Knitson Farm

30/09/2026

This is why we have to back British dairy 🥛 🇬🇧

12/09/2026

The best-performing Curlew ground in the BTO's new report is farmland next to a shooting estate, where fox and crow control is in place.

BTO Report 797 asked 28 Curlew recovery projects what their work had achieved. Most could show more nests hatching. Almost none could show more chicks surviving. As many recorded more chick predation after intervention as recorded less.

Fencing equipment costs £500 to £1,000 a nest. One project put staff time at £2,500 a year. Few had any of that met through an agri-environment scheme, and several relied on local farmers or shoots to do the fox and crow control for them.

Calladine and colleagues put 36% of Britain's breeding Curlews on ground that overlaps grouse moors. Remove that management from the model — less predator control, or trees planted over the ground — and projected growth drops from 18.3% a year to 8.0%.

Based on those figures, more than half the projected growth depends on the keepering.

05/09/2026

11/08/2026

Natural England now agrees with the people who actually manage the moor.

In a new blog, it accepts that reducing vegetation fuel through grazing, cutting and firebreaks is essential to preventing wildfire. For years, that has been our argument: a moor is kept safe by skilled people working it season after season, not by leaving it alone.

Stopping a fire before it takes hold is safer, cheaper and far less damaging than fighting one after it spreads. Natural England's own reserves are managed exactly this way.

So here's the honest question: if active management is right on Natural England's land, why do its licences and access rules still hold up the same work everywhere else?

Read the full article — link in the comments:

04/08/2026

THE FUTURE OF FARMING, CANCELLED BY THE PAST.

Seven years ago, Rotterdam opened the world’s first floating dairy farm.
A three storey farm in the middle of a city harbour, producing food close to consumers, using solar power and feeding cows partly on useful by-products from nearby businesses that might otherwise have gone to waste.

It reduced food miles, reused urban waste and demonstrated how food production could continue where land is scarce and flooding is an increasing risk.

In other words, it was exactly the type of circular and sustainable farming system politicians constantly tell us they want.

It was impressive enough for Jeremy Clarkson and Kaleb Cooper to visit during the latest series of Clarkson’s Farm, where it was presented as an example of how agriculture could modernise and adapt.

Now it is being put up for sale.

Its current permit expires this month. Its Rotterdam harbour site is being redeveloped for housing, its lease is not expected to continue and no workable alternative location has been secured.

The owners say outdated regulations and environmental bureaucracy have left them with no viable route forward.

There is some nuance here. The site was never guaranteed to remain available forever and Rotterdam clearly needs housing.

But that does not erase the absurdity.

Farmers are constantly told to:
Reduce food miles.
Reuse waste.
Produce food closer to consumers.
Adapt to climate change.
Use less land.
Modernise.
Become more sustainable.
These people did all of it.

They invested millions, proved the concept, attracted international interest and turned political slogans into an actual working farm.

Yet when it came to helping that farm survive, the system found deadlines, departments and reasons why it could not be done.

We are very good at praising innovation while it remains a pilot project.

We are far less capable of allowing it to become permanent.

This is not simply the loss of 30 cows on a floating platform in Rotterdam.

It is a warning about what happens when regulation stops managing genuine risk and begins suffocating the very solutions it was supposedly designed to encourage.

If the future of farming can be imagined, financed, built and proven, but still cannot survive the bureaucracy, then the problem is not a shortage of innovation.

The problem is the system.

27/07/2026

This is why we have to back our British beef farmers and buy local 🥩 🇬🇧

12/06/2026

Did you know that 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. In calm hands with 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.

Most 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.

We have a system that lectures farmers without pause about welfare whilst making 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?

05/06/2026

Where do you even begin to start with nonsense like this?

Seriously Sainsbury's, who are you trying to convince that this is an actual thing?

The idea that white eggs automatically have a lower carbon footprint is ...well..I'll try to explain why it's a daft theory.

White egg laying birds such as White Stars and Amberlines may eat slightly less and they do lay well. That part is true.

However, they are not exactly the calmest creatures in the poultry world. They are flighty, nervous and very easily stressed. In fact, White Stars in particular have a bit of a reputation for suddenly dying when they get overexcited or startled!!

Which is not ideal when your grand environmental strategy appears to be resting on a hen that can be taken out by a strong sneeze.

There is also the issue of productive life.
In commercial systems, white egg layers often have a shorter laying life than brown egg layers such as ISA Browns, Bovans and Lohmann Browns.

So yes, they may eat a bit less feed.

However, if birds need replacing sooner, that means more chicks being incubated, more pullets being reared, more heat, more electricity, more gas, more transport and more cost.

That all has a footprint too.

People who actually know poultry will tell you that these birds are bred to lay hard.

Very hard.

White Stars are slender birds, they do not eat a lot and the pressure of laying at that rate can take a real toll on them.

So forgive me if I do not immediately accept the idea that this is all being done for the planet.

It looks far more like a supermarket buying decision dressed up as an environmental one.

If Sainsbury’s wants to sell white eggs because they suit the supply chain, improve margins or fit the system better, then just say that.

Just do not dress it up as some grand net zero breakthrough while ignoring the reality of the birds themselves.

If supermarkets want to talk seriously about farming, food and welfare, they could start by listening to the people who actually understand hens.

Just a thought!!