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Oct. 15, 2022 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole

01:45:55

Jamie Blackett

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	Welcome to the Deling Pod with me, James Deling Pod.
	And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but I really am looking forward to talking for a second time to my old friend, Jamie Blackett.
	Jamie, welcome back to The Deling Pod.
	The last time we talked was in your Scottish Fastness, where you'd invited me up very kindly to shoot some birds, and that was good.
	A lot's happened since then though.
	You've written another book about farming, which is what you do.
	It's really good.
	I can highly recommend it.
	On my screen, it's coming up reverse, but the book is called Land of Milk and Honey, Digressions of a Rural Dissident.
	And Jamie, I was reading this book and I was thinking, That you are halfway to being where I am, but you haven't quite gone on the full journey yet.
	In other words, you are halfway down the rabbit hole, and actually, if only you knew... You're talking about my hairline, James!
	No, I can talk.
	I can talk.
	No, I'm talking about... I'm talking about the fact that it's very obvious... Look, you're a farmer.
	You have very very clearly seen that there was a war on farmers, that your life is being made impossible in any number of excruciating ways by the various authorities.
	And you understand this, you've seen all this, but you haven't made the final connection which is this stuff is not accidental, this stuff is being done deliberately to destroy you.
	Now does that sound like too much of a Too much to ask you to believe, because I can tell you, reading your book, it comes through on every page.
	Yeah, no, I think I'm increasingly with you, James.
	I mean, we definitely are an endangered species, which is, I suppose, one of the motivations for writing about it.
	I mean, I really hope that isn't the case, but maybe in a hundred years' time somebody will Read my books as this is a sequel to the first one and sort of compare it to, you know, how a book like the Irish RM, for example, you wrote about it.
	It was very much the sort of end of an era in Ireland before things, you know, went all horribly wrong, really, in many ways, although in some ways it came right again for them after a bit.
	But Yeah we are, we are being attacked on all fronts.
	I mean the Scottish Nationalists and particularly now the Scottish Greens are bringing in, each week they're bringing in new legislation to eradicate us.
	Rather spookily they add the words net zero or cost of living crisis to every bit of legislation.
	To try and give it some sort of legitimacy, but it is really just a purely Marxist agenda very often.
	I don't use that word Lightly really, but it is what it is You know they brought in this week they brought in rent controls by by stealth On the back of the cost of living crisis which It's already having a disastrous effect.
	There's one big entrepreneur who in fact is actually a Labour peer, Lord Hockey.
	He's a socialist, or at least on the left anyway.
	Anyway, it's just announced that he's cancelling a big project to build 11,000 affordable homes to build, you know, to let in Scotland because, you know, the numpties in the Scottish Parliament have gone and frozen the rent.
	So it's no longer worth building homes.
	In the meantime, there are homeless people in every town in Scotland.
	Next week, or next month anyway, probably there's going to be uh more land reform legislation which is actually being called quite blatantly net zero land reform legislation where it's got absolutely bugger all to do with carbon uh it's just really just trying to get rich people out of scotland yeah exactly look i think we should um
	We sort of went straight in there and I think what we didn't discuss was, you know, who you are, where you farm, because not everyone would have seen the first podcast.
	By the way, what you are describing, you are describing your position as a farmer in the lowlands of Scotland, but I can tell you, There will be farmers in Texas nodding their heads, farmers in Australia nodding their heads, in the Netherlands nodding their heads.
	Particularly in the Netherlands at the moment, yeah.
	Exactly.
	So just tell us about your situation, how many acres you farm and what animals you have and stuff like that.
	Well, we farm about 1,200 acres here.
	That 1,200 acres includes woods and kind of wilded bits, a bit of an emotive term there, but about 1,000 acres of kind of ploughable acres that we actually mostly put down to grass now for an all-grazing free-range dairy herd, which is something that you don't see
	That many of in this country or in Europe, but is is the way they do business in in New Zealand.
	It's a much more natural way to to farm.
	Yes.
	And and we also.
	I'm also a wicked landlord.
	The Scottish government are doing their best to eradicate us, but we we let properties either On a permanent basis really, effectively on what used to be called a short assured basis, but they've got rid of that now.
	To local people to live in, mostly actually young people, we try and bring in young people who have got skills and work in the countryside to live in our cottages if we can.
	So a third of them have tenants who are under 30 in them, which is a kind of source of pride for us.
	As I was saying, the rent freeze may make that increasingly difficult.
	We've diversified into tourism to try and even out the bumps in farming.
	So that's basically what I do when I'm not writing puerile articles for various publications.
	They're not puerile your articles, they're very good.
	I think you are definitely one of the best writers on farming and country issues in the country, which is why you get used a lot and deservedly so.
	I really did love your book and I'd definitely recommend it for people who remember the old me, Before, you know, the journalist that used to write for The Spectator and the person I was until two years ago when I realised that things are much worse than are portrayed in the media.
	But, like, people who have loo books, people who have pictures in their downstairs loos of their sons and themselves at Eton and stuff, That those kind of people will, they probably own your book already, but if they don't, they should.
	And anyone who wants, who cares about the countryside and cares about farming, lovely, lovely stories about, just, it's a really nice read.
	So I genuinely recommend it.
	But what really shines through your book, is that you are like a lot of farmers.
	You're not a shit.
	You don't hate your animals and just want to kill them and sell them for lots of money.
	You actually care about your animal, your livestock.
	You care about the diversity of your landscape.
	You care about the ecosystem.
	You're a decent person, and yet the system treats you like a bloody criminal.
	And this comes across again and again.
	You are shat on from every which way.
	Tell me a bit more about that.
	Give me some examples of this.
	Well, I don't know.
	I mean, the book starts in a real low point in my life, when I was sort of going through a bit of a midlife crisis.
	It just so happened that it wasn't caused by Brexit, but my business just went through a complete nightmare really.
	We were losing money hand over fist and because it was at a time of Brexit, we were being told, you know, we're going to take all your subsidies away.
	I thought, shit, I'm already losing money.
	So, yeah, if they take my subsidies away, I'm going to be bankrupt in no time at all.
	And I think, you know, when this sort of thing happens in middle age, you know, it really hits you much harder than when you're kind of 30 or something, you just shrug your shoulders and say, oh, well, sod it, I'll go and do something else.
	And so that was a real sort of wake up call.
	And that's, you know, when we changed actually to becoming a Dairy and now and now actually we're making a decent living again.
	So in that sense, I know you were a Brexiteer I was a I was a reluctant remainer Yeah, I think Brexit in some ways did me a favor because it it kind of it kind of made me think shit We can't we can't kind of think like carry on thinking like European farmers.
	We've got to start thinking like Kiwi farmers and do what they do, which is what really what we're doing now but at the same time we we had this I
	And it's still going on in the media, but it's it's it's I like to think that we're kind of winning the argument a bit now, but this this bloody vegan business and People well not so much now, but a few years ago when people didn't really understand Veganism very much people said although you know don't don't be nasty about vegans because you're gonna alienate them
	And I think that's absolute complete bollocks because it is a thoroughly pernicious, obnoxious doctrine that is ruining the lives of, and the health particularly, of a lot of young people.
	It's destroying their mental health, it's taking away their fertility, lots of autoimmune diseases that that we'd never heard of before and are quite prevalent because we're all eating, or not all of us, but a lot of people are eating the wrong diet.
	And in particular, it's causing this obesity crisis.
	And the whole COVID experience would not have been nearly as bad.
	We might not even have had to have lockdowns or anything like that if we'd all been properly fit to start with.
	And it was, you know, I'm not saying it was all just fat people dying, but there was a definite link between type 2 diabetes or an obesity and all these sort of problems and people dying of Covid.
	People were dying in their middle age who shouldn't have died because they were basically eating the wrong things.
	They weren't eating enough saturated fats and they're eating too many carbohydrates.
	And obviously a vegan diet really It is absolutely that, you know, that take that take taken to extreme, really.
	Oh, yeah.
	And I you know, and so because we were we were already losing money and having a miserable time farming.
	The fact that every time you open a newspaper or turned on the television, you had people preaching veganism and vilifying livestock farmers and trying to take away our livelihoods.
	At the same time, by the way, as all these these spooky corporate capitalists in America bragging about how they were going to take down the meat industry.
	I mean, that sort of thing has a pretty bad effect on a farming community that is already losing one farmer a week to suicide in the in the UK.
	And so I was pretty determined to to write about that.
	I have written about it a lot, not just in the book but also in newspapers and magazines and along with a lot of other writers.
	There's that terrific book by Charlie Spedding, Stop Feeding Us Lies, and another fantastic book that's come out this year, The Great Plant-Based Con by Jane Buxton, which everybody should read.
	I think maybe the tide is turning but that was another example of how I think we felt persecuted as a group and then of course obviously there is this assembly self-identifying as the parliaments in Edinburgh.
	The Scottish Parliament who do everything they possibly can to make life difficult for For people like me who, you know, I just sort of, I think that the two things that I do, providing food and providing accommodation to the sort of basic needs that humankind needs, are generally sort of, I think of those being public goods, but our politicians seem to do everything they possibly can to stop us doing it.
	Yeah, totally.
	I'm with you on a lot of what you're saying there.
	I'm not sure I'd I think the Covid thing is slightly irrelevant.
	I think there should never have been a lockdown.
	I think, anyway, there was no pandemic.
	If you look at the mortality figures, age-adjusted, you can see that in 2020-2021 there was no dramatic increase in deaths, which suggests to me that this thing was orchestrated and overblown.
	So there should never have been lockdowns.
	Well, I think there was a deliberate attempt to use it to To destroy the economy, really, I think, by a lot of people.
	Now you're getting them.
	I'd agree with that.
	But the point you made about veganism, I'm with you.
	And as you point out, they've rebadged it plant-based, because the word vegan, I always think, sounded unattractive.
	It sounds a bit like vagina, and not that there's anything wrong with vaginas, but it's not a kind of sexy, Diet, diet name.
	And so they rebranded it Plant Food and you had the companies like Beyond Meat.
	Have you, have you looked at, so I was looking at Beyond Meat's share price today and it, I think at its peak it was approaching $300 a share.
	All the, all the kind of the, the Richard Bransons bought into it.
	It was the hot thing.
	I think now the share price is around $17, I think.
	Nobody wants to eat burgers made of stuff that isn't meat.
	No one wants fake meat.
	It's just a nonsense.
	Have you noticed how when you go to the supermarket, And you look at the shelf they have for the stuff they haven't been able to sell and they're selling off cheaply.
	Very often there are these kind of fake meat products on it.
	Nobody wants this stuff.
	Veganism has not taken off.
	It's just a media phenomenon.
	It's not a real phenomenon.
	I think that's right and I really hope that's right.
	Yeah, you're right.
	I think that the share price has tanked and I think a lot of these Greedy people have hopefully lost their shirts on it because I think it was just a thoroughly evil thing to do.
	First of all, it's based on false, well, deliberately fake science, a lot of it.
	The methane argument has been completely overblown.
	I mean, my cows, sure, they burp methane.
	But it gets recycled back into the ground.
	I mean the vegetation that we're growing, 17 tons of, so 15, 16, 17 tons of dry matter, grass per hectare per year, is absorbing huge quantities of carbon dioxide to grow.
	And methane breaks down into carbon dioxide, you know, there's a loop, a kind of virtuous cycle, the carbon cycle that's been going on for years.
	And people have deliberately manipulated the science.
	So that's the first thing.
	And the second thing is that actually, leaving aside the whole carbon argument, is that we so need more cows, actually, not less, in most parts of the country for our biodiversity.
	Because without cow pats, you don't have beetles and other insects, and you don't get the birds.
	A cow through its cow pads, creates a fifth of its own body weight every year.
	And that is the base of our food chain.
	And without that, yeah, we certainly, I do subscribe to the notion that there is a biodiversity crisis in lots of parts of the country and lots of species as well.
	Yeah, for various different reasons, but that's the big one.
	Just going back to your point, I mean, I love the way that you now feed your cows.
	Just describe the method that you use now.
	Well, we feed them as much as possible, just on grass.
	And George Monbiot, people will be saying, oh, well, grass is evil because it's a monoculture.
	But it's not even really just grass.
	It's a pasture.
	In the pasture you have what you call a grass lay, which can include all sorts of different plants, mainly legumes like clovers and plantains, which produce nectar.
	And so that's a good thing.
	And people say, oh well, you know, It would be much better if it was all just wilded and scrubbed over with stuff.
	And yeah, in a narrow sense, for, you know, I don't know, nightingales or purple emperor butterflies or something, sure, it probably would be better.
	But, you know, you have to take the view with all these things that the best is the enemy of the good.
	And on our farm, I think we've got the right balance.
	We have got sort of wildy bits, as I described, But the actual pasture is growing an awful lot of grass to drive the dairy.
	We're producing 3 million litres of milk a year.
	But we've also got lapwings nesting on those dairy pastures, where they wouldn't be nesting if we were growing plant-based food.
	There'd be absolutely nothing there at all, because there'd be no cow pats, there'd be no life in the soil.
	and uh it probably would be a monoculture of uh growing i don't know sort of whatever we'd be growing beans tell me tell me how the the the the new zealand system works though basically so i can understand it well it well the way the way that it works is it mimics nature as much as possible
	by you just have these huge herds I mean you walk around our farm now you you you turn the corner suddenly there'll be you come face to face with 300 cattle on a on a quite a small paddock as we now call them um and they they graze and they trample the grass and they uh and they so they're putting fertility back in as their as their grazing
	Not just actually through their dung, but also through their saliva, which contains the sort of enzyme that makes the grass grow more.
	They quibble.
	And then when they've eaten it all down, they get moved on to the next bit.
	And that is exactly how nature created it in Europe, the ancient aurochs.
	It was the forebear of the modern cow that would have been grazing in great numbers on a savannah type landscape such as they still have in Africa.
	Probably more trees than we have now.
	It's a natural way to farm but also it's very very effective because you grow an awful lot more grass that way.
	uh because you're you're you're eating it right down and that and that well not all the way to the floor but almost and that and then it just bring you back up again whereas the old way of doing things was you turn a herd of cows out into into a field in in april you might not take them out again until july when they when they've run out of grass and that doesn't help the photosynthesis in the in the grass or anything because it's it's just kept at a very
	short level the whole time whereas we've got grass that's kind of doing that every three weeks and that's at the same time putting down roots each time under the soil and the old roots are dying off and that's creating topsoil but also most importantly for those who are hung up on carbon it's fixing carbon into the soil that would otherwise be in the atmosphere and so the big thing is if you
	If you're really hung up on climate change, you believe that the problem is too much carbon in the atmosphere, then you have to accept that the solution is to put it back under the ground again.
	And this is how we do it, basically.
	You can't do it any other way, certainly not by growing plant-based food.
	Yeah.
	I'm not interested, really, in the carbon, you know, that, like, look greenish.
	But it's actually more fundamental than that.
	It's not just that I'm not interested.
	I feel that your time is being wasted worrying about what these shitbags say, because it's all lies.
	Look, you're talking to a guy who wrote, you know, Watermelons, which is all about the Green Movement.
	And the thing I discovered after three years research was that everything they tell you is a lie or a half-truth or an exaggeration.
	There is no truth in the environmentalist argument.
	Therefore, I feel somehow we are wasting our time if we try and...
	If we try and fight on terrain of their choosing.
	Well, as a Mercury man you know you never do this.
	You never fight on terrain of the enemy's choosing.
	They are dragging you over there.
	Like, already you've invoked the evil Monbiot.
	Monbiot is just a kind of a junior demon in an evil system designed to wipe people like you out.
	We should not be paying any attention to him.
	Yeah, I mean, I kind of...
	Editors don't let me write evil demon, but they do now let me write phrases like false prophet to describe George Morbio and Chris Packham, who have really kind of gulled a whole generation of people in this country into believing all this stuff.
	And it's complete nonsense.
	It's going to take an awfully long time to get the genie back into the bottle.
	Yeah, but the thing is, the step further down the rabbit hole, which you've not taken yet, and I'm desperately trying to steer you down, is this.
	You would not have people like Chris Packham, you know, the sort of autistic weirdo, who's got, I mean, no charm.
	He relays vile, mendacious eco-propaganda.
	He doesn't really understand the ecosystem at all.
	And yet he is the BBC's... What's the programme he does?
	Countryfile.
	With the emphasis on the first syllable.
	Because that's what they are.
	They're a bunch of countryfiles.
	And they put out... Springwatch is his one, yeah.
	Oh, sorry.
	Sorry.
	Well, yeah.
	Okay, right.
	They put out a bunch of green propaganda which has no relation to the actual truth.
	They're promoted by the BBC, which is an organisation which again is on board with the programme, to destroy people like you, to wipe out farmers for class reasons and for even more sinister reasons than that.
	Same with Monbiot.
	Anyway, sorry, I was going to ask you a question about your... I love the way you feed your cows, the way you graze them.
	Presumably that's based on the studies of Alan Savory, isn't it?
	He's the big cheese in this.
	Yes, I mean, yeah, the two kind of gurus, Alan Savory in Africa, who discovered, you know, that you can actually reverse Desertification.
	Everybody of my generation, in geography lessons in school, we're all very worried about desertification.
	I think people are honest about it.
	The planet is getting greener at the moment, but nobody will admit that.
	It's true, mainly because there's a bit more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, ironically.
	But also, he discovered that by doing this mob grazing, you could actually turn things around really quite successfully.
	So he was doing that out in Zimbabwe.
	And then this guy, Gabe Brown, in North Dakota, on the Great Plains in the States, particularly that area that was affected by the Dust Bowl, And he wrote a brilliant book called Dirt to Soil, which is pretty much the Bible now, really, for regenerative farmers like me.
	There's a sort of regenerative farming movement.
	And again, he just said, well, if you don't have enough shit on the ground to provide the sort of glue to to glue the soil together and of course it's going to blow away.
	So he basically said you must integrate, even if you're an arable farmer, you must integrate livestock into your system.
	There's a whole lot of science about all the healthy fungi and bacteria and everything in the soil that actually provides its fertility, which we've forgotten because we've been getting fertility out of a out of a bag, because of the Haber-Bosch process.
	One of the most perhaps unintentionally evil men of the 20th century, Fritz Haber, who also invented poison gas and the gas that they used to kill the Jews in the gas chambers.
	But he also invented making artificial nitrogen.
	Right, right.
	And that was a by-product of what, the Haber-Bosch?
	It was making chlorine, was it?
	Or was that a separate thing?
	Yeah, I think it was probably a separate experiment, that one.
	But yes, I mean, his chemistry has had lasting effects on the world.
	Some of it benign, I guess, because, you know, We've pretty much cracked hunger, I think, haven't we, in the world population?
	There are far fewer famines now and we're producing enough food largely because of his invention actually producing nitrogen.
	But in the long term it's probably not a good thing because the natural fertility in the soil is being Lost, and that's what we're trying to regain.
	Now, I was just looking while you were talking there.
	Yeah, I've got it wrong.
	It's the ammonia production.
	So, as a by-product of ammonia product, they... Yeah, it's ammonium nitrate, yeah.
	Right, yeah.
	So, okay.
	Ammonium nitrate, yeah.
	So they needed ammonia for stuff like making explosives and they discovered that, yes, you can also make nitrogen fertilizer as a by-product, which then became, which sort of took over and became this quick fix, didn't it?
	To sort of enable farmers to cheat rather than using the sort of age-old methods.
	Is that right?
	Yeah.
	It meant that farmers could go away from using fallows, for example, and decent sort of proper crop rotations where you built the fertility naturally by putting it down to grass for a few years before putting it back into crop again.
	So that's the sort of thing we're going back to now, which is better all around really.
	Well, yeah, definitely.
	So, I mean, I was very impressed reading the book and you just reminded me of that moment where you were all ready to give up and then you discovered, you thought, I'm going to take a gamble before I sell my herd and just, I don't know, top myself or whatever you're going to do.
	I'm sure you wouldn't do that.
	No, you were going to give it one last shot and you took this gamble and you, why is it, why is this old-fashioned method more profitable?
	Well I think because it uses far fewer inputs it's far less capital intensive because you're not keeping cattle inside the whole year round so you haven't got to have the same sort of buildings and you're not burning diesel the whole time to cut crops and cart them to cattle and put them in front of the cattle and then take the shit away and put it back on the fields again.
	Which is basically what most farmers are doing.
	You're letting the cow do all that themselves.
	And it does seem to pencil out much better than... I mean, dairy farmers are completely anal about benchmarking everything.
	Measuring everything and analyzing every cost.
	It is a highly efficient system.
	I mean, we're very lucky here to be able to do it at scale.
	I mean, a lot of farmers are really trapped by the size of their holding or the fact that perhaps they've got major roads everywhere and they can't move cattle around easily.
	We're lucky that we can do it that way.
	Ah, so it's not the miracle solution that could transform dairy farming in the UK?
	Well, I think a lot more people could be doing it.
	And actually a lot of people, maybe where you have two struggling farmers killing themselves working 24 hours a day on small farms, they might be better just to go in with their neighbours and amalgamate everything.
	And have one big, big, efficient dairy on a more extensive system that they run together, maybe.
	I mean, actually, my farm here, what we're doing is share farming.
	So my partners are in with me and we share all the profits and losses equally.
	There's no reason why people can't do that.
	But the whole structure of a pattern of land ownership and tenancies and that sort of thing, It's very inflexible in Britain and it's very hard for people to do that.
	It's almost impossible for landowners to get land back if they want to get it back.
	It's very hard for them to expand as well if they want to expand and the politicians sort of entrench this inflexibility unfortunately because they invariably You know what kind of side with the tenants but for understandable reasons but it does mean that most people are stuck with this kind of legacy systems that aren't necessarily very efficient.
	Right.
	That's one of the problems you know everybody thought with Brexit you know with one leap we'd be free, everybody would be able to change what they did.
	Yeah.
	Yes and no.
	We haven't seen any dramatic cuts in regulation yet, which is something that was promised to us but hasn't happened.
	And there are other problems that we're simply not going to go away simply because we are out of the EU.
	Yeah, no, I think it, look, you and I were on opposing sides of the divide.
	I think that Brexit was always, with hindsight, a distraction.
	It was a complete waste of time, just because they never intended to deliver on any of the things that they, they gave us the illusion.
	We Brexiteers, for example, were passionate about Britain's life outside the EU as a kind of Singapore of Europe, a kind of free-booting, deregulated state where free-market capitalism could finally prevail unrestrained by these kind of bureaucratic directives.
	It was absolute bollocks.
	That was never the intention.
	It was always a trap.
	It was designed to divide us.
	So once more you and I are united again.
	We both realise that Brexit was an absolute waste of time.
	I think there have been some good things that have happened with it, but it hasn't delivered all that it promised, certainly.
	On the subject of subsidies, first of all, why has farming reached such a pass over the decades that farmers cannot make a living without subsidies?
	How did that come to be?
	Well, I think partly because If you have a distortion in the market, like a subsidy, then everything else distorts itself to match the subsidy.
	For instance, we British farmers, because everybody knows we get this subsidy, the machinery companies, there aren't that many who make all this big machinery we have on farms now, It charges British farmers a lot more than they charge Kiwi farmers for the same product, simply because they know that we've got the money to pay for it.
	And that sort of thing, you know, just goes across the board, really, because farmers don't have any power in the marketplace, really.
	Even the biggest farmers are price takers rather than price makers in economic terms.
	The supermarkets at one end of the chain and the huge companies that supply things like fertilizer and diesel and all the other things that we need at the other end.
	Just make sure that they extract as much as they can from the value chain, leaving farmers with just enough to Survive.
	So I think actually if you took away the subsidy then everything else would adjust and probably to a large extent farmers would probably end up with pretty similar incomes really.
	Having said that I think there are some parts of the countryside that you know if you want to keep family farms going in places like the Lake District and keep a Beatrix Potter landscape
	and expect people to scratch a living then they need a subsidy and that was in the original Brexit plan drawn up by Owen Paterson at the time.
	He was the Deferred Secretary.
	He was one of the Deferred Secretaries who actually did understand agriculture a bit and so there was going to be this sort of two-tier system of Farmers like me on good land where you should be able to compete on roughly level terms with New Zealand farmers, for example, Australian farmers, they would take away the regulations and allow us to do what we needed to do and we would probably be able to make a living.
	But then other farmers up in the hills just simply couldn't cope without some sort of help.
	And that was a fairly rational plan.
	How you actually sort of execute it in practice would be, I think, quite difficult.
	But the really churlish thing about the Brexit
	post brexit government is that all of that seems to have been forgotten and they haven't they've they've just um they've just quietly been that plan and haven't really you know they've just come up with a few sort of token um schemes which will be very very costly for farmers to implement and extremely costly to the taxpayer for civil servants to umpire um i was always sort of delivering delivering public goods a lot of sort of green stuff that uh
	Some of it's quite good and some of it probably not very good at all actually.
	It's becoming a bit of a dog's breakfast.
	I'd sense that Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng maybe understand this and maybe sort of talking about going back to the drawing board on all of this, which is provoking lots of squawks in Whitehall.
	Which is probably a sign that maybe they've actually put their finger on it, maybe.
	They've rumbled a few vested interests in the bureaucracy that need to be looked at quite closely.
	We'll come on to that a bit later on because I don't believe there's any hope at all.
	I think if you look for salvation from Westminster you don't realise the scale of the problem.
	Tell me, what are the margins on a pint of milk?
	How much does a dairy farmer get of the price?
	What are we paying in the supermarket at the moment for a litre?
	I'll tell you what we're getting at the moment for our milk is about 55p a litre, which is, you know, we can make money at that.
	And I guess it's, what is it, being sold in the supermarket for about a quid or something.
	I mean, there's very little you have to do to milk apart from pasteurise it, which is the Which actually you don't need to do.
	We drink our own milk, unpasteurised.
	Jamie, I would... I've been dying to get hold of some milk which is not pasteurised.
	I love unpasteurised milk.
	I mean, why they made it illegal, I do not know.
	Well, I think because back in the day, you know, we didn't have the same sort of hygiene and there were nasty things like brucellosis and TB and that sort of thing around and it probably made sense to pasteurise it.
	But now, All our milk gets tested to death for every sort of possible hazard, and I think it probably is probably healthier actually to drink unpasteurized milk.
	But anyway, the rules say it has to be pasteurized, so the actual raw... I mean, our milk actually goes for cheese all of it anyway, but... Does it?
	Because it's high butterfat, high protein, but the...
	Your average white water that ends up on the supermarket shelf probably skimmed, which is another mistake.
	All they're doing, actually, is pasteurizing it and shoving it in a plastic bottle, which is, again, something they shouldn't be doing, and putting it on a shelf.
	But the distribution chain in this country, the supermarkets, have huge margins, which for very little risk, and farmers have huge risks and generally fairly small margins on most things.
	Is the supermarket milk sort of... well, two questions here.
	First of all, I've always thought skim milk is bad, but why is it bad?
	What do they do to it?
	Well, simply because Most of us are short of fat in our diets and it comes back to this demonization of fat.
	They failed to demonize sugar, which I think we all know is bad for us.
	It rots our teeth and also rots everything else in our bodies, including our brains and our intestines.
	So they've failed to do that and they've, for some bizarre reason, it all goes back to this chap Ansel Keys in the States, they've demonised fat and so your average British housewife, I'm sounding rather patronising here, but it's probably true that most consumers think that it's healthier to drink skim milk than full fat milk when when actually the opposite is the case
	because you you you you need fat in your in your diet more than you need carbohydrates or or anything else really i'll tell you what jamie whenever i go to people's houses um people who should know better particularly and and they offer me a cup of tea and they try and give me they they put that sort of uh the white piss in my tea you because it's got it's semi-skimmed and i just instantly mark them down several points i'm thinking you
	you're you're a gullible you're a gullible idiot you bought into this answer pieces lie uh it's not nice it doesn't like you've got to use a lot extra to make your tea properly milky because it's basically water the the other thing about i was some i once met this amazing woman um who introduced him to the idea that vaccines are really bad which which they are um and she had she had not given her child
	any of the um any of the the the jabs that they they force you to have when you're when you know the the mmr and stuff and he was really really healthy because he was But another interesting thing she told me, she travelled a lot, and she said whenever you go abroad, If you want to avoid all the nasty bugs that are going around, if you want to avoid getting stomach bugs and stuff, find some milk from a local cow, some raw milk, and drink that milk.
	And that milk will prepare your immune system, your whatever, your flora and stuff, with all the necessary things to not get the local diseases.
	Have you heard this?
	No, but it makes sense.
	I'm not by any means a scientist, but I think the gut is what provides our immune system and it's all about having the right bugs in it.
	And actually the food that we eat should really ideally be coming from soil that has all the right bugs in it as well.
	I mean, there's this great sort of scientific result.
	It's not really a theory.
	I think it's actually fact that we're the first generation in history to be overfed and undernourished because the nourishment, the nutrition that we get from modern food is not nearly as good as it used to be because of soil health.
	If you drink the milk from a farm where the soil is healthy and drink it from where it isn't, the nutrients are going to be very different.
	Having the right things in your gut makes a huge difference to your health.
	I'm sure that's right.
	And of course antibiotics kill things in your gut and probiotics put them back in there.
	Oh yes, do you use antibiotics on your calves?
	Well not unless we absolutely have to because it's very expensive.
	There's the expense of buying the antibiotic, there's also the labour expense of actually You know, pulling out the cow and putting it through the crush and jabbing it or whatever.
	I mean, we will definitely treat them if we have to and we will use antibiotics definitely if there's a problem.
	But, I mean, actually our cows on the whole or cows in pasture fed systems tend to be a lot healthier than the ones that are kept inside anyway.
	Right.
	You know, they pick up much less disease or bacteria outside the fields than they would in a shed.
	I became quite a fan of ivermectin during the fake pandemic because I thought that this was a much more effective prophylactic and treatment for so-called COVID.
	Lots of people were having great success.
	But I understand, as you know, it's a kind of standard dewormer used throughout the farming industry.
	It's a wormer?
	Yeah, okay.
	Yeah, it would appear you have worms anyway, James, definitely.
	Well, yeah, but somebody told me, maybe it was you, maybe you wrote this article, somebody else did, that they'd noticed that since the widespread use of ivermectin, there were far fewer insects in cow pats, and this was becoming a real problem.
	Do you know anything about this?
	Yeah, yeah, I mean, I would It almost goes as far as to ban ivermectins because they're a wormer so they kill all the bugs in the cow's stomach and that means that the cowpat is completely sterile.
	When you walk around in the countryside you come across these cowpats that are like made of concrete almost.
	They've been there months They've gone all grey and white.
	A healthy cowpat should have lots of holes in it, where all the beetles and things have been in there.
	Ivermectins kill all the bugs in the cowpat, so there are therefore no insects.
	And I suspect that over time that it also means that the soil doesn't have all the right bacteria in as well.
	And of course, inevitably, all these things get into water courses and probably do damage to rivers as well.
	So, on that basis, I wouldn't recommend anybody takes it themselves.
	I mean, obviously, you have to work If a cow is really stricken with worms, or particularly actually with fluke, which is something you definitely have to treat, then you've got to do something about it, purely from a welfare point of view.
	But actually, if you rotate the pastures, keep moving animals, it's not just cattle, it's sheep, horses, whatever, then you won't get too many worms in the The animals build up a natural immunity.
	They can cope with a certain level of worms because that's natural.
	What they can't cope with is too many worms and then they get sick.
	Then you have to use ivermectin.
	There are plants that kill worms naturally.
	They're called anthelmintic plants.
	Chickery is one.
	There are a whole lot of them.
	Wormwood?
	Farmers should go back to planting those.
	In pastures, which would help to keep the worm burdens down, I think.
	Oh, black walnut, apparently.
	That's really good for worms.
	I only know this because I was recently on an anti-worm protocol.
	And one of them is Artemisia wormwood.
	Another one is black walnut.
	And cloves!
	Yeah.
	That's supposed to kill them off.
	Yeah, well these are all things that our ancestors knew, but we've just done the lazy approach with chemicals.
	Well, you say lazy.
	I mean, I'm sure that's true to a degree, but I'm not sure that this is not deliberate.
	Look, I'm looking at a picture of Fritz Haber, and I have to say, he looks like an absolute Nazi bastard.
	He looks like he lives in a castle, he's got children chained in the basement ready to harvest their adrenochrome.
	He looks really dodgy.
	I can't imagine he was a good man.
	Well, yeah, tragic story.
	I think he's, I think I'm right in saying his wife committed suicide because she was so ashamed of what he'd done inventing poison gas.
	She was a chemist as well.
	Yeah, it wouldn't surprise me.
	I think he's a, yeah, he's a shit.
	And we can say that safely without fear of libel because he's long dead.
	And anyway, it's true.
	What about, have you got beef cattle as well?
	Not anymore, no.
	I sold my lovely herd of beef cattle to go into the dairy.
	Ironically, we actually produce more beef now from the dairy herd than we ever did before when we had beef cows, simply because we've got a lot more cattle.
	We're growing more grass and producing more meat from them.
	The cows themselves, once they They are culled for whatever reason, normally about the age of probably eight years old, so they've had a good life.
	Unfortunately, they go into the food chain, and the calves also.
	The girls we keep, and they become dairy cows, and the boys all are generally beef-bred, so they're sired by an Angus, generally, Aberdeen Angus, and they They go off and become beef cattle and they will end up as steaks or whatever.
	We've got so clever now in farming that we invented artificial insemination a long time ago.
	This is getting really basic now, but we're able to do clever things with semen.
	getting really basic now, but we're able to do clever things with semen.
	So you can buy sex semen, which is over probably 90% plus efficient, that you can guarantee that the calf is going to be one sex or the other.
	So all our heifer calves are dairy bred and become dairy cows and all our bull calves, or nearly all of them, are Aberdeen Angus bred and they make probably good beef cattle to go into the into the beef system and we we we sell them at the moment we sell them as as calves and then somebody else goes and you know rears them and then you know they'll get slaughtered uh so there's no waste
	you know come from a beef and it's not it's not inferior meat I mean, is this proper good quality?
	Because even though it's a byproduct of the dairy process, it's still proper, like, juicy.
	No, it's good quality.
	And actually, because our cattle are quite, they're not these sort of great sort of angular, lean looking Holsteins.
	Ours are quite sort of stubby, stocky looking.
	I mean do you eat it?
	Aussies um you know they they produce quite if you cross them with a a beef ball they produce quite a stocky looking beef animal that then you know produces some quite good cuts with enough fat on it and that sort of thing I mean do you eat it is that is that is that your where your steak comes from yeah all right okay cool yeah Yeah, we do.
	Every now and again we kill one for the freezer.
	We haven't for a bit.
	I'm very worried.
	I don't know whether you've ever heard of somebody called Ice Age Pharma, but Ice Age Pharma has been documenting the global war on agriculture.
	And it seems very clear to me, this may sound extravagant to you, but I think the evidence demonstrates it unequivocally, that what we are witnessing right now is the beginning of a deliberately orchestrated global famine, that the war on farmers is being conducted in every country.
	And, well, clearly I'm thinking specifically about our own country.
	Do you know what percentage we are self-sufficient and how much we have to import, first of all?
	Well, it's about 50% of all food.
	The figure that often gets quoted is the higher figure of the food that we can produce ourselves, which excludes things like bananas and tropical foods.
	And that's I think that's higher.
	I can't remember the exact figure.
	I've written a lot, as you know, in the book about food security and I did it red rag to a bull.
	A lot of that, I'm pleased to say, with help from Vlad the Bad and various other factors, a lot of that has come to pass.
	We had a very narrow escape during Covid.
	If you remember, there were several weeks when the shelves in the supermarkets were looking very empty.
	There was a bit of a crisis and ironically, because of Brexit, we were saved by the EU.
	If the EU had been real shits about it, They could have said, well, sod Britain.
	You know, we think it's a good thing to close borders so that lorry drivers don't go across to the UK and bring back Covid.
	We'll just, you know, we'll let them starve.
	And we would have come pretty close to starving, I think, for a few months.
	I mean, it's only really because the UK is a land bridge to Ireland.
	And the Irish wouldn't have put up with that.
	They didn't just sort of close the gates at Calais and say, right, we don't want Covid, thanks very much, so we're not going to trade with you anymore.
	Also, I suppose it would have hurt their own economies quite a lot as well.
	It's possible why they didn't do it.
	But it just went to demonstrate that we're so reliant in this country on Vegetables grown in glass houses in the Netherlands or in Spain, we've allowed our agriculture to become completely hollowed out really.
	We're not even self-sufficient in dairy products.
	We're only about 50% self-sufficient in dairy products, which is something that in this country we can actually do really well.
	It rains a lot, we grow good grass.
	And then so that was during Covid there was a big wake-up call and then obviously Ukraine has been another wake-up call where suddenly the price of wheat went whistling up to 300 quid a tonne.
	Actually in historical terms it's not the spike that most commentators think it is because if it went back to where it was in the 1973 Oil spike when all the commodities went sky-high, it would be £1,600 a tonne.
	And people really would be talking about a cost-of-living crisis if that happened.
	But anyway, I think the whole narrative that was in Whitehall, do you remember there was that chap, Dr Tim Lunig, who was some sort of Whitehall Mandarin working in the treasury, I think, who said, oh, we don't we can be like Singapore.
	We don't need our own agricultural base in this country or we just buy it in from wherever it's cheapest.
	And it was delicious that he used Singapore as an example, because, of course, in 1942, when the Japs went steaming into Singapore, I mean, the garrison had to surrender really quickly because, I mean, they would have starved.
	It's funny that he used that example because we are an island and therefore very vulnerable and as warfare gets more and more sophisticated with drones or whatever, at some point we might find ourselves back in a 1940s situation when we thought, we're reliant on
	Atlantic convoys to keep us going.
	So I think suddenly in Whitehall, because of these two shocks with Covid and with Ukraine, the whole narrative about we don't need food security has been pretty much buried because I think the population sees through it, which is
	Maybe part of our salvation, because as you say, whether it's groupthink or a conspiracy or a bit of both, there is this World Economic Forum doctrine, which I know you've been itching to talk about, which does manifest itself in all sorts of ways with people in really quite surprising places.
	I think probably including in the Tory cabinet, but certainly in the Labour Party and lots of
	Lots of politicians, lots of I guess maybe journalists probably as well, certainly broadcasters in the BBC seem to be pretty much sold on all this and would love to see us all give up farming and subsisting on this sort of gloop lab food that they think that they can all feed us on in
	You know, regretting factories, which is really a bizarre idea, particularly when you come back to the whole idea of nutrition and the idea of nourishment and needing the good nutrients coming out of healthy soil via animals and particularly through animal fats.
	And that again is something that's underpinning veganism.
	Sure.
	And this weird idea that suddenly we just wild everything, we all live in, there's no countryside because it just becomes a wilderness and we all live in blocks of flats and subsist on lamb food.
	And it's really, it's like a James Bond film, isn't it?
	We haven't got Stavro Bloefeld, we've got Whatever it's called.
	Klaus Schwab.
	With all these weird ideas and I guess, you know, being a farmer and a bit of a journalist on the side as well, I'm kind of interested in this stuff and I'm sort of writing about it.
	But it's remarkable how people don't want to talk about it in the mainstream media, as you have found.
	By design, Jamie.
	Because the mainstream media are also part of the problem.
	I mean, you're still dependent for part of your living on the articles you manage to place in The Telegraph, but I can tell you that The Telegraph and The Mail and the BBC, they are all part of the problem, because they are all on board with this, what you think of as a conspiracy theory.
	Klaus Schwab... I think it's partly Partly groupthink and partly conspiracy.
	I think when we last spoke I was a lot more sceptical about it all than I am now.
	What really spooks me is when, for example, during Covid, when it was probably obvious to those of us on the right that those
	on the left and lots of people who we who we were thought were on the right but actually proved to be on the left um you know suddenly embraced all these lockdowns so enthusiastic and honest but what's what really you know it was what was really weird is when this woman uh Devi Sridhar suddenly popped up in Edinburgh uh advising Nicola Sturgeon as her sort of minder
	On Covid, without having any qualifications or whatever to do that, she was actually an anthropologist who happened to have been given a chair in Edinburgh University to teach students anthropology.
	But surprise, surprise, she'd come straight from the World Economic Forum Global Leader Programme via the Clinton's office to Nicola Sturgeon's Sort of out of office, or in our office, really.
	And it was things like that happening that you maybe think, OK, yeah, these things are happening that shouldn't be happening.
	And surprise, surprise, the only people who are talking about it are people on, you know, on Twitter or whatever.
	It's not, you know, leaders in newspapers saying we must beware of fifth columnists from Weird supranational organizations preaching dodgy stuff.
	So yeah, I think I'm with you on a lot of this stuff.
	Look, I'm really not patronising you here because I'm very much in the same boat where I was, but it's very hard.
	You've been reared in a system, you know, you were in the army, you went to a very posh Private school.
	You rub shoulders with hunting, shooting, fishing folk.
	These people are inclined to believe in the paradigm.
	They sort of read the telegraph and they believe what they say in it, because why not?
	They believe in the system, they believe in the monarchy, all these things.
	They've had no reason hitherto to ...to consider the horrible possibility that everything they know is a lie, and that the people that they think of as being in charge, you know, their elected officials, their government ministers, are actually just puppets of this... of this...
	much narrower, a much more wicked global elite.
	And it's not just the World Economic Forum.
	Klaus Schwab was the bag carrier for Henry Kissinger.
	He was selected by Henry Kissinger, who himself is the bag carrier for these higher-ups, many of whose names we don't know.
	But as a thought experiment, I want you to look back on what's been happening to agriculture in our country and around the world and view it through the light of a conspiracy theory.
	So, for example, you mentioned that chap in the 1970s who wanted Britain not to be self-sufficient anymore.
	Now, Suppose you were an evil member of the predator class, as I call them, and you wanted to weaken sovereign states and create a new world order, a sort of new global government.
	One of the first things you would do is to stop countries being self-sufficient.
	You would force them to be dependent on a supply chain which could easily be shut down at any moment, wouldn't you?
	You would also want the populace to be weakened by lack of meat.
	Meat, we know, is really important for health.
	So you would wage a war on meat by promoting veganism, by all manner of things, by advertising breakfast cereals like the Seven Day Adventists used to do.
	Once you view the war on agriculture through the prism of a war by the elites on the people, foot and mouth for example, wasn't that a dry run for Covid?
	It was using animals instead of humans.
	I mean, do you trust the foot-and-mouth narrative?
	Do you think it was really necessary to destroy herds on a massive scale?
	I mean, it's never been done before, I don't think.
	I don't think farmers' private property had been destroyed like that by the forces of the state.
	No, it had each time.
	The same thing happened in the 60s.
	So maybe the war goes back further.
	Well, I think where I perhaps differ from you is that I'm not sure to what extent all these things, which I agree a lot of them are not just coincidences, but I'm not sure how they necessarily fit into a sort of grand plan of this sort of global domination or whatever it is.
	But there is no doubt that there are multiple conspiracies.
	Some of them are just quite simple to see the motive and the cause and effect.
	The Kellogg family of Seventh-day Adventists had a weird thing about wanting people to stop having sex and therefore they wanted to feed the world cornflakes to destroy their libido.
	And the globalists who just thought they would make a fast buck out of taking down the meat industry on the back of this false narrative about methane
	You know because because quite simply that there is For somebody, you know some billionaire in Texas or wherever It's quite easy to see that there is not very much margin in meat But there is a massive margin in plant-based gloop and so there is this that's so there's a huge commercial incentive there and
	um purely around the margin really to uh to support this this narrative that meat is bad and plant-based is good and so and so i think i think there's a sort of you know there's a whole sort of network of of lots of different conspiracies all of which have been speeded up by communications by by the internet by television by by
	You know, the fact that almost everybody now in the world is in some way sort of connected through their phones or whatever and actually their likes and dislikes and needs and things can be harvested by data and by unscrupulous people and sold to other unscrupulous people to try and, you know, flog them stuff.
	So, you know, I think, you know, Maybe there is.
	It's a bit like whether you actually believe in the devil as sort of coordinating all the bad in the world, or whether you just believe there are just loads of bad people in the world doing bad stuff, and that they're not part of a huge, great, big, bad plan.
	I think you can only understand the world.
	It's diabolical.
	It's a diabolical project.
	I tell you what, the world makes so much more sense when you understand because a lot of the things that we've been talking about make absolutely no sense except that they are the workings of a diabolical imagination bent on immiserating us and killing us.
	I mean that's what it's about.
	Well it's certainly very misanthropic I mean, there's no doubt about that.
	People like George Monbiot and Chris Packham, for whatever reason, as far as I can see, absolutely hate people.
	Yes, they do.
	I mean, they want the world to go back to being the Garden of Eden, with Adam and Eve shut up in a hutch somewhere, being fed lab food through the bars.
	But I mean, I'm not sure.
	I think that's just them.
	I'm not sure that's the fact that they're being manipulated by somebody somewhere in a James Bond set sort of island in space or something that's manipulating everything.
	But it's definitely going on.
	What I find interesting and I try to explore in my writing is how ordinary people like me and my neighbours, struggling away against the elements and all the things that have affected farmers since the world began, are suddenly Affected by this new threat that never happened before.
	I mean, we've been hunting for 20 millennia, I think, haven't we?
	And ours is the first generation to be told we can't hunt, you know, with Blair's ridiculous hunting act.
	And we've been farming livestock for 12 millennia.
	And ours is the first generation to be told that we're evil for Keeping cattle and sheep and producing meat and milk.
	And so, you talked about paradigms a moment ago.
	I mean, yeah, this is probably the biggest paradigm shift of all time, certainly in the countryside as far as we're concerned.
	I mean, my grandfather, you know, would have moaned about the weather and prices and crop failures and all sorts of things, but He never had to contend with all the list of stuff.
	Although, interestingly enough, he did spend a lot of his time fighting against communism behind the scenes.
	He was involved with an organization called Common Cause that worked with trade unions to try and defeat communist infiltration into the public sector.
	So maybe that's where I get some of this from in my desire to try to fight against this.
	But I think that was just good old-fashioned communism, you know, from 1917 onwards, you know, and some of the Communist Party of Great Britain and all the rest of it.
	But of course, they're now much more dangerous because they've morphed into the Green parties and Extinction Rebellion, and they're no longer really tackling capitalism Head on.
	They're doing it obliquely through destroying the livelihoods of people like me by trying to bring down parts of the capitalist system but specifically really in the countryside actually.
	They're no longer really that bothered about factories and things I don't think anymore.
	Do you think that I mean, look, I can tell you things are going to get much worse.
	We're going to have serious food shortages.
	We're going to have riots.
	We're going to have all manner of things.
	How quickly could this country ramp up food production?
	I mean, we're going to be hamstrung by things like the fertilizer shortages, aren't we, and things like that.
	But what could be done to scale up food production quickly to deal with the starving populace?
	Well, I think one of the interesting things about this laboratory food, which I am against that, but I mean, we now have things like insect farming and things like that.
	Technology has moved on.
	So, I mean, one of the interesting things is that Malthus, you know, the Malthusian theory of 1796 or whatever it was,
	is is is dead in the water now because we we can i mean technology does allow us to if push came to shove to to literally produce food out of thin air really and with it with these extraordinary sort of proteins how quickly could we i mean i mean real i guess i guess that's quick
	I guess as quickly as we ramped up production of ammunition and weapons and things at the beginning of the two world wars.
	I mean, I'm talking about that sort of speed, I guess.
	But also, I mean, I think this insect farming is fascinating.
	I'm not necessarily against that.
	I'm not terribly keen on It's bad for you.
	They've got parasites in them.
	It's a complete nonsense.
	But I think what they can do, for example, I mean, we do have an awful lot of food that goes to landfill in this country, which is a complete waste.
	We used to, if you remember, we used to feed it to pigs.
	Even in towns, every house that had a garden probably had a pigsty at the back of it and all their swill and rubbish and everything would be recycled through the pig and that produced the food.
	More recently, during our lifetimes, there used to be bin men who used to go around the doors outside hotel kitchens in London and collect up all the swill and take it to feed to pig farms in Essex.
	Well you can't do that anymore because we had a foot and mouth epidemic that buggered up the economy for quite a long time and closed down the countryside and affected the tourism industry and all of a sudden because of feeding swill to pigs that hadn't been properly heated up.
	If it had been heated up it wouldn't have happened.
	But what you could do very easily is Feed all of this.
	Put a complete ban on food waste going into landfill.
	Make everybody put it into bins to get closer.
	And feed it to insects, which can then be ground down and turned into fish meal.
	So you're no longer raping the oceans of krill and things like that, which are destroying wild salmon and other fish.
	So you would say to the salmon farms, right, okay, well, if you want to stay in business, you must just feed manufactured insects or reared insects to the fish instead of raping the oceans.
	And you could also feed it quite safely, I'm sure, to poultry and to pigs.
	And that actually would go some way to producing affordable Food, which must be something that every politician should want to do.
	But they haven't really, and I think they are starting to think in that direction, but they'll be pretty slow on the uptake.
	They're not.
	Maybe, as you say, because they're not really, they're maybe not that bothered about it.
	I don't know.
	They're part of the problem.
	They're just stooges.
	So, well, you haven't really reassured me that, because I'm not sure that the inset thing is my, well, I don't think it's even viable.
	Well, I mean, what I'm saying is that there are these new technologies Around that we're not, we're not around, for example, in 1939, when we really were reliant on tens of spam coming across the Atlantic.
	I mean, I'm sure we would, you know, we would definitely still face a real crisis and have to have food.
	We did have food rationing during, as I write in the book, we did have food rationing during COVID, but it wasn't called that because now that there was such a cartel
	I can't remember the exact statistic I quoted but something like half a dozen supermarkets are selling us 80% of our food or something and so the government just outsourced the problem to them and said look well you've got to do the rationing and so all this business about only old people and NHS workers can buy food during these hours and
	Certain things not being on the shelves and certain whole lines being withdrawn.
	I mean, a friend of mine who has a trout farm, suddenly, with no conversation, the supermarkets turned around and said, well, we're not going to do trout anymore because, you know, it's Covid and we're going to concentrate on fewer lines.
	And this was rationing.
	What?
	But so, you know, and this was rationing.
	The R word wasn't used in the media as much as it should have been, really, because it was what we had for really quite long periods during COVID because there was not enough food in the country to feed everybody.
	So it was just rationed to make sure that it was by time to make sure that they could bring in more food from the continent and all the other things they needed to do.
	Have you got arable?
	I've got some arable still.
	We've changed the way we do things a bit, but we're just harvesting the last of our spuds today, the last of this year's crop of spuds.
	OK.
	The thing that's worrying me there is that, thanks to all the subsidies we mentioned earlier, is not UK farming, in fact global farming, so dependent on fertiliser because the soil's been depleted?
	And yet, fertiliser prices have gone through the roof.
	What have they done?
	Are they double, treble?
	So, we haven't got any fertiliser, so how could we ramp up agricultural production at a time when we've actually got less fertiliser than before?
	How do you do that?
	You can't suddenly sort of go organic in the space of a... Well, I mean this chap Gabe Brown in the States actually would say that Regenerative agriculture is a win-win.
	People like Monbiot are very dismissive of it.
	You hear politicians kind of dissing it as well because it doesn't fit their narrative.
	To them it's binary.
	You're either a horrible evil farmer raping the land or your Charlie Burrell and his wife Isabella Tree doing this wonderful stuff down at NEP with the wilding.
	They simply can't accept that there's a middle ground in it which is ironic because even the Burrells actually would say that they are farming but just not so intensively.
	I mean they've still got cattle which they're In fact, they make a point of saying that their cattle and their pigs that they're rooting around in their woods are the driver of their wonderful ecosystem that they have now, but they're also just farming them intensively.
	They're selling them in their farm shop.
	Most of us now are trying to find somewhere in the middle, really.
	We're still producing lots of food, but we're doing it in a way that is Much more nature-friendly.
	And Gabe Brown argues that his yields have actually, you know, with a lot less chemicals, that his yields have gone up eventually, once you get your soil to a good condition.
	It's that word, eventually.
	Yeah, but not, I mean, over a few years.
	We're talking years rather than decades.
	Yeah, but we'll starve then.
	Well, the other scandalous thing that happened is that during the Second World War, for example, we ramped up our fertilizer production.
	We were dependent on ammonium nitrate and we whacked up the production.
	What really What buggered things up when Putin went steaming into Ukraine and suddenly there was a lot less fertilizer around, was that it transpired that we'd been asleep at the wheel and allowed our own domestic fertilizer production to dwindle down to virtually nothing.
	And that was really the problem.
	I mean, it can be produced anywhere.
	There was a plant, and we are an oil producing nation, and there was a plant on the east coast that was producing fertilizer, nitrogen, and it had closed down just before all this happened because the American company that owned it said to the government, well, you know, we, I can't remember exactly what the story was, but I have actually written about it in a telegraph, but
	But, you know, it's not economical for us to carry on doing this unless you buy us a subsidy.
	We're going to close it.
	The government said no, close it.
	So they closed it and then, bingo, suddenly we can't import any nitrogen and we've just given up our own production in this country.
	So, I mean, these are the sort of strategic issues that I don't necessarily blame politicians because, you know, they
	you know they're kind of across their brief as much as they can be in the you know they might have been in post for a few months and have known absolutely bugger all about agriculture before they got there but these are the sort of strategic issues that white or mandarins are supposed to understand and and do something about and make sure that if you know that they stop politicians making bad decisions and that they do
	maintained a sort of agricultural industrial base in this country so the push comes to shove it's still there and and when when it did come to shove it wasn't there so and i think it does come back to this naive belief in globalism that rather than subsidize those horrible landowners
	to produce food or whatever it is that you should just buy it in from wherever you can get it cheapest on the planet.
	I hope that that thinking has been kind of reappraised slightly in the last few months.
	There should be public inquiries into why our agricultural base and our industrial base in terms of the fertilizer was so badly prepared for these two massive shocks that we've had in the last three years.
	Yes, I'm sensing that you are further down the rabbit hole than you were last time we spoke.
	Yeah, and I think actually, I mean the thing about books is You're always looking slightly in the rear view mirror because obviously they take a while to write and publish.
	I think the last bit of material that I wrote in Land of Milk and Honey was well over a year ago.
	I've done a lot more research and thought more deeply about a lot of these things.
	So my next book, if I write another one, probably will actually contain a lot more of this sort of stuff.
	And also my farming career has changed quite a lot and keeps changing.
	Well, I mean, I'm really glad you've stuck at it.
	Out of interest, have you ever met any farmers, any of your fellow farmers who are where I am, who recognise, as I would say it, that what is going on is deliberate, orchestrated and psychopathic?
	Or are they all kind of where you are, although it's kind of a mixture of cock-up and...?
	I think most of them are probably right.
	If I'm honest, probably where I am, or probably a lot less aware, really.
	I mean, the thing about farming, a lot of it is just down to time, really.
	My change, which I've written about in the book, from going from being a very hands-on beef farmer to being, if I'm honest, quite a hands-off dairy farmer, because dairying requires really quite a big team.
	manager who can kind of be on it day to day in a way that I wouldn't at my age have the energy or probably the technical ability to be.
	So although I make the big calls here now and I'm kind of involved day to day and like to see what's going on and sort of probably to everybody's irritation sort of interfere with things but as the sort of Chairman rather than as the kind of operations manager which I was really as well as being the chairman before.
	And that's given me a lot more time to do the journalism and the writing and actually a bit of broadcasting now and be on GB News from time to time, all this kind of thing.
	And partly for that reason, partly out of interest.
	I've done a lot more reading and researching and so I've probably broadened my outlook a lot more
	than it was a few years ago when I was spending my whole time looking for cattle passports or filling in forms for civil servants or unloading lorries full of fertilizer bags or just trying to deal with whichever wolf was closest to the sledge and that pretty much for most people is what farming is.
	It's a Wonderful way of life, a wonderful way to live in many ways.
	But it's a terrible grindstone as well for a lot of people.
	And I think part of the tragedy of all this is that there are, as I said, one farmer a week commits suicide.
	And there will be many, many more who are dealing with terrible mental illness brought about by the stress of what they're doing.
	And they simply haven't got time to To think about what's going on behind the scenes.
	If they read a newspaper at all, it would probably be the local newspaper, just to catch up on local information.
	And they will read the farming press, because that contains information they need about prices and that sort of thing.
	And if they have time to turn on the television at all, they'll probably just to see the weather.
	They certainly won't bother with something like Countryfile or Springwatch because it makes them very angry.
	And so the tragedy is that, you know, there they are and all this is all happening to them from above and they just haven't got the time to be To be aware of it, really, a lot of them, I think, probably.
	And it's a weird situation to be in, because as I said, you know, we've been, for by on, well, 12 up to 20 millennia, we've been doing stuff with animals and crops and things, and we've had to worry about the weather and things like that, but we've never had to, and we've always liked to think that the government Get that the government has our back.
	But we're now, you know, for the last few decades, we've really had to worry about the government stabbing us in the back, quite honestly.
	Yes.
	You know, we've had, I mean, within the United Kingdom, in Northern Ireland, the assembly there suddenly came up with this weird plan that all the farmers were going to have to get rid of half their livestock and it was all going to have to change because of net zero and all this.
	And these are existential threats to livelihoods being brought about by governments in a way that never happened before in history, as far as I know.
	Absolutely.
	I was just thinking of one of the psalms I learned, when it talks about that our garners may be full, affording all manner of store, that our sheep may bring forth thousands and ten thousands in our streets, that our oxen may be strong to labour, that there be no breaking in nor going out.
	Meat-eating and the cycle of food production is intrinsic to what it is to be a human, and this goes back generations and generations.
	It's very deep in our culture as well, yeah.
	Understandably so, given that without food we die.
	And now we seem to have reached this weird, weird place in history where I would consider this predatory elite, which views us as useless eaters, has finally brought us to a pass where they can deny us the meat and food that we need.
	It's extraordinary.
	The stuff of life.
	It's not just food.
	Yeah, and it's not just food.
	I mean, you know, we've got this situation now where the Scottish government this week brought in a rent freeze.
	And, okay, I declare a vested interest.
	You know, we left properties and all the rest of it.
	But I just remember what happened in the 70s when there were rent free.
	Rent controls were brought in in 1915 in this country.
	Surprise, surprise on the back of a crisis in the First World War, you know, worries about inflation and cost of living crisis and the rest of it.
	And they didn't, they didn't, they didn't go.
	This temporary measure didn't go until Mrs. Thatcher came along in 1979.
	And at some time, I think it was, might have been 80 or might have been in the early 80s, she got, got rid of rent controls.
	And wherever rent controls have, have happened, they've been a disaster.
	And I just think the really wicked thing about it is that the politicians in Scotland know very well that it's likely to end in tears.
	And they're just deliberately trying to milk votes from gullible people who are tenants who think, wonderful, I've got a rent freeze.
	But at the same time, the people who are really going to be hurting are the people who are simply not going to get Housing now, as a result of this, as a result of private landlords withdrawing from the market and homelessness.
	Shelter, the charity, said, look, please think about the unintended consequences here.
	You might have thought that they would be siding with tenants and thinking this was a good thing.
	They were not.
	And the politicians just did it deliberately because they They have this wicked idea in Scotland that if everybody is broadly happy with their lot, then they're not going to vote for change.
	They're not going to vote for independence.
	If they're completely miserable and everything is going wrong, and Scotland is the drug deaths capital of Europe, which it is, and there's rampant homelessness and misery everywhere, People are more likely to vote for independence because they think if we vote for independence everything will be different and with one leap we're going to be free.
	Some of these politicians, a lot of them are very stupid but some of them are not stupid and they are just deliberately doing this knowing that it's going to cause Great hardship, but it will further their electoral chances.
	Yeah, they're basically revolutionary communists and one of the guiding mottos of revolutionary communists is worse is better.
	You need that period of chaos Well, as you say, so that people are desperate for change.
	That's what it's all about.
	So yeah, it doesn't surprise me.
	By the way, I don't know whether you've ever... I've got on my bookshelves a fantastic book, which I've only dipped into, called Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell.
	And pretty much the first chapter is about why rent controls do not work and never have worked.
	Or rather, they always achieve the opposite of the effect intended.
	It makes everyone more miserable.
	So yeah, I'm with you on that one.
	I'd better look at that before I write any more about it.
	Oh, it's great.
	It's really good.
	Thomas Sowell, S-O-W-E-L-L, Basic Economics.
	OK.
	I didn't have the advantage of going to Oxford like you, James, you see, so I'm having to educate myself.
	It's not an advantage, I can tell you.
	Pretty much everyone who attended... I'm sure that's right.
	It's designed to train the people on the lower rungs of the evil elite which rule the world, or rather misrule the world, and it's not...
	I don't, I look back now, I wonder how I survived intact, because actually it's not designed to enable you to kind of think freely and critically, it's designed to make you an effective part of the evil, you know, the beast system.
	So yeah, there we are.
	Jamie, I hope next time we talk that you will be even further down the rabbit hole and that I've red-pilled you.
	But I totally understand your point about farmers not really having time to, when they're firefighting with the weather and so on, and all the inspectors and whatever, they haven't got time to go trawling around the internet on conspiracy theory sites explaining the truth.
	So there we are.
	Where can people buy your books?
	Tell us the name of your books again and where they can find you.
	Well, this one's called Land of Milk and Honey and the last one which we did discuss in the last podcast we did together was called Red Rag to a Bull, Rural Life in an Urban Age.
	I'm hoping that one day, if I get around to it, they might form a trilogy that will give future generations an idea of what was going on.
	Because unfortunately, the victors, if they do win, will write the history.
	My books might even have been banned, actually.
	They will.
	But at least I hope I've given an honest account of, you know, just the kind of, I mean, there's a whole genre of countryside books, isn't there?
	And, you know, I sort of go back to people like A.G.
	Street and Adrian Burland, and before that, William Cobbett and people like that.
	And I think it's important for books like mine to be very much of their time and of their place.
	And just give an idea of the kind of things that landowners were discussing at lunch parties and dinner parties and things that were preoccupying us as well as all the sort of nature writing stuff and the actual descriptions of farming life that are so important I think to these sort of books really and connect people with the
	Unfortunately a lot of people see the countryside through the prism of the BBC, through Springwatch and that sort of thing.
	So to a certain extent I'm trying to redress the balance a bit and tell things as they are, or at least as I see them.
	I suppose I was encouraged by my publisher to write polemically, And so, yeah, I am on a bit of a mission to reverse various things like the ban on hunting and try and reverse the trend towards veganism.
	And, of course, what we haven't discussed is Scottish separatism and the whole issue of the breakup of the United Kingdom.
	Yeah.
	Which I've written about as well.
	Yeah, we're fighting a war on many fronts, Jamie, and it's worse than you think.
	Anyway, on that cheery note... It always cheers me up talking to you, James.
	Yeah, well, listen, I'm going to be going out.
	I think it's the first meet at the end of this month, and I'm figuring... Great!
	Yeah, yeah, I'm figuring that, hell, it's best to die in the saddle than it is to be, you know, killed by marauding gangs, starving, when the Holodomor begins.
	A short life in a saddle is better than a long life by the hearth, James.
	Yeah, bloody right.
	Okay.
	Well, it only remains to thank my dear viewers and listeners.
	Do please feel free to support me on Patreon, on Subscribestar, on Locals and Substack.
	I really appreciate your support.
	It helps me greatly.
	Jamie, thank you very much.
	I do recommend your books.
	Latest, Land of Milk and Honey, published by Quiller.
	Thanks very much and good luck feeding us.
	I think you farmers are doing a heroic job and you ought to be more valued.

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