If you haven't already listened in, could I just recommend the excellent AGonomics podcast from AHDB.
Here is the latest episode:
open.spotify.com/episode/2PMT...
Food 4 Thought
🏛️Farming is the foundation of our civilisation
🪖Digging 4 victory was key to surviving WWII
½ 🌍 population is only alive now due to the Green Revolution
🍽️ Humans need more food in next 25yrs than in all history combined
📈 Climate is making it harder
👇😬
x.com/EdConwaySky/...
It popped up in my feed, I think. Was a while back now.
Ahh afternoon tea time on Friday 🫖☕️
Good to remember that the entire annual £2.5bn Defra farming budget represents only 4.66 days of NHS spending.
So if you had started spending it on the NHS instead of farming at midnight on Sunday, it would have just run out.
People in other jobs might wonder, if you can only make money from subsidy & by not-farming, what's the point of farming?
A) it's volatile, risky and unpredictable. A few recent years weren't as bad as last year.
B) it's what we do
C) Bet you're glad we do
#WeJustWantTofeedYou
NEW DEFRA stats just out.
Show that in 2023/24 cereal farm incomes fell by 73%
On average cereal farms made a £26k loss on their crops, only earning an income due to direct govt subsidy & non-farming activity. Even so, 1/3 of all cereals farms made a loss despite other income.
I suggest that NOWHERE else in the UK faces the intense land use trade off between climate, nature, food security and economy as in the Fens.
Really informed article here, worth a read 🤓👇
www.thetimes.com/uk/environme...
🎵"All the hungry people"🎶
Be nice if that could happen for mobile phone calls on farms sometimes soon too, even with 5G signal!
24 hours ago I booked a one-night stay at a hotel in Manchester on Saturday. I paid upfront, I have made no changes to the booking. I have so far received seven emails about it. SEVEN. Would i like to upgrade, would I like to pre-book some champagne? Chocolate? A mini bar? An alcohol free mini bar?
The average UK house price buys 6.1 metres of motorway.
Bluesky now has over 10 million users, and I was #6,136,428!
Hello Zoropsis spinimana! 🫤
A photo of a great blue heron flying over golden water, with its large wings and long toes on full display.
Head, shoulders, wings, and toes - heron toes!
📷 #birds
All booked up.
Good line of work to be in this autumn I wager.
You're such a Budgie Smuggler.
We grow for milling. Quality appears good at first glance 🤞, just not enough of it, and plenty of ergot...
If you know, you know 🫣
Combine harvester sending up a plume of straw dust into a stunning wide fenland sunset of purple, orange, yellow and blue.
Gives us this day, our daily bread 🌾 🍞
An unusual pause in harvest activity today, as the wheat that's left isn't ready.
Partly because it was sown so late, because of all the 🌧️
That also means yields are very, very poor 🥺🍽️
I grew up on a small family farm in New Jersey & I have an M.S. in agricultural economics from Purdue. People think 'the heartland' is full of family farms run by unpretentious 'folk' who drive 10 year old pickup trucks, but much of modern farming is controlled by multinational conglomerates. 1/2
There you go. The people who own that equipment know its value per hour down to the penny. During planting & harvesting season, the 'shadow price' of an hour of modern tractor time might be several thousands of $$.
You might have heard the phrase "No Farmers No Food", now we seem to have No Seed No Food. Is it time the farming industry joined the EU? www.theguardian.com/politics/art...
The climate crisis is essentially a food crisis. Oh, and good morning
news.un.org/en/story/202...
Nice to meet you David
Introductions…
I’m David, I manage land with farming, forestry and houses in the Berkshire Downs. I’ve got a huge enthusiasm for the countryside, communities, food and conservation.
I’m a (mostly off road) cyclist and a maker of pictures; formerly a profession, now more a hobby.
An absofuckinglutely majestic fluffy yellow moth standing facing the camera defiantly like the lepidopteran royalty that it is. If Monday tries to come for you, this moth will find it and crush that Monday like a very, very tiny grape. This moth has big round grey eyes, delightful comb-like antennas, a fluffy body, and wings that look like autumn leaves. A plus plus plus moth buddy.
A side view of the extremely stylish and fluffy and majestic yellow moth, with wings held aloft. Those wings are an autumnal shade of orange tan, with dark speckles and crenellated wing edges that make them look like autumn leaves. It's a very good moth friend, 14 out of 10 would recommend.
A close up on the majestic yellow moth so you can tell how fluffy its body is. Its very, very, very fluffy. Like an extremely plush plushie. From this alt you can also see it's legs are orange and brown speckled at the top and pale peach towards the feet, like it's wearing fancy shorts. Nice work little moth.
Behold the majestic floof of this canary-shouldered thorn moth and let your Monday be that little bit more bearable.
This majestic moth eats birches and alders; to help look after it please look after local trees & report any damage to your council.
Thank you from the Moth Promotional Board ✨🦋✨
