollen gathering trick-just one of the ways in which bees are utterly brilliant 💯:

[Jim Scott @jimscottphoto]

Rolling waves and pink skies

[From acorns to mighty oaks @SummeryJen]

People power.

[James Wright @JPBWFarm]

Thank you. Since last week, over 7,500 of you have signed my letter to protect Exmoor ponies. Because of that pressure, I have good news.

I wrote to Natural England and asked them straight. They have now confirmed, in writing, that there are no current plans to change grazing on Exmoor, and they recognise the Exmoor pony as a rare breed and a vital conservation grazer. Exmoor National Park has said the same.

This isn't the end. I have outstanding freedom of information requests from Defra and the Rural Payments Agency, who run the funding schemes, to make sure those reassurances hold for the long term.

There is something lasting you can do TODAY! Exmoor Ponies came back from just 50 animals after the Second World War, and the breed's gene pool is still fragile. The Exmoor Pony Society is building a gene bank so we never come that close to losing them again.

Donate and help secure the future of the breed.

[Yorkshire Dales National Park @yorkshire_dales]

Hello, I’m Julia - today, the National Park has handed their socials over to me to talk about my experience of bags of rubbish, broken glass, and empty cans left scattered where I live. This is damaging, dangerous, and avoidable. If you're visiting, please respect the Dales 🙏

[LustraSkye @LustraSkye]

225MW. 3 buildings, 24m high. 151 hectares. In a Special Landscape Area.

“Green roofs” but Scotland has NO legal definition of “green data centre.”

Gas backup but framed as “using wasted wind power.”

Nearly 7,000 signatures in a week. Save the Lammermuirs is fighting back.

This is one of 20+ similar proposals across Scotland.

Combined pipeline now EXCEEDS Scotland’s entire electricity demand.
https://t.co/sEOg7NxqMa

[Iain Cameron @theiaincameron]

Ah, a good old Scottish summer… Today in Oldmeldrum, Aberdeenshire.

Video link: https://t.co/1x77b8bjxi

[Iain Cameron @theiaincameron]

This is from Norway, but it’s one of the most distinctive and evocative calls of the Scottish Highlands: the ptarmigan.

🔈 Sound ON for this.

Video link https://t.co/7INXNiZawf

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The milk in that bottle has, at times, been sold cheaper than the water beside it on the shelf, and the man who produced it has been paid less than it cost him to make.

Look at the actual pennies, because that is where the cruelty hides.

It costs a typical British dairy farmer somewhere around 44 pence to produce a litre of milk. Feed, energy, vet bills, labour, the cows milked twice a day, every day of the year, Christmas included. That is the floor he has to clear just to stand still.

Now the price he is handed for that litre. In early 2025 it sat in the mid forties, which leaves a margin of a penny or two on each litre for one of the hardest jobs there is. Then through late 2025 the processors cut, and cut again, dragging the farmgate price down into the mid thirties, with some farmers paid under thirty pence. By the spring of 2026 the UK average had fallen to around 34 pence.

Do that sum. Around 44 pence to make it. Around 34 pence paid for it. The farmer is losing something like ten pence on every single litre his cows produce, and a dairy cow does not stop producing because the price went wrong.

He cannot pass that on. A handful of giant processors and supermarkets sit across the table from thousands of small farmers, and they set the number. He takes it, or he pours good milk down the drain.

The meeting did not go badly for everyone, mind. In the very stretch that farmers were being paid below the cost of production, the big processors were posting record results, hundreds of millions in profit, ploughing hundreds of millions more into new plant and capacity. The squeeze simply moved up the chain, out of the cold parlour and into the warm boardroom, where it turned into a bonus.

So the farmers leave. There are now only around seven thousand dairy farms left in the whole of Great Britain, down from many tens of thousands a generation ago. The small family herds went first. The milk comes from fewer and bigger units every year, and the patchwork of family dairies that once covered this country is wearing through to nothing.

The shopper sees cheap milk and feels lucky. The cheapness is a quiet transfer, out of a farmer's livelihood and into the appearance of a bargain, paid for in ten pence pieces by a man in a cold parlour at half past five in the morning, working out how many more months he can afford to feed you.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Two hives went into Dave's orchard corner this spring, and Keith, who has assessed and tested and dismantled every single thing on that farm, has assessed the bees exactly once and elected, for the first time in his life, to leave a thing entirely alone.

This is genuinely without precedent. Keith tests everything. He has eaten a latch, a pocket square, a set of water heater instructions, and the better part of Dave's left wellington. He climbs what cannot be climbed and opens what cannot be opened and investigates the world with a relentless prehensile curiosity that has cost Dave three hundred and eighty-seven pounds in gates. There is no object in his domain he has not, at some point, put his lips to in the spirit of enquiry.

He walked up to the hives on the first day. Dave watched from the yard with the specific dread of a man who has seen this goat approach things before. Keith stood in front of the nearest hive. He watched the entrance, the constant stream of bees coming and going, the low working hum of forty thousand individuals about their business. He brought his nose to within a sensible distance. He held there for a while, doing whatever calculation it is that goes on behind those rectangular eyes.

And then he stepped back, turned, and walked away to the bramble, and he has not gone near the hives since.

Dave's log: "He left the bees. I don't know what passed between Keith and the bees. Whatever it was, the bees won the negotiation without appearing to negotiate, which is the only time anything on this farm has managed it. I have not added a column. I am simply relieved."

There is a kind of intelligence that tests everything to find its limit. And there is a rarer kind that meets a thing humming with quiet collective purpose and recognises, without needing to be stung, that here at last is something better left to get on with its work.

Keith has both. The bees are fine. The bees were always going to be fine. Even Keith knows where the line is, and the line, it turns out, is forty thousand of anything, all agreeing.

[Sheep’s Head Nature @SHeadbirder]

A Chalk Fragrant-orchid this morning near Snowshill. #orchids

[Carl Bovis @CarlBovisNature]

Song Thrush high in a tree at RSPB Ham Wall in Somerset last week. 😍😊🐦

[A. R. Peters & Son @sussexfarming]

3 generations have kept these puddles filled for the swallows, that’s why this old yard has become the #swallow super highway even when numbers dwindle because of development and the lack of livestock farming. #farming #food #birds

[Michelle Cowbourne @Glastomichelle]

Storm clouds through the archway of St Michael's tower. Photograph taken this morning on Glastonbury Tor.

[Iain Cameron @theiaincameron]

This is about as good an illustration as you’ll get for the amount of snow that blew in from the south east over winter. As we move into the 2nd week of June, a gigantic (8 metre) wall of snow persists at Cairn Gorm’s Ciste Mhearad.

Photo by @ScotMtnHols

https://t.co/Tbi9W7buFH

[Kris Luckenbach @KrisLuckPhoto]

Me and my bears 🐻

[Natalie Hood @NatalieAHood]

I am loving this rainbow weather we’re having in Aberdeen just now! How crazy are these clouds? 👀 ☁️ 🌈 ❤️

[MJTurnerPhotography @MJTurnerPhoto]

Sometimes the best shots are the ones you don't plan for. Captured yesterday evening in the Lake District, this picture ended up being my favourite from the entire outing, even though it wasn't the scene I had set out to photograph. I was completely captivated by the gorgeous interplay of light and shadow, with golden-hour sun dancing in bright patches over the rolling pastures stretching beyond the waters of Bassenthwaite Lake. This luminous sweep of illuminated fields contrasted perfectly with the brooding silhouette of Binsey yonder, standing watch as the northernmost outpost of the national park.

📌 Binsey beyond Bassenthwaite, Lake District.