Jon Gale

Visitor: Who shears all these? Farmer: Lads from New Zealand. Every summer, since before I was born. Visitor: Why not British lads? Farmer: Two hundred sheep a day, bent double, for six weeks. We stopped raising boys who'd do it. Visitor: So they fly in. Farmer: They did. The Home Office turned them down this year. Visitor: Why? Farmer: Visas. Visitor: So who shears them? Farmer: Whoever's left. Visitor: And if nobody's left? Farmer: The flies. Visitor: The flies shear them? Farmer: Blowflies lay in the fleece. The maggots hatch and eat her alive from the skin in. That's what an unshorn ewe is by July. Visitor: And if that happens? Farmer: I'm prosecuted. Neglect. Same government. Visitor: They stop the shearer and charge you for the sheep. Farmer: And the lamb from his farm lands at Dover tariff-free under the trade deal. The New Zealand sheep's welcome. The New Zealand man who'd save mine from the maggots isn't. Visitor: Who signed that? Farmer: The same hand that'll sign my summons.

Antifreeze kills by turning into oxalate inside your body, and spinach hands you oxalate ready-made. Ethylene glycol, the stuff in your car's radiator, tastes sweet. That's why vets see so many cats and dogs that have licked it off a garage floor. On its own it does surprisingly little. The damage starts when the liver gets to work and breaks it down, step by step, into glycolic acid and then oxalic acid. The oxalic acid pulls calcium out of the blood and turns it into calcium oxalate, a crystal. The crystals lodge in the brain, the heart and, worst of all, the tiny tubes of the kidney, which they block and tear apart. Oxalate crystals in the urine are how a doctor knows it was antifreeze. - Lethal dose: just over 1mL per kilo of body weight - For a 70kg adult: about 70mL - The classic antidote: alcohol, which ties up the liver enzyme so the oxalate never gets made Spinach, rhubarb, beet greens, almonds and black tea skip the liver step. Their oxalate arrives already made. In 2014 a 56-year-old man in Arkansas went to hospital with nausea, weakness and aches all over. His kidneys were clogged and inflamed with oxalate. There was no kidney disease in his family and nothing wrong with his gut. He drank about 16 cups of iced tea a day, which put his oxalate at 3 to 10 times what the average American takes in. His doctors wrote him up in the New England Journal of Medicine, and he went on dialysis, possibly for the rest of his life. Same crystal, same organ. A&E gives the antifreeze victim a stiff drink to stop his liver making oxalate. The salad bar serves it to everyone else pre-made and calls it a superfood.

In 2014 a trap came up from nearly seven kilometres down in the Mariana Trench carrying an animal no human had ever seen, and when the scientists cut it open they found a thread of polyester inside it, so they named the species after the plastic. It is an amphipod, a scavenging crustacean a few centimetres long and a deep-water cousin of the sandhopper that jumps out of the seaweed on your beach. It lives in the hadal zone, the last and darkest layer of the ocean, under a weight of water that would flatten a submarine, eating whatever drifts down from the sunlit world above: dead fish, dead whales, and now the laundry. The traps that caught it were set between 6,010 and 6,949 metres, deeper than Everest is high, by a team from Newcastle University looking for life nobody had catalogued. They found it, and in the gut of one of the first specimens was a microfibre that matched the chemistry of PET. The plastic in a drinks bottle, a gym top and the fleece on the back of your chair. In 2020 it went into the scientific record as Eurythenes plasticus. The man who led the work said they chose the name because the plastic was the most conspicuous thing about it, and Guinness lists it as the first species ever discovered already contaminated before it was named. The same team had already pulled amphipods from the bottom of six trenches across the Pacific and found fibres in the stomachs of nearly three quarters of them, and in every single animal from the Mariana. So a creature can spend its whole existence at the deepest point on the planet, never within six miles of a human being, in a place no sunlight has reached since the ocean formed, and the polyester still arrives before the biologists do. The route is your washing machine. One load of synthetic clothes sends up to seven hundred thousand fibres down the drain, too fine for the sewage works to catch, and the drain goes to the river and the river to the sea and the sea goes down a very long way. A wool fibre takes the same journey and is eaten and gone inside a year, because it is a protein and the bottom of the sea is full of things that eat protein. The polyester is eaten too. It just never leaves. The first new species of the age of plastic was named for what it had swallowed. Somewhere in your laundry basket is the rest of its dinner.

In 1979 Britain's most beautiful butterfly went extinct because the country had killed its rabbits and taken its sheep off the hills, and the scientist who worked out why had to put a flock back to bring the insect home. The large blue is a thing of chalk and limestone downs, and it has the strangest life of any animal in these islands. The caterpillar feeds on wild thyme for a few weeks, then drops to the ground and does an impression of an ant grub so convincing that a red ant carries it underground, where it spends ten months eating the ant's own young. Only one species of ant will do it, and that ant only lives in turf cropped so short the sun can warm the soil to the depth of its nest. Short turf means grazing. For a thousand years the grazing was sheep, and from the eighteenth century it was rabbits as well, millions of them, mowing the downs to a lawn. In 1953 myxomatosis arrived and killed ninety-nine rabbits in a hundred. Hill sheep were already coming off the downs as the farms went to the plough or to subsidy. Within a few years the turf grew long and cool, the ant died out of it, the caterpillar was carried underground by the wrong ant and eaten, and the butterfly dwindled through the sixties and seventies while everyone blamed collectors. The last British colony, in Devon, died in 1979. Jeremy Thomas spent the decade on his knees in the grass before he understood it. The whole chain ran back to a mouth cropping a hillside. In 1983 the butterfly was reintroduced from Sweden onto a Somerset slope where the first thing the project did was put the cattle and sheep back on, hard, and the ants returned, and the large blue came after them. It is now on thirty sites, every one of them grazed on purpose. A butterfly the colour of the summer sky disappeared from England for want of a sheep, and the people who saved it did not plant a flower or build a fence. They hired a grazier.

For 60 years the blue tits of Britain broke into the milk on your doorstep, and all they ever took was the cream. It was first seen in Swaythling, near Southampton, in 1921. A blue tit landed on a bottle, pecked through the cap and drank. By the 1950s every tit in the country seemed to know the trick. Housewives put out saucers, stones and upturned cups. The birds learned to follow the milk float down the street and be waiting at the next step. You will remember the bottle. Silver foil on top, and beneath it 2 inches of thick yellow cream that had risen overnight, with the white milk underneath. The first one down in the morning got it on the porridge. That cream was the whole point of the burglary. A bird cannot digest milk. It has no means of handling the sugar in it. Cream is nearly all fat, with very little sugar, so the tits drank down to the line and stopped. A wild animal weighing 11 grams, with every bird table and berry bush in the street to choose from, worked out how to open a sealed container to get at butterfat. Then the habit died, in about 10 years. Nobody trapped them or changed the caps. The milk changed. It was homogenised so the cream no longer rose, then skimmed so it was hardly there, then moved to a plastic jug in a supermarket. The blue tits inspected the red top, found nothing in it worth stealing, and went back to the hedge. They were the last creatures in Britain to judge a pint of milk on what was actually in it.

Customer: "No bacon this week. My daughter says it's processed." Butcher: "It is." Customer: "You admit it?" Butcher: "I do the processing. Out the back." Customer: "Go on, then. What's the process?" Butcher: "I rub it with salt." Customer: "And then?" Butcher: "I wait a fortnight." Customer: "And then?" Butcher: "I slice it. Some weeks I smoke it first. That's the deluxe process." Customer: "Nothing else goes in?" Butcher: "A pinch of curing salt in with the ordinary. That's the nitrite." Customer: "That's the bit she's worried about." Butcher: "That's the bit that stops it giving you botulism. Butchers have been putting it in for hundreds of years, mostly for that reason." Customer: "She made it sound like a factory." Butcher: "It's a tub and a cold room. The Romans wrote the method down about 160 BC and I've not found much to add." Customer: "Well, she won't touch it. She has one of these instead. I've to pick her up a box every week." [She takes a box of protein bars out of her shopping bag. There is a picture of an oat on it.] Butcher: "Turn it over. What's in those?" Customer: "Hang on, I've not got my glasses. Soy protein isolate. Glucose syrup. Palm fat. Humectant. What's a humectant?" Butcher: "No idea. I've never needed one." Customer: "It goes on. There's a bit in brackets." Butcher: "Mine's pork, salt and curing salt. I can do you the list from memory." Customer: "So hers is the processed one." Butcher: "Hers has had more done to it than anything in this shop, and I've a mincer." Customer: "Six rashers. Smoked." Butcher: "The deluxe. And for your daughter?" Customer: "She's got her box."

Activist: "Farmers pump their cows full of antibiotics. It's in every glass of milk." Dairy farmer: "Do you know what happens if it is?" Activist: "People drink it." Dairy farmer: "The tanker gets tested at the gate. One cow's worth of antibiotic in 20,000 litres and the whole load goes down the drain. Every farm on the run that morning gets their milk tipped, and the farm that did it pays for all of it." Activist: "So you're saying it never happens." Dairy farmer: "I'm saying a treated cow on this farm gets red tape round her leg, goes to the back of the parlour, and her milk goes in a bucket for 6 days. I treat her like she's radioactive, because financially she is." Activist: "You still use them." Dairy farmer: "On a cow that's ill. Same as you. The vet writes it up, the date goes on the wall, and the wall's checked. Use on this farm is about half what it was 10 years ago, and that's every dairy I know." Activist: "Routine use in feed, then." Dairy farmer: "Illegal for years. Growth promoters went 20 years ago. You're describing a chicken shed in a country I don't farm in." Activist: "You can't prove it's not in the milk." Dairy farmer: "I can prove it 3 times a week, because they test it 3 times a week and send me the sheet. When did you last get a sheet on your oat drink?" Activist: "That's different." Dairy farmer: "It is. Nobody tests it. Mine's the most inspected liquid in your kitchen and it's the one you're scared of."

The dairy farmer has milked twice a day, every day, for as long as you have been alive, and the country's thanks for it is a man on the internet calling his milk pus. There is no clock in Britain as unforgiving as a milking parlour. Half past four in the morning and half past four in the afternoon, 365 days a year, with no Christmas, no bank holiday, no wedding, no funeral, no flu bad enough to excuse it, because the cows do not know what day it is and their udders fill regardless. Miss a milking and you have 200 animals in pain by teatime. He has not had a lie-in since 1994. Neither has his wife, who does the calves, the paperwork, the calving at 2am when he is already up, and the books that tell them every quarter how much the last 3 months lost. Then the standard, which is the part nobody on the outside can picture. Every collection, the tanker driver takes a sample before he connects the hose. It is tested for antibiotic residue, for bacteria, for cells, for water, for temperature, and a fail on any one of them is a load down the drain and a bill with his name on it. The cell count on every cow, every month. The TB test on every animal, every year, with a 4mm lump on the neck deciding whether the herd survives the week. Red Tractor in the yard with a clipboard. The vet's book on the wall. He runs a food factory to a hospital standard, outdoors, in the rain, with a workforce that kicks. And it works. British milk is the most tested liquid in your kitchen. Pasteurised milk in this country has caused so little harm for so long that nobody can name an incident, and there are 14 million litres of it collected every single day. Now what he is paid for that. About 40p a litre at the gate, when it costs him roughly that to make, and the supermarket sells it at 68p and calls the difference logistics. In 1995 there were around 35,000 dairy farms in England and Wales. There are fewer than 8,000 in Great Britain today. The rest did the sum, sold the herd on a Tuesday to a man with a lorry, and stood in an empty parlour listening to the silence that had never been there before. The ones still going are not there for the money. There is no money. They are there because their grandfather built the parlour and the cows are in it and somebody has to be up at half four. Into that walks a lad with a phone and a documentary, who has never lifted a cluster, telling 3 million people the milk is full of drugs and the cows are in the dark. The cows are in a field in Cheshire. The drugs are in a book on the wall. The man is in the parlour, where he has been since before it was light, keeping a standard his critic has never once had to meet, for a wage his critic would not get out of bed for. Say his name, next time. He is the reason there is milk.

Keith went to Margot's farm for a week on Monday, which is the first time in his life he has been the visitor, and the first gate he met at the other end was opened for him from the inside. Dave's cousin has finished her building work. That was the arrangement, in the end, made on the phone in June and not mentioned again by either party: Margot had come to Dave's twice while the builders were in, and the ditch on the cousin's side of the county has a bramble problem of its own, and Dave said, in the voice of a man who has already lost, that Keith could go over for a week and have a look at it. He went up the ramp without being asked. Dave has seen that once before, outside a pub, and did not comment. The trailer went twelve miles. When the ramp came down, an Anglo-Nubian doe was standing at the yard gate on the cousin's farm with her head over it, and she had the latch up before the goat was off the ramp. Keith stood in the yard and had a look at the place. It is a different place. Different gates, different latches, a Dutch barn instead of a stone one, a lane that runs the other way. He took it in the way he takes everything in, slowly, and then he walked through the gate she was holding and she went with him, and the two of them went to the ditch. The cousin rang Dave that evening. Cousin: He's on the barn. Dave: Yes. Cousin: There's no way up the barn. I've looked. Dave: There is now. The week went as the week was always going to go. The ditch was cleared by Thursday, the two of them working toward each other from the ends, the way they cleared Dave's. The cousin's gate latches were assessed, all of them, in order, and none of them were opened, because a guest does not open his host's gates, and Keith knows the difference between a project and a courtesy. He ate a hi vis jacket off her gate post on the Wednesday, which she said she had been meaning to throw out. Dave, at home, had a week without him. He checked the kitchen latch on Tuesday morning out of habit and stood there with his hand on it, feeling foolish. Pat and Margaret, the two retired Texels, stood at the field gate for three days looking down the lane. The north gate was not assessed by anybody. Steve did not write. Dave found, by Thursday, that he was leaving the back door open on purpose and could not have told you why. Sunday, the trailer came back up Dave's lane at eleven. Keith came down the ramp and stood in his own yard and looked at it, and Dave watched him do what he had done at the cousin's, which was take the place in, slowly, as though checking it against a record. Then he walked to Steve's boundary and stood at the place where the corner post used to be, the one with the flex in it that Margot found and he kept for her all summer and she put over in the spring, and he looked at the gap for a while, and went to the bramble. Dave's log, Sunday: "Back. Cousin's ditch done. Cousin's barn roof, apparently, done. He looked at the corner post first. I have not put it back up and I am not going to. Margot is coming in October. Nobody asked me."

Jeremy Clarkson has just filled a field with sheep that shear themselves, in the same year Britain told the men who shear everyone else's that they will not be needed. EasyCare is the breed. Series 5. An Anglesey farmer bred them from the 1960s onwards to drop their own fleece in spring like a dog moulting, so there is no shearing and no dagging. Clarkson was convinced they would also behave. They did not, because they are sheep, but the wool point stands: a British fleece today fetches less than it costs to have a man take it off. Farmers have been paying to be rid of wool for years. Somebody else has noticed the breed too. 11 of them went off Diddly Squat in the dark sometime in the last 10 days, unwitnessed, on 1,000 acres with a film crew about and a drone in the air. He and Kaleb found 16 where there should have been 27. 700 hours of recorded messages later he got through to a police officer, told her it would sound like he was from 1856 but he had had some sheep stolen, and she checked the address and said, oh, not your EasyCares. Thames Valley Police are investigating. Clarkson has told whoever has them to put them back and mentioned that the farm is armed. While the series was being cut, the concession that let up to 75 overseas shearers into Britain each spring, mostly New Zealanders who have come to the Borders and Northumberland for 30 years, closed on 30 June. The Home Office said the industry had had 14 years to train its own. The men still on the fells this week are on leave that runs out on 1 October. 14 million breeding ewes. A window of weeks in which a fleece left on gets a sheep eaten alive by maggots. 75 men who each clear a ewe in under 3 minutes and do 15,000 in a season. So one side of the country has bred the fleece off the sheep, because the wool is worthless, and the other side has shown the door to the men who take it off, because the job is British now. Between them, next spring, somebody's ewes are going to stand in the heat in a coat nobody wants and nobody can remove. The 16 still on Clarkson's farm will be fine. They have opted out of the whole argument. The 11 in somebody's shed have opted out of it in a trailer, and are the only sheep in England this week that anyone has gone to real trouble to acquire. The other 14 million did not get the memo, and they are the ones that make the lamb.

Spare a thought for Doris, who in June was subjected to three minutes of the worst thing that has ever happened to anybody. She is a six-year-old Texel on a Lake District fell and she was, on the morning in question, wearing a fleece she had grown herself and had strong feelings about. A stranger arrived in a vest. She was turned onto her backside, held between a man's knees, and relieved of her entire coat by machine, in the open, without being asked, in front of the others. She could not have made her objection clearer. She was rigid throughout. She kicked once, on principle. The whole ordeal lasted about as long as it takes to boil a kettle, and at the end of it she was tipped back onto her feet, four kilos lighter, and stood in the pen doing the thing every sheep does after shearing, which is walk away from a man at a speed she has not managed since May. The alternative on offer, for a ewe in full fleece on a wet fell in August, is a blowfly finding her, laying eggs in the wool, and the maggots eating her alive from the outside in over about four days. Every hill farmer in Britain has seen it. Nobody who has seen it has ever needed the ethics of shearing explained to them afterwards. That is the choice, every summer, on every sheep in this country. Three minutes of undignified handling, or the other one. Brian's cheque for the entire clip did not cover the shearing gang, and it has not covered it for eleven years, and the fleece still comes off every June because it has nothing to do with wool and never did. Doris has not forgiven anybody. She grazed the top with her ears back for two days and came through Brian's wall on the Thursday out of what he assumes was spite. Then she lay down in the sun on her own bare back for the first time in a year, at four in the afternoon, in front of everyone.

11 sheep were stolen off Jeremy Clarkson's farm this week, and the first thing he did was apologise to the police for sounding like a man from 1856. He counted the flock with Kaleb and found 16 Easycares where there had been 27. Somebody took 4 in every 10 sheep he owns, off 1,000 acres with a film crew on it most days, on an evening when nobody was filming. Then he rang it in. Once you get through 700 hours of recorded messages, he said, he got a girl on the line and told her he knew he sounded like he was from 1856, but he had had some sheep stolen. She took his name and address and said, oh, not your Easycares. She watches the show. His message to whoever has them is to put them back. In 1831 the courts of England and Wales sentenced 162 people to death for stealing sheep. It had carried the rope since 1741, and Parliament only took it off the capital list in 1832, when the sentence became transportation for life. A man who lifted 11 Easycares in 1856 went to Australia and did not come back. NFU Mutual's figures in May had good news in them. Rural crime overall fell 6% last year, to £41.5m, with £9.3m of stolen machinery recovered. Livestock theft went the other way. Up nearly 30%, to £4.5m. The insurer's own phrase for it now is highly organised, which means a lorry, a plan and a buyer before the animals are loaded. There is one dedicated livestock theft officer in the United Kingdom. One, for the whole country, and the insurance company pays for him. Clarkson is the one victim in Britain who can get it into The Sun by Thursday. The farm 4 miles down the road has the same lorry, the same night and no film crew, and when 11 ewes go out of that field nobody counts them. In 1831 the country hanged a man for it. In 2026 it puts you on hold.

A timeline of one man's cunning inheritance tax scheme. 2008: Buy a thousand acres in Oxfordshire. Tell The Times that dodging inheritance tax is the critical thing. Scheme live. 2009 to 2018: Do absolutely nothing. A villager farms it on contract. Flawless. 2019: The villager retires. Rather than hire another one, decide to farm a thousand acres yourself, having never grown anything. Also 2019: Invite a film crew. 2020: Rain for nine weeks. Profit on a thousand acres: £144. 2021: Broadcast the £144 to the largest streaming platform on earth, thereby informing the entire planet that farmland makes nothing. 2021: Open a farm shop. Acquire a queue down a lane and the undivided attention of West Oxfordshire District Council. 2022: Restaurant refused. Enforcement notice. Six weeks to take a barn apart. 2023: Lose the appeal. Lose it again. May 2024: Accidentally get English planning law rewritten. Lawyers name it Clarkson's Clause. August 2024: Open a pub selling only British food. Sell your own sausage at 74p against 18p imported, and eat the difference on every plate. October 2024: The Chancellor caps agricultural property relief at a million. Scheme dead. November 2024: Stand on a platform in Westminster in front of thirteen thousand farmers, drawing maximum national attention to the exact tax break you were supposedly hiding behind. July 2025: Go down with TB. First calf ever born on the farm destroyed, pregnant with twins. Gate padlocked. 23 December 2025: Government retreats. The threshold goes from one million to two and a half. Five million for a couple. March 2026: Farm declared clear. July 2026: Drive four hundred miles to Scotland and buy more cows. Eighteen years. Planning law changed. Agricultural degree applications climbing. Cited in the Commons more times than most ministers manage. Half the estates that were going to be caught by the tax are no longer caught by it. He was accused of buying a farm to dodge inheritance tax, and then spent eighteen months getting the relief raised for everybody else's. Worst tax dodger in British history. Best thing to happen to British farming in fifty years.