Victoria Tuck

[Alexandra @Alexandr4Denman]

WELL DONE MILLIBAND JUST WONDERFUL!
Over a thousand wind turbines across Britain contain banned ASBESTOS in brake parts supplied by Chinese manufacturers .
The chrysotile asbestos banned in Britain since 1999 was found in lift and hoist brakes . A major and very expensive ( paid by the taxpayer ) clean up operation is now underway with costs expected to be substantial .
Not forgetting if any of those brake pads broke and the asbestos got into the ground the fibres don't break down they would stay in the soil for a longtime making the land contaminated meaning it couldn't be disturbed with digging or grown on . Dangerous stuff if airborne
The GMB union is demanding full details from the government .

[ClarksonsFarm @ClarksonsFarm1]

🤷‍♂️

[FarmingUK @FarmingUK]

British farmers don’t complain about the heat… they adapt 😎🚜

📸 Insta: wickstreetfarm

[Martina Navratilova @Martina]

Insanely amazing

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Across Britain right now, farmers are shearing their sheep, bagging up the wool, and burning it. Some bury it. Some leave it to rot in a corner of the field. The wool-burning has made the odd headline as a protest, but the truth is duller and sadder. The fleece is worth less than the diesel it would take to haul it to the depot.

The numbers are grim. In recent years a kilo of British wool has fetched somewhere between twenty and sixty pence, and hill breeds like Swaledale and Welsh Mountain sank as low as ten. A whole fleece off a mountain ewe might bring thirty pence. Shearing that same ewe costs the farmer around two pounds. One Lincolnshire farmer added it up out loud: over three pounds to shear and cart a single fleece to the depot, and twenty-six pence back. So she burns them. A great many do.

Here is the part that stings. The shearing still has to happen, every year, whatever the wool will fetch. A sheep left in full fleece overheats, struggles to move, and gets eaten alive by maggots. So the job carries on purely as welfare, a cost the farmer simply eats to spare the animal, with the wool itself going on the fire straight after.

And think about what this fibre once was. For centuries wool was the engine of the English economy, the country's greatest export and the crown's main source of tax. It raised the soaring wool churches of the Cotswolds. It turned merchants into princes. To this day, whoever presides over the House of Lords sits on the Woolsack, a literal cushion of wool, put there in the fourteenth century so nobody would forget where the nation's wealth began.

Prices have lifted off the floor this past year, the first real relief in a long while. It still does not cover the shears for a hill farmer. The fibre that built England now smoulders in a heap behind the barn, and almost nobody notices the smoke.

[Morgan Barrett @MorganBarrettX]

Jeremy Clarkson’s Farm show on Amazon is the most radicalizing piece of mainstream media I’ve ever seen

Just one example (bear with me):

Badgers became a protected species in Britain 40+ years ago.

The population has exploded and now frequently transmits tuberculosis to cows

But farmers can’t cull the badger population to protect their cattle because the government still considers them to be endangered

Instead of addressing the root cause, the UK has the most batshit testing regime for cattle

There’s no TB vaccine. So the cattle have to get tested. The vets administering the test have to measure welts on the cows neck. Whether a cow lives or dies comes down to a vet trying to discern 1mm on a caliper (reactive vs non reactive).

If a cow tests positive, the farm (already running on super thin margins) is quarantined and starts hemorrhaging money.

Jeremy Clarkson’s cow (pregnant with twins) has an inconclusive test so it’s separated from the herd. It receives a second inconclusive test so they have to kill it (before it can give birth to the twins).

Now here’s the kicker: the autopsy reveals no sign of TB. It was a healthy cow needlessly killed

So - silver lining the farm should be removed from quarantine, right? WRONG - it’s still under quarantine and has to keep testing and can’t sell its beef

Kafkaesque doesn’t even begin to describe how f’d up it is for British farmers

[Paul Mummery @RHAPaulMummery]

#NationalLorryWeek starts tomorrow!

[No Farmers, No Food @NoFarmsNoFoods]

Absolutely. 🥩

[Richard Seiler @richardseiler]

𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘪𝘴 𝘪𝘵 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘮𝘢𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘱𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦 𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦

Jeremy Clarkson has never pretended to be anything other than exactly what he is

Brutally honest. No oil painting. A pot belly, a lifelong smoker, a drinker. Not exactly the modern alpha male or is he?

And somehow that is the whole point

I have watched him for most of my life
First as a motoring journalist who could make you want a car you would never own and never need
Then as something bigger
The loudest, funniest, most unfiltered mouthpiece the ordinary person ever had
A man who said the thing everyone was thinking while the rest of television tiptoed around it

From Top Gear he built something that should not have worked
Three middle aged men, The Stig, a track and a chemistry you cannot manufacture
James May the patient one
Richard Hammond the brave one
And Clarkson the force of nature dragging both of them into chaos and somehow back out again

When it all fell apart at the BBC he could have disappeared
The fracas was not his finest hour and he never pretended it was
He owned it, apologized and carried on
No reinvention, no groveling tour, no carefully managed comeback
He just kept being himself and let the work speak

The move to Amazon and The Grand Tour proved something I think a lot of people missed
The format was never the magic
The men were
You can take three friends out of a studio and drop them anywhere on earth and the loyalty between them travels with them

But it is Clarkson's Farm where the whole picture finally comes into focus

Here is a man with nothing left to prove walking into a field he barely understands and refusing to fake competence he does not have
He has run that farm at break even and then at an outright loss in full public view
No editing it into a success story
No pretending the numbers work when they do not
His farm manager hands him one brutal truth after another and he sits there and takes it

A whole season swallowed by drought even after he leaned into robotics and the most advanced farming money could buy
Technology was supposed to be the answer and the weather did not care
He showed that too
Most people would have cut it

And through all of it he has done something quietly remarkable
He has dragged the plight of the British farmer into the light
The paperwork, the council, the margins that vanish, the weather that ruins a year of work in a week
People who had never thought about where their food comes from suddenly cared because he made them care

And then there is the part nobody warned me about
Men who raise animals for meat and still love them
Who name them, worry about them, sit with them
Who treat them with respect and dignity right up to the moment they cannot keep them
And feel the full weight of sending them off

He does not hide that
He lets the camera sit in the discomfort of it
The grief of a man who knows the deal he made and still finds it hard

That is not weakness
That is honesty most people are far too afraid to show

We live in an age that rewards the polished, the curated, the carefully built personal brand
And here is a scruffy, swearing, chain smoking farmer who has done the opposite of all of it and won
He stayed exactly who he was while the world begged him to become a product

That is the whole secret
There is no act
There never was

And that is exactly why we keep watching

Praying for a full recovery mate, looking forward to another season of Clarkson's Farms!

[FarmingUK @FarmingUK]

The countryside feeds the country. Share if you stand with British farmers! 🚜🇬🇧

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

If you are old enough to have driven in Britain in the 1980s, you remember the windscreen.

By July you could barely see through it. A run from Leeds to London in August finished with a bumper that looked like it had been to war and a sheet of glass you scrubbed with a sponge at the services while the engine ticked as it cooled. Moths in the headlights. Flies in the wing mirrors. The grille packed solid. Nobody thought it remarkable. It was simply the price of moving through a country that was still, in living memory, heaving with flying things.

Drive that same road today. Stop at the same services. The windscreen is clean. Spotless. You could very nearly eat off it.

We have the numbers, for those who want them. The Bugs Matter survey, run by Kent Wildlife Trust and Buglife, has had volunteers counting the splats on their number plates since 2004. Britain's flying insects are down by roughly four fifths in twenty years. Gone in a single human lifetime, while the rest of us noticed nothing at all.

The birds went down with them, because the birds lived on them. A child born this year can grow up in the English countryside and never once hear a turtle dove, for the simple reason that there is almost nothing left to do the calling.

And none of it, not one acre of it, happened on the grass.

It happened in the arable fields, where the hedges were torn out for bigger machines and a single crop was sprayed over and over to keep it upright. The herb-rich meadow grazed by cattle still hums. The beetles, the pollinators, the ground-nesting birds, all still there, just about, on the pasture our ancestors never stopped grazing.

So when someone tells you your steak is emptying the British countryside, ask them what grew on that field before it was drained and ploughed and sprayed to raise the oats for the carton in their fridge.

It was grass, and there were cattle on it, and back then the windscreen needed cleaning.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

This year the Home Office moved to stop expert sheep shearers from Australia and New Zealand coming to shear British sheep.

The people who keep the animals comfortable were declared surplus to requirements.

For over a decade, around 75 of the best shearers on earth have flown in each spring on a simple visa concession. In a few brutal weeks they take the wool off up to two million sheep.

A top shearer clears a ewe in two or three minutes. Hundreds a day. Calm hands, no panic in the animal. It is a global trade and a young body's game, and Britain has never grown enough of its own.

The official line? Fourteen years to train Britons, so the door is closing.

Here is what that tidy sentence ignores. A sheep must be shorn every year or she overheats, cannot move properly, and gets eaten alive by flies and maggots. Shearing on time is welfare, plain and simple, written into law and into the animal's own skin.

So a government that lectures farmers without pause about welfare has quietly made the most basic welfare task harder to carry out. After the outcry they allowed one "final" year. Then the experts are gone for good.

A sector already losing money on every fleece, already burning wool it cannot sell, now told it cannot even get the people in to take the wool off.

You could be forgiven for thinking somebody wants the British sheep gone.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Wool grows back every year on grass and rain. It warms you better than plastic and feeds the soil when it wears out. We let the trade collapse anyway.

Here is how anyone, anywhere, can help bring it back.

- Read the label. Most "fleece" is plastic. Choose real wool.

- Buy your bed back from oil. Wool duvets breathe, resist fire, and outlast synthetics by decades.

- Put wool underfoot. A wool carpet lasts a generation. Nylon sheds microplastic with every step.

- Insulate with it. Sheep's wool beats foam, and foam is just oil.

- Buy close to the animal. Straight from farms keeps the money with the shearer.

- Compost the old stuff. A wool jumper rots back into the ground. Polyester outlives your grandchildren.

- Back it where the big orders are. Hotels, uniforms, fire rules. They could all specify wool tomorrow.

- Learn the craft. Knit, weave, felt. Every stitch is a vote.

This belongs to no one country. Merino off an Australian ewe, Rambouillet from the American west, Shetland, Harris Tweed. Half the world's wool sits unloved while we dress in oil.

None of this needs a hashtag. Just ordinary choices, made on purpose.

The sheep have done their part for ten thousand years. The rest is us, reading the label.

[ClarksonsFarm @ClarksonsFarm1]

🙌🏼

[Emmanuel Macron @EmmanuelMacron]

Our heroes are back and Brigitte was here to welcome them!

[Wendy Steward @WooStewd]

Peter Lovett - My step dad is 102 in October. This day 82 years ago he was landing on Juno beach with the Canadians. He stayed there for 6 weeks on Juno, doing his duty. This man is a legend. 🇬🇧

[FarmingUK @FarmingUK]

Do you? 🚜 🇬🇧

[ClarksonsFarm @ClarksonsFarm1]

It certainly does!🌾

[Cat @catdeans]

This is awful. The last ever Denby Pottery going to the kiln. Why is there not uproar? Where’s the government in this?? We all have Denby in our homes, in family heirlooms, as our history and now it’s closing through lack of support, such a sad sad day. #SaveDenby @denbypottery