Milk, eat, rave, ruminate, sleep… repeat!… Have a blessed Sunday folks! „For the Lord is the great God, the great King above all gods.” Psalms 95:3

My deep-dive Substack content is here. This piece works through Mark 1:21–28 in some depth, tapping into the orignal language and tackling why the scribes left baffled while the unclean spirit knew immediately and it did them no good at all. open.substack.com/pub/simonb…

The unclean spirit in Mark 1 names Jesus before anything else. That's not faith. Jesus replies with two Greek words. Phimothete. Exelthe. Done. The longer piece, for those who want to dig deeper, with the Greek and the historical context is here: simonbowkett331045.substack.…

If you're curious to answer that question, there's a free copy of Mark's Gospel here: live.bible.is/bible/ENGNLH/M…

“They make no financial sense”🐖 Clarkson’s been in it 3yrs, had his heart broken for the love of PIGS ❤️,THE BEST animals to work with. Now imagine multi-generation pig farmers going out of biz due to Corporatism,abusive food supply chains…happening now whilst gov look away…

Here is a little beauty wishing everyone - Blessed Calf Tuesday! And from me to you motivation from the Bible - „Stop doubting and believe.” John 20:27c ¡Feliz martes de terneros! #Martesdeterneros photo from my trip to France (little Abondance heifer)

„Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.” Matthew 5:8 Good morning and have a blessed Sunday everybody!

It’s a long, slow process but the statistics just released show TB in England is at its lowest for over twenty years. Now is not the time to take the eye off the ball.

In 1984, Britain produced enough food to feed itself for 306 days of the year. Today the figure is around 233 days. The country grows about 60 per cent of the food it eats, down from 78 per cent in the mid-1980s, and imports very nearly half of what ends up on the plate. This is a country with some of the best grazing and dairy pasture in the world, a long coastline, and a climate that grows grass nine months of the year. The decline was a choice, made gradually, in favour of cheaper imports. British farms were undercut, then handed welfare and environmental rules their foreign competitors did not have to meet, then left to watch the supermarkets fill the shelves from abroad. The beef comes from Ireland and South America. The bacon from Denmark and the Netherlands. The lamb, out of season, is flown from New Zealand. The cheese from anywhere with a spare tanker. The land that could feed the nation is still here. Each year a little more of what the nation eats is grown, raised, and slaughtered somewhere else, and the gap between the field outside the window and the food in the fridge widens by another notch.

Badger culling in Cumbria reduced TB in badgers from 20% infected to zero. The fact that badgers suffer terribly with TB is always ignored by wildlife groups.

A tenant farmer in the Cairngorms says land that sold for £500 an acre a few years ago now goes for £5,000. He is being moved off ground his family has worked for generations, because he cannot outbid the people buying it. The buyers are corporations, and they have no intention of farming a single acre of it. Here is how the trick works. A company keeps emitting carbon exactly as before. Same factories, same flights, same supply chain, same product. Then it buys a Scottish hillside, plants some trees, and announces to the world that it is now carbon neutral, or, if it is feeling brave, carbon negative. The emissions never fell. It simply bought a landscape to point at. Take BrewDog. In 2020 it bought a 9,300-acre Highland estate, propped up with public grant money, and promised a million trees and the crown of the world's first carbon negative beer business, removing twice the carbon it emitted, forever. By 2023 roughly half of the 500,000 trees it had managed to plant were dead, killed by drought, with critics noting the planting was drying out the peat and releasing carbon of its own. The advertising regulator ruled its carbon-negative claims misleading. In 2024 it quietly dropped the badge and dismissed the entire carbon credit market as a flood of cheap schemes whose benefit was "questionable, maybe even non-existent." Then it sold the estate to a firm whose actual business is selling carbon offsets. That is the whole model in one story. Public money in. Dead trees out. A green halo worn for four years and then dropped. The farmer who used to be on that land, gone. The hillside passed to a company that exists purely to sell other people the right to keep polluting. This is no fringe case. In one recent year, half of every estate sold in Scotland went to investment funds, corporations and charitable trusts rather than anyone who would farm it. A third of the deals for plantable land are now done off-market, in secret, precisely so the local community never gets the chance to bid. So this is what net zero looks like on the ground. A man who produced food is priced out of his own glen. A corporation that produced emissions buys the glen, calls itself a force for good, and sells the carbon. The land stops feeding anyone. Nobody's emissions actually went down by a gram. The food was real. The farmer was real. The carbon saving is a line in a slide deck. And we have somehow decided the villain in all this is the man with the sheep.

For a while now, people have been asking for somewhere to go a bit deeper into the Word for the Week teaching. Somewhere the Greek can breathe, the background can be explored, and deeper thoughts formed. So I've started a Substack. 👉 substack.com/@simonbowkett33…

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 The Welsh Army had two HUGE victories at the Battle of Coed Llathen, near Llandeilo on this day in 1257. They were led by Prince Llywelyn ap Gruffudd and his generals. 3,000 invading ✝️ English soldiers were killed. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 'Da Ni Yma o Hyd!' - Forever Welsh! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

Nice 3 yr old British Blue cow with 2 month Limousin heifer calf at foot leaves @NockDeightonAg #Carmarthen at £4800. Good trade here with a full house here today.

We have reached a strange place, where you can drain a river, poison a coastline, and lean on people with no rights, and still be thanked for saving the planet, so long as the damage happens somewhere you will never have to look. Follow the virtuous plate home, one item at a time, and watch the halo slip off it. The avocado came from Michoacán, where the cartels run the orchards, divert the rivers, and murder the people who object. The almonds in the milk came from California, drawn out of a drought and an emptying aquifer, pollinated by bees trucked three thousand miles across a continent and worked to exhaustion in a fortnight. The salad was grown under a sea of plastic in Almería, by migrant workers on thirty euros a day in forty-five-degree heat, on groundwater so poisoned the region now has to import its own. The peppers were grown beside a Spanish lagoon that has died so many times they had to give it the legal rights of a person just to defend it in court. The cashews were shelled by hand by people whose fingers were burned by the acid in the husk. The cotton bag it all came home in helped drain the fourth largest lake on earth into a salt desert. Every item crossed thousands of miles, from somewhere left drier, poorer, and more poisoned for having grown it. And the person carrying that bag home walks past a field ten miles up the road, where a cow stands in the rain turning grass nobody can eat into food, dropping dung that feeds the soil it stands on, on land that has looked more or less the same for a thousand years, and thinks, with total sincerity: there it is. The thing destroying the planet. A cow. Burping in a meadow. It is one of the strangest acts of misdirection of the age. We built a supply chain that strips deserts, drains rivers, flattens forests and runs on people with no rights, and we taught ourselves to feel virtuous about it, purely because the alternative was an animal we could see, standing in a field we could walk to. The cow you can point at gets the blame. The catastrophe you cannot see gets a halo and a sticker that says plant-based. Heal the planet, they say, with the asparagus flown in from a drought.

If you're coming to @NockDeightonAg #carmarthen mart today, come by helicopter and park on the grass! Full out and consistently good trade.