@Vtuber_Expo I'm sorry but... That's not all that transparent.
Not does it do anything to restore trust in situations such as where talents have been invited back next year only to be denied when applying said next year.
If you have just arrived and are wondering why so much of this account is given over to a bull, a ewe, a goat and a few other animals in fields you will never visit, stay a moment. There is a reason.
These are the Ruminati. Each is a living argument doing an ancient job, and between them they dismantle most of what the modern world believes about food, land, and who is to blame for the planet.
Gerald, a Hereford bull, has spent four years turning one corner of one field into wildflowers, and has never asked anyone to notice.
Doris, a Texel ewe, knows fifty faces and forecasts the weather better than the BBC. She is the answer to anyone who calls the animals we eat stupid.
Keith, an Anglo-Nubian goat, respects no fence in Devon and turns land no plough could touch into food.
Eduardo, an alpaca, grows a fibre finer than cashmere on Welsh rain, and is guarding an orphan lamb that has decided it is a small strange alpaca.
Freya, a European bison, is back on a hill her kind left six thousand years ago, raising a fox-coloured calf, Seren, who already leads the herd out in front of her.
Marged, a Tamworth pig, turns an old orchard over with her nose and hands it back richer than she found it.
Hector, a Cavalry Black, stood seventeen years for the Household Cavalry and has lately decided it is safe to lie down and sleep. And Moss, a collie pup, is learning the oldest job a dog has.
Here is what they stand for. You will have been told animals like these are wrecking the planet. The methane a grazing cow breathes out is carbon the grass pulled from the air last season and sent straight back, nothing like the ancient carbon we drag from the ground and burn. The wildflowers and the curlew are here because of the grazing animals, not despite them. Strip the livestock off a British hill and you do not get Eden. You get bracken, scrub and silence.
So this account exists to defend the British farmer, lectured for a generation by people who have never mended a wall in the rain. The man at the gate at first light and the shepherd on the fell in January are the reason this island still works.
Underneath sits the oldest pattern of all. The people telling everyone what to eat were never short of meat themselves. The poor got the bread and the gruel and were told to be grateful. The modern version swapped the top hat for a lab coat, but the message is the same. Eat less of the food that built you. Trust the chart. I do not accept it, and neither do they. Real food is the birthright of ordinary people, not a luxury rationed out by the fashionable.
So while the country argues over who runs it, the truth sits in the fields, chewing. A bull, a ewe, a goat and the farmers nobody thanks keep this nation fed and its hills alive. The Ruminati run the country. They always have, and never bothered with a press release.
Eat well, train hard, mind the land, and come back tomorrow. Pull up a chair at the gate. Gerald will not mind.
A tenant farmer in the Cairngorms says land that sold for ยฃ500 an acre a few years ago now goes for ยฃ5,000. He is being moved off ground his family has worked for generations, because he cannot outbid the people buying it. The buyers are corporations, and they have no intention of farming a single acre of it.
Here is how the trick works. A company keeps emitting carbon exactly as before. Same factories, same flights, same supply chain, same product. Then it buys a Scottish hillside, plants some trees, and announces to the world that it is now carbon neutral, or, if it is feeling brave, carbon negative. The emissions never fell. It simply bought a landscape to point at.
Take BrewDog. In 2020 it bought a 9,300-acre Highland estate, propped up with public grant money, and promised a million trees and the crown of the world's first carbon negative beer business, removing twice the carbon it emitted, forever. By 2023 roughly half of the 500,000 trees it had managed to plant were dead, killed by drought, with critics noting the planting was drying out the peat and releasing carbon of its own. The advertising regulator ruled its carbon-negative claims misleading. In 2024 it quietly dropped the badge and dismissed the entire carbon credit market as a flood of cheap schemes whose benefit was "questionable, maybe even non-existent." Then it sold the estate to a firm whose actual business is selling carbon offsets.
That is the whole model in one story. Public money in. Dead trees out. A green halo worn for four years and then dropped. The farmer who used to be on that land, gone. The hillside passed to a company that exists purely to sell other people the right to keep polluting.
This is no fringe case. In one recent year, half of every estate sold in Scotland went to investment funds, corporations and charitable trusts rather than anyone who would farm it. A third of the deals for plantable land are now done off-market, in secret, precisely so the local community never gets the chance to bid.
So this is what net zero looks like on the ground. A man who produced food is priced out of his own glen. A corporation that produced emissions buys the glen, calls itself a force for good, and sells the carbon. The land stops feeding anyone. Nobody's emissions actually went down by a gram.
The food was real. The farmer was real. The carbon saving is a line in a slide deck.
And we have somehow decided the villain in all this is the man with the sheep.