The funniest maths in modern environmentalism.
One almond requires 12 litres of irrigated water to produce. Peer-reviewed, ScienceDirect, 2017. A glass of almond milk contains roughly 50 of them. 600 litres of water before the carton is filled.
The water comes from the San Joaquin Valley in California, which sits over one of the most over-extracted aquifers on earth. The valley floor has subsided by up to nine metres in places due to groundwater depletion. The carton is then refrigerated, sailed across the Atlantic, refrigerated again, lorried to a Manchester Tesco, and bought by someone who is concerned about the environmental impact of dairy.
Meanwhile, in Cheshire.
A British dairy cow drinks roughly 70 to 100 litres of water a day and produces around 28 litres of milk. That's about 3.5 litres of water per litre of milk. The water is rainwater that fell on her field or came from a local stream fed by the same rainwater. The rain was going to fall on the field whether the cow stood in it or not. 80% of her moisture intake comes from the grass itself, which is also rain.
She converts the grass, free of charge, into a litre of milk containing seven times the protein and four times the calcium of almond milk, and shipped roughly 18 miles to the same Tesco.
To recap.
600 litres of stolen aquifer, flown halfway round the world for nutritionally worthless beige water.
Or 3.5 litres of rain that was already falling, converted by an animal you can pet, into actual food.
The shopper picks the almond.
She has been told this is the ethical position.
The aquifer would like a word.
❗ "I’ve just wrestled this out of a cow's mouth...
"Don’t be so dirty & irresponsible, take your dog mess home & bin it!
"If you don’t you may succeed in killing something one day"
📷 Abi Reader
Farming should be one of the main priorities of any government. Domestic local farm food security is vital to the health and wealth of any nation. And the fact that the Labour government are doing the exact opposite and financially punishing farmers is absolutely shameful.
Good riddance to Jess Phillips. The ex-safeguarding minister fiercely resisted a rape-gang inquiry. She has continually downplayed the link between illegal migration and sex crimes. She put PC pieties ahead of protecting the vulnerable, says Georgina Mumford
https://t.co/pJF2vns6G4
The time to act is now. Join us in supporting the “Ban IRGC” campaign and help raise awareness about human rights, accountability, and security concerns linked to the IRGC. Share this video, start conversations, and stand with those calling for action. #BanIRGC
Activist: "You can graze sheep underneath solar panels. It's called agrivoltaics."
Farmer: "I've read the brochures."
Activist: "Best of both worlds."
Farmer: "The panels shade the sward. Productive species die back. What grows is what tolerates shade and compaction. Sheep won't finish on it."
Activist: "But the trials show it works."
Farmer: "The trials run three years and measure ewe presence. Not lamb growth rates. Not finishing weights. Not what the soil looks like in year fifteen."
Activist: "It's still better than nothing."
Farmer: "It's a 30% stocking rate, a steel frame I can't plough around, panel-cleaning chemicals running into the watercourse, and a 40-year lease I can't break."
Activist: "But you're getting energy AND lamb."
Farmer: "I'm getting a third of the lamb, a maintenance contract, and a field my grandson can't farm."
Activist: "You're being negative."
Farmer: "I'm watching a thousand-year-old way of feeding people get traded for twenty-five years of subsidised electricity. Negative would be the polite word."
Respected Iran expert Abbas Milani argues that the majority of Iranians want a secular, democratic society - one where women are equal, religious minorities can live peacefully, and clerical rule has no claim to power. The only people who don’t want this is the regime in power.
3 Staged Assassination Attempts.
Starting multiple wars.
Murdering 160 School Girls with a Tomahawk Missile.
All to distract from the fact…
He Raped Children.
A reasonable audit of what the British farmer is actually doing, measured against what he is currently being accused of.
What he is doing:
- Up at 5am. Earlier in lambing. Finished at 9pm last night. Doesn't consider this notable.
- Producing 60% of the food eaten in the UK.
- On a land area smaller than Oregon.
- Maintaining 400,000 miles of hedgerow.
- Several hundred thousand miles of stone wall.
- The entire drainage infrastructure of the lowlands.
- Every postcard the country has ever printed.
- Sequestering carbon into the soil beneath his livestock at rates that offset a significant fraction of his sector's emissions. Not widely discussed.
- Feeding, clothing and tanning a population that has mostly forgotten where any of this comes from.
- Lambing in March at his own expense.
- Calving in April on no sleep.
- Silage in June on three hours a night.
- Harvest in August.
- Ploughing in October.
- Feeding stock through January in conditions any urban professional would call a humanitarian emergency.
- Watching his son decide whether to take over the farm, knowing what the answer is likely to be.
- Earning less per hour than the barista who served the coffee to the journalist writing the article about him.
What he is not doing:
- Destroying the ozone layer. Hasn't been near it.
- Flying almonds in from California.
- Clearing the Amazon.
- Running a data centre.
- Operating a private jet.
- Producing microplastics.
- Failing to recycle his packaging. He hasn't got any.
- Causing the climate crisis. The climate crisis is two hundred years of industrial activity he wasn't around for.
- Lobbying Parliament. Can't afford it. He's in a field.
- Complaining about any of this. He hasn't got the time.
The audit concludes.
The defendant is out feeding the cattle.
He'll be back for supper if the tractor holds up.