Founder & Director of New Forest Cider. When I'm not cider making I'm enjoying my hobby - rearing forest, acorn fed, old spot pigs in Burley. Views are my own
Joined July 2014
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Living in Cornwall at the time,I’ll NEVER forget the night of the Penlee lifeboat disaster,the @RNLI boats are all volunteers!
What sort of misguided muppets threaten @RNLI teams out preventing tragedy at sea?
They dont check immigration status, use a colour chart to decide on who they help.
They are VOLUNTEERS selflessly saving and preventing the loss of life at sea.
Just upped my donations.
Barry Topp retweeted
A cow lifts her tail in a field and drops a couple of kilos of dung on the grass.
Most people see mess. What has actually landed there is a delivery, and the crew is already on its way.
They smell it from several hundred metres and they do not dawdle. First beetles down within minutes. By nightfall there can be thousands of them in one pat, which is a level of enthusiasm for the job that no human industry has ever managed.
They come in three trades. The tunnellers go straight down underneath and drag it below ground in the dark. The rollers cut out a ball and take it away, walking backwards, pushing with the back legs, occasionally fighting each other over it like men outside a pub. The dwellers move in, raise a family in the thing, and eat their way out through the roof.
So the pat goes into the soil instead of sitting on the grass and smothering it for a month. The nutrients end up where roots can reach them rather than in the ditch after the next downpour. The tunnels stay behind as open channels, so the rain goes into the ground instead of across it.
Flies laid in that dung get eaten or crowded out, so the cattle standing over it are bothered less. Worm eggs go underground and away from the grass.
Then the beetles get eaten themselves, by the birds working the pasture behind the herd and the bats out over it at dusk.
One animal, standing outdoors doing nothing whatsoever, is running soil building, nutrient cycling, drainage, fly control and half a food chain at once, for nothing, on a system that has been going here since before anybody was writing things down.
That is a keystone species. Pull it out and the structure it was quietly holding up comes down, and no scheme, no tank, no subsidy and no committee has ever replaced one.
Then we started worming whole herds off a calendar rather than off evidence, with products that pass through the animal and see off the crew waiting at the other end. Where that happens the pats sit for months, hard and grey, like bins nobody came for.
The dung beetle asks for two things. An animal outdoors, and a farmer who does not poison the output.
Clear the cattle off the hill for the good of nature, and nature is the first thing to go.
Barry Topp retweeted
Your porridge oats were sprayed with weedkiller a fortnight before harvest, on purpose, to kill the plant while it was still standing. Scotland invented the trick.
A dying crop dies evenly. The whole field ripens on the same day, the plant pulls its last moisture into the grain, and the combine goes through once instead of three times. The grain is cut and bagged a few days after the drenching, which is how it gets into the bag intact.
1980s: Scottish farmers start killing standing cereals with glyphosate to dry them. Canada and the American Midwest copy it.
2015: the World Health Organization's cancer agency classifies glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen.
2018: independent labs find it in 43 of 45 conventional oat products.
2019: the same labs find it in all 21 oat cereals and bars sold to children.
2020: Bayer puts up 10.9 billion dollars for around 100,000 people with non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
2023: the EU bans pre-harvest spraying outright. Britain carries on.
2026: Bayer offers another 7.25 billion, paid out over as much as 21 years, and Britain's licence decision lands in December.
Eleven billion in settlements, a second one on the table, and a public consultation still deciding whether it is acceptable to spray it directly onto food four days before that food is harvested.
Now the part that should ruin your morning. The residue does not sit evenly through the grain. It concentrates in the bran, the outer layer, which is the part sold to you as the reason to eat the stuff at all.
Whole is worse than white. The healthier you have been trying to be, the more of it you have eaten.
The oat milk in the flat white you ordered instead of dairy was dried on the stalk by the compound Bayer is paying billions to stop hearing about. Lovely leaf on it, though.
Barry Topp retweeted
Professor Emeritus Dr Ian Plimer calls it "the great CO2 fraud."
For decades we have been told that human CO2 drives global warming, but Plimer points out: "No one has ever demonstrated that human emissions drive temperature."
Ice cores show the opposite of the narrative.
"Temperature rises first," says Plimer, "and only centuries later does CO2 follow."
For more than 200 years, chemistry has shown that CO2 is the gas of life, not a pollutant and not a threat.
The planet is far greener today because of higher atmospheric CO2 levels, and crop yields are breaking records.
According to Plimer, 'runaway warming' is not science, it is propaganda built on inversion and fear.
Barry Topp retweeted
Russia's biggest grain terminal is smoking, Ukraine's exports are down 76% this month, wheat is up 30% this year, and the Strait of Hormuz has been shut since February.
Britain's answer? We closed our last ammonia plant, we import our nitrogen, and now we tax the carbon in it at the border so farmers spread less and grow less.
Cheap imported food was never a strategy. It was a gamble on somebody else's peace.
Back British farmers @andyburnham , or buy your bread from whoever wins the wheat war................. At whatever price they demand
@TiceRichard @reformparty_uk @UKLabour @DefraGovUK @TomTugendhat @Telegraph @agricontract @wheat_daddy @loosecollie #BritishFarming #NetZeroNetStupid #NoFarmersNoFood #UKFarming telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/08…
Barry Topp retweeted
And today for my daughter’s wedding, I’m wearing this; the beautiful pocket watch that my Dad gave me that was given to him by his Dad. I was actually there when his Dad gave it to him all those years ago. I think it was given to all people working in the mining industry in Stoke on Trent after the First World War. I’ve never figured out why it says 1914-1919 instead of 1918 mind you. I love it and will remind me of my Dad today.
Barry Topp retweeted
Clarkson's Farm streams in over 240 countries. The strongest demand outside Britain is American, running roughly twelve times the average US series, and the first episode took over five million views on Bilibili in China.
A programme about one man losing money in a field in Oxfordshire, watched on four continents.
The Dutch were first. On 1 October 2019 thousands of farmers drove tractors to The Hague over a proposal to halve the national livestock herd on nitrogen grounds. A thousand kilometres of traffic jams, the busiest morning rush hour in Dutch history. Within a month they had founded a political party, and four years later the BoerBurgerBeweging came first in all twelve provinces.
Germany, January 2024. Tractors in nearly all sixteen federal states over diesel tax.
France, roads and supermarkets blocked, and tractors back in Paris again this January.
Poland, Belgium, Spain, Ireland. The European Commission pulled its plan to halve pesticide use, directly because of the unrest.
Greece has been going since December. Highways, border crossings, ports and airports, over frozen subsidies and livestock disease.
India produced the largest protest in human history by most measures. Farmers built a settlement outside Delhi with kitchens, schools and its own newspaper, sat in it for over a year, and the government repealed all three farm laws.
America has lost 142,000 farms in five years and its average farmer is pushing sixty.
Britain got 13,000 farmers and a thousand tractors in Westminster, and told itself it was arguing about one chancellor's budget.
Different countries. Different governments, left and right. Different grievances on paper: nitrogen, diesel, subsidies, pesticides, inheritance tax, minimum prices.
One complaint underneath the lot.
The people who produce the food are the only ones in the chain who cannot set a price, cannot pass on a cost, and are told by everybody else what they may do with their own land.
Which is why a Missouri rancher, a Dutch dairyman and a farmer in Punjab can watch a man in the Cotswolds fail to clear £144 and recognise their own books.
The problem was always global.
Clarkson just put subtitles on it.
Barry Topp retweeted
4 videos from 24hr at Strickley
Contrary to the opinions of some naturalists, some farms are balancing food production & habitat creation 💚
• 1 organic grass & Dairy Shorthorns
• 2 natural fly control before milking
• 3 No cows- no bat food!
• 4 Juv kingfisher on our beck
Barry Topp retweeted
Jeremy Clarkson made £144 farming a thousand acres in his first year.
In year six he lost five thousand.
His own words to his land agent: dispiriting enough to clear a hundred and forty-four quid at the start, and here we are six years on, down five grand. The harvest had been projected at thirty-seven thousand profit. Weather and prices took it.
Now look at what that thousand acres has behind it that yours does not.
One of the best land agents in the country. A farm manager who has worked that ground since he was a teenager. A farm shop with a queue down the lane, a pub, bestselling books, more than a quarter of a million in subsidy across three years, and a television production paying for the entire thing to be filmed.
It is the most commercially advantaged thousand acres in Britain, and the farming still loses money.
That figure should end every conversation about British agriculture, and it is the one number that never makes it onto a campaign graphic. Not the glyphosate. Not the pig housing. The margin.
Because everything people object to on a farm grows straight out of it. The field pushed to the very edge. The hedge that came out because the government paid to have it removed. The shed instead of the yard. The supermarket contract signed below cost because the alternative was no contract. Nobody intensified out of malice. They were priced into it over sixty years by a policy that decided cheap groceries mattered more than a countryside, and by a retail sector that kept the difference.
Britain now grows around sixty per cent of its own food. More than a third of British farmers are past sixty-five.
The man with the Amazon cheque cannot make a thousand acres pay.
The seventy-year-old with three hundred and no film crew is doing it anyway, and being told by people who have never sold a tonne of anything that he is the problem.
Barry Topp retweeted
The Earth is in a long-term cooling phase — and today’s sharp warm pulse is a temporary peak in a much larger cycle.
Despite recent warmth and its prominent place in the climate crisis machine, we are still living in the Quaternary Glaciation (which began 2.58 million years ago). It may seem counter-intuitive, but global temperatures today remain several degrees colder than the Phanerozoic average of 18°C to 26°C across the last 541 million years.
Our current warm interglacial (spanning the last 11,700 years) peaked during the Holocene Thermal Maximum (9,000 to 5,000 years ago). Since then, orbital cycles have driven a steady, long-term cooling trend. Models and proxies aligned on this cooling trend until the recent industrial-era reversal.
While today's warming (1.4°C above the baseline from 250 years ago) has temporarily disrupted this trend — creating the 'Holocene temperature conundrum' — the many warnings of runaway or instantaneous 'tipping points' have badly missed the mark.
Ultimately, the structural influences of natural variability can be impossible to predict, as any weather forecaster knows full well.
IMAGE: The chart below highlights the massive scales at play: we are experiencing a rapid modern pulse superimposed on a deep-time baseline that, historically speaking, remains in a cool phase.
Barry Topp retweeted
To say humans are adding carbon to the Earth is a physical impossibility.
What is actually happening is a change in 'where' the carbon is stored. We are told humanity is inflating the Earth's carbon budget, but geology tells us this kitchen cupboard has been sealed shut for billions of years.
We're not baking a 'bigger cake' by adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere; the planet is simply shifting its ingredients from the subterranean vault back into the biological engine — a state the Earth has vibrantly occupied for the vast majority of its history.
The attempt to regulate the breath of cattle and the outputs of agriculture is an attempt to regulate the eternal nature of the cake recipe itself.
Think of Earth's carbon reservoir as being split into distinct pantries: the atmosphere, the oceans, the soil plus every living thing (ants, antelopes, humans and forests). Carbon moves between these constantly. When you exhale, or a tree rots, it stays in this active loop. It is not adding a crumb.
Carbon that was taken out of active circulation millions of years ago and locked away in rock — is lithified in limestone, oil, coal and shale. When we use hydrocarbon fuels, we aren't creating any 'new' carbon; we're digging up carbon from the Deep Vault of time and throwing it back into the biological mix.
The hothouse worlds of the Miocene (and the Eocene and Cambrian) are the ultimate geological anchor. During the Miocene (roughly 5 to 23 million years ago), CO₂ levels were significantly higher than today, and the planet didn't experience runaway greenhouse death. Instead, lush ecosystems and massive biodiversity flourished.
Why? Because the cake was just being distributed differently. The atmosphere held a larger slice of the total carbon, driving a warmer, wetter, hyper-productive biosphere. The rocks prove that the system can handle vastly higher atmospheric carbon loads because that is the baseline state of a vibrant Earth. We treat global carbon accounting like a corporate ledger, but the largest active reservoir on Earth — the deep ocean — is virtually a black box. It's invisible to us.
The deep ocean holds roughly 45 times more carbon than the atmosphere. A microscopic shift in ocean temperature, deep-sea currents, or upwelling zones can release or absorb more CO₂ than humanity could ever dream of emitting.
Yet, we pretend we can calculate the global budget down to the decimal point based on surface surmising.
By the laws of the 'single cake' of CO₂, livestock and agriculture are completely carbon-neutral cycles.
A blade of grass plucks CO₂ out of the air. The cow eats the grass, processes the carbon, then releases it.
Within years, that carbon is right back in the atmosphere to grow more grass. It's a closed loop. No carbon leaves the vault.
Barry Topp retweeted
The World Bank ranked every country on earth for practical solar potential.
Britain came second from bottom. Not second from bottom in Europe. On the planet. Out of everywhere they measured, the only place with worse conditions for a solar panel is Ireland. Norway is above us. Norway, where the sun clocks off entirely for part of the year, is a better bet than Lincolnshire.
The reasons are not a mystery. We sit at 53 degrees north, the same line as Edmonton, Alberta. The sun in December gets about as high as a first-floor window and then thinks better of it. And there's the cloud, which is not a detail, it is the national personality. A square metre of London gets 0.52 kilowatt hours of sunlight a day in December and 4.74 in July, so the panel does nine times less work in the month your heating is on than in the month it isn't. Across the whole of 2024, British solar ran at 9.5% of what it's rated at. The other 90.5% is a photograph of a power station.
Now the other column.
The ground we're bolting it to is Trent valley silt and Lincolnshire fen. Some of it took three hundred years to drain. It grows wheat at yields that most of the planet cannot get near, in a climate so reliably damp that grass grows here without anyone asking it to, which is the entire reason this island has cattle and cheese and a butcher.
So we are, measurably, one of the worst places on earth for sunlight and one of the best on earth for food.
And we've had a good long look at both of those numbers and gone with sunlight.
Somewhere in Namibia, which the same report ranked first, there is a patch of absolutely nothing, in full sun, wondering what it did wrong.
Barry Topp retweeted
BREAKING: French Senator Claude Malhuret TORCHES Trump and his alcoholic, drug-addicted administration on the floor of the Luxembourg Palace: "Every time the Epstein affair resurfaces, bombs explode somewhere in the world and cause a distraction!"
This might be the greatest MAGA takedown of all time. Nobody was spared...
"A year ago, here in France, I compared Trump's presidency to Nero's Court. I was wrong. It's the miracle court. An anti-vaxxer, former heroin addict as Minister of Health," he said, referring to RFK Jr.
Malhuret's comparison to the mad Emperor Nero is fitting. It's said that he fiddled while Rome burned. In Trump's case, he's building a ballroom while the entire world goes up in flames.
"A climate-skeptic Minister of Economy. An alcoholic TV host, Minister of the Armed Forces," Malhuret continued, referring to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
"An old Qatar agent, Minister of Justice. A groupie of Putin, Minister of National Security," Malhuret went on, referring to Attorney General Pam Bondi and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. Bondi previously worked for the Ballard Partners firm which raked in $115,000 a month by lobbying on behalf of Qatar.
"A Turkish proverb says 'When a clown settles in a palace, he does not become king, it is the palace that becomes a circus," said Malhuret. "His fine team has decided to create a competitor to the UN. Since the creation of the Board of Peace, Trump has triggered more military strikes than Biden during his entire term."
"Every time the Epstein affair resurfaces, bombs explode somewhere in the world and cause a distraction," he continued. "Bomb more to win more."
This is how the world now sees the American president: as a pedophile desperately exploiting his role as commander-in-chief to obscure the fact that he preyed on children with his long-time pal Jeffrey Epstein.
"There isn't a single country where Trump did not take advantage of the situation to enrich himself without ever forgetting his family. A Boeing plane offered by Qatar," he said, referring to the $400 million jet that Qatar "gifted" to Trump. "Investment in all Gulf projects or elsewhere. Stock market manipulation that only a few insiders benefit from."
"Any one of these conflicts of interest would have caused an immediate procedure of impeachment here," Malhuret. "But we are not here. We are in MAGA's America where public business is conducted in favor of private interests."
Rarely have we heard such an exhaustive yet succinct distillation of the Trump administration's rampant criminality and incompetence. By focusing on individual Cabinet members and what makes them uniquely unfit for office and then expanding the aperture to the broader patterns of corruption and malignancy, Malhuret delivered a master class in political messaging.
Every mainstream outlet in the U.S. should be running this speech to show Americans what the world thinks of our leaders.
Since they won't, please make sure to like and share to spread this far and wide!
Barry Topp retweeted
Freaking corrupt parasites in the EU who ruined European civilization. Select few WEF puppets ruining billions of lives.
Vile pieces of shit :Schwab, Ursula , Fink, Hoffmann, Kallas, Zwinggi, Gates,Tedros,,Fauci,Rutte . These parasites should be tried for crimes against humanity
Barry Topp retweeted
I hope everyone had a great 4th of July. I know @realDonaldTrump and family did.
250 years ago we declared independence from a king who ran the colonies as a family business. In just 18 months the Trumps have made King George look like an amateur.
A $620 million Pentagon loan, the largest in the program’s history, to a company Don Jr.’s firm bought into three months before.
An Air Force drone contract to a startup the princelings took public through a golf course company they own a piece of.
The Army’s largest drone motor order ever, to a company where Don Jr. sits on the board and holds millions in stock.
A $24 million Pentagon robotics contract to the company that employs Eric as Chief Strategy Advisor.
A stake in the largest undeveloped tungsten deposit on earth, in Kazakhstan, backed by $1.6 billion in US government support.
Jared’s fund seeded with $2 billion from the Saudi crown prince, now $6.2 billion, 99% of it foreign money from Gulf governments. Over $110 million in fees collected from the Saudis alone. He negotiates American foreign policy with the governments that pay him.
$2.3 billion from crypto ventures their father regulates. More than a million people bought in and lost $2.3 billion. The money didn’t grow. It simply moved from the subjects pockets to the crown’s coffers.
And the next one is already drafted. A proposed ATF rule that will allow guns to be shipped straight to your front door. The government’s own estimate is 3.3 million home gun deliveries a year. Don Jr. sits on the board of the online gun megastore built to cash in. He holds 300,000 shares.
And that’s only the fraction they’ve allowed us to see. Not one subpoena served. Not one search executed. Why hide anything when you own the investigators?
Me? They searched a laptop for six years. Federal prosecutors. Grand juries. Subpoena power. Congressional hearings. They found nothing. I made about $200k a year selling paintings when my Dad was President, and they made my paintings part of an impeachment inquiry.
For six years they’ve asked Where’s Hunter? What about the laptop?
Wrong questions. The right one is 250 years old. Does America belong to a family?
They’ve given their answer. Long live the King.
Barry Topp retweeted
The loudest voice telling you to give up beef also owns the farms, funds the fake replacements, and holds the microphone.
Bill Gates is the largest private owner of farmland in America.
It is a sliver of the country's total, and that is the point. You do not need to own much land to decide what the rest of it grows.
Then look at what he funds.
Money into Impossible Foods. A stake in Beyond Meat. A startup growing "butter" from carbon dioxide in a vat, no cow required.
He has tasted that butter and says he couldn't tell the difference. He will presumably still be eating the real thing.
He also funds a vaccine for cattle, to shut down the microbes in the cow's stomach that make methane.
The rumen, the finest digestive system on earth, the thing that turns grass into steak, and the plan is to inject it quiet.
The cattlemen called the idea laughable. The funding rounds did not.
And he said it into a live microphone. All rich countries, in his words, should move to one hundred percent synthetic beef.
Then there is Africa, where his foundation sank close to a billion dollars into remaking farming across the continent.
It promised to double the incomes of thirty million households. It missed. Hunger rose.
It locked smallholders into patented seed and synthetic fertiliser, buried them in debt, and leaned on laws that criminalise saving your own seed.
The farmers there have a blunter word for it. They call it the second colonisation.
So here is the picture.
He owns the farmland. He funds the replacement for what it grows. He funds the vaccine to reprogram the animal. He wrote the sermon that says it is all for the planet. And he ran the trial on Africa's poorest first.
Maybe every piece of that is coincidence and goodwill.
But when one man owns the field, patents the substitute, medicates the cow, writes the gospel, and quietly keeps the real butter for his own table, philanthropy starts to feel like a costume.
He is building the future of food. He has just forgotten to leave you a seat at the table.
Barry Topp retweeted
When the UK says it’s lowering its emissions remember this …
The UK exports 50 MILLION used tyres a YEAR about 43 MILLION of them to India!
70% are then BURNED to extract crude oil, black carbon and scrap steel.
so we can pretend we’re hitting net zero targets 🤡
Barry Topp retweeted
Labour’s new “bottle tax” is a masterclass in how not to do climate policy.
They’ve designed a weight‑based levy that hammers glass – the infinitely recyclable, genuinely sustainable option – while giving cheaper plastic a relative free pass.
The result?
Up to 10–12p slapped on basic glass packaging, with fees on glass beverage containers reportedly around 49 times higher than for some less recyclable materials.
Unions and industry are spelling it out in words of one syllable: this isn’t a green transition, it’s a de‑industrialisation plan. British Glass and GMB warn tens of thousands of jobs in a 120,000‑strong supply chain are now in the firing line, with investors stalling “billions” in planned UK projects because ministers have just made domestic production uncompetitive overnight.
Labour dresses this up as “extended producer responsibility”. In reality it’s extended unemployment responsibility: loading costs onto UK manufacturers until production migrates to lower‑regulation economies, and Britain ends up importing the same bottles, with higher transport emissions, and fewer decent jobs at home.
If you wanted a policy designed in a spreadsheet by someone who has never visited a factory but loves a COP photo‑op, this is it.
Barry Topp retweeted
Svalbard, a remote Arctic archipelago, holds inconvenient secrets about our climate history.
A new study reveals it was up to 9C warmer around 10,000 years ago when CO2 was just 260 parts per million. Despite this warmth, glaciers didn't vanish. They survived, supported by increased snowfall.
Svalbard then cooled for the next 8,000 years while CO2 kept rising. No tipping points, no runaway melt.
Yet today's climate models project the same 8 to 9C of warming by the year 2100 (using the discredited RCP8.5 scenario), and predict widespread glacier loss.
That directly contradicts the historical record. Even the study's authors admit the future may follow the past. Warmer, wetter conditions could bring more snowfall, stabilizing or even growing glaciers.
The fatal flaw in climate modeling has raised its ugly head once again. It can't replicate history. And when the past contradicts your theory, it's the theory that's broken, not the past.
Working,milking cows in earlier days,great to see some science saying cows burping and farting are not culprits for climate change.
The University of Nebraska has called out the misleading narrative on cow burps & methane on climate change:
“They have not accounted for the capture part, they only account for methane being released. Carbon capture in soil and grass - helped out by cow grazing and manure - can far outweigh the emissions from cattle. Grasslands can take up more CO2 and carbon in the soil and plants, that offsets the CO2 that cattle are producing but it also offsets the methane.”