Dog walkers who did not pick up after their pets have cost a New Forest farmer 18 of the 38 calves his herd was carrying. Tom Gould is a commoner, keeping cattle on the Forest under rights first written down 800 years ago. He scanned 38 cows in calf in March, turned them out onto Wilverley and Longslade for the summer, and when they came back in only half of them calved. Blood tests found every animal in the herd had been exposed to Neospora caninum. Some of the calves that did come were deformed. Neospora lives in a dog. It comes out in the faeces, sits in the grass, and gets eaten by a cow up to 6 months later. No vaccine exists and no treatment. An infected cow is infected for life, and she passes it down the female line to her heifer calves, so the loss runs past one year's calves and into the bloodline. Gould could not buy his way out either: New Forest stock has to be double tested for TB before it comes in, so a replacement heifer takes a season to get through the gate. The New Forest Dog Owners Group, 1,200 members, said it was the foxes. The Moredun Institute, which has been studying the parasite for 30 years, says the dog is the definitive host and it has found no link with foxes. The dog that carries it usually shows nothing. The owner who left it in the grass will never know he did, and he will walk the same path next Saturday with the same dog and the same bag in his pocket. That is the quiet half of the damage. Farm animals worth £1.95 million were injured or killed by dogs in Britain in 2025, up 10% on the year. NFU Mutual asked 1,407 dog owners about it in February. 57% let the dog off the lead in the countryside. 1 in 10 said it has no recall at all. 44% said it comes back some of the time. 72% do nothing to stop it chasing. Nearly two-thirds do not believe it could harm an animal. The law moved in March. Unlimited fines in place of the £1,000 cap that had stood since 1953, and the police can now swab a dog, seize it, and come through your door to do it. Not one person in any of this set out to hurt an animal, and 18 calves are dead anyway. Pick the mess up and put the lead on. It is the only request in British farming that costs nothing.

Someone explain this to me slowly, because I'm clearly the idiot here. We plant a Mediterranean nut in a Californian desert. It doesn't rain there, so we drain a ten-thousand-year-old aquifer until the ground itself sinks a foot a year and whole towns get shorter. The trees can't fight off fungus, so we spray the lot. They can't pollinate themselves, so every February we truck thirty billion bees across a continent and let a fair share of them die in the crush. Then we chill the harvest and sail it six thousand miles to Britain, where it rains constantly and always has, to be blitzed with water and gums and sold to you at £2.40 a carton with a green leaf on the side. That is the environmentally friendly option. Twelve miles down the road there's a bloke with cattle in a field. Rain falls on the hill. Grass drinks it. Cow eats grass. Nothing pumped, sprayed, chilled or shipped. No bees died. Her entire supply chain is weather. That is the planetary emergency. And it'll be explained to you by someone holding a carton of desert water, wearing a fleece made of crude oil. Asking for the cow. She's been very patient about it.

Chris Packham went on Gogglebox last week, watched the cartoon at the start of Clarkson's Farm, and announced that most farms are horrible monocultures sprayed with deadly chemicals, the ground pumped full of fertiliser, the animals indoors in crates being crushed and kept in the dark. A cartoon. Not a farm, not a documentary. The little illustrated title sequence. Clarkson replied in his Sun column and it is the best two hundred words he has written in years. He called Packham endlessly angry. He noted that the man had erupted in blind fury at the Winnie the Pooh-ish opening credits of a television programme. He pointed out, patiently, that it was a drawing. Then he dropped the actual grenade. Packham has been to Diddly Squat. In 2012. He drove there, on purpose, to look at the birds and do a bit of foraging. Sit with that one. The naturalist who tells a primetime audience that British farms are lifeless, poisoned industrial monocultures once picked a British farm as the place to go and enjoy the wildlife. And to gather food off the ground. Voluntarily. For pleasure. If the fields are sprayed dead, what were the birds doing there. And if the animals were indoors in crates in the dark, you would think he might have raised it at the time, rather than waiting fourteen years and bringing it up on a sofa while looking at a cartoon. He has doubled down on Instagram since, with a graphic about glyphosate and pig housing, asking whether it is really all happy smiley down on the farm. Which is a fair question to put to a farm. It is a strange question to put to an illustration. Here is the part that should genuinely annoy people. Clarkson's Farm has explained British agriculture to the British public better than every campaign, report and documentary of the last twenty years put together. Subsidies, weather, supermarket margins, the lot. Packham had the platform to join that conversation. He used it to lose an argument with the title sequence.

"We should stop farming cattle to save the Amazon from soy." Before you swing that one around, have a look at where the world's soy actually goes. The Oxford food researchers did, and the breakdown is not what the documentary implied. 37% is fed to chickens. Around 20% goes to pigs. 6% goes to farmed fish. And beef and dairy cattle, the animals on the poster, take 2%. Two per cent. The cow you have been told is eating the Amazon accounts for tuppence in every pound of the world's soy. The bird in your supermarket nuggets eats nearly twenty times more of it than she does. It gets better. A soybean is crushed into two things at once, meal and oil, and the oil is a prize in its own right. It fills the fryers, floods the ultra-processed aisle, and increasingly it does not get eaten at all. Close to half of America's soybean oil is now burned in fuel tanks as biodiesel, wearing a green halo while the forest that grew it does not. And the British cow being lectured about all this spends her life on grass and hay, off hillsides where no soy has ever grown and no crop ever could. Tofu, soy milk and edamame, for the record, take 7% of the world's crop, so even the vegans are only modest customers. So the field was cleared to feed the chicken shed, the frying vat and the fuel tank. And the animal standing on a Welsh hill eating rain-fed grass got the blame, because she was easier to film.