Reading in progress
Tuesday 8 September 2026
What is working, where, and who made it work. Read the whole turn of the earth in two minutes, then go as deep as you like.
Leave the last few pods on the runner beans to fatten instead of picking them. The beans inside are next summer's seed, for free.
251 of 365Many cattle hides in Britain now end up shredded, fed into biodigesters or dumped in landfill. The leather industry that once converted them has all but vanished, undercut by cheaper synthetics and overseas manufacturing, and the tanneries went with it. The waste is one loss. The knock-on is quieter: hides were one of the things that made a small local abattoir viable, and the abattoirs were already closing.
At Thomas Ware and Sons in Bristol, the work carries on much as it did a century ago. Hides arrive from pasture-fed cattle and spend months with tannins drawn from vegetable matter - bark stripped from branches - rather than the chromium salts that do the industrial version of the job in days or weeks. The slower method costs more and employs people who actually know what they are doing, which is the point. It also cuts chromium ore mining out of the supply chain entirely.
British Pasture Leather has built a short chain around this: a network of pasture-based farms, a local abattoir, the Bristol tannery, and a buyer in Mulberry, which cuts and stitches the leather in its Somerset factories. Every hide is traceable back to the farm it came from. In Wiltshire, a farmer called Andy Rumming has gone a step further - he has his own beef cattle's hides tanned and runs on-farm workshops where people make their own shoes from them.
None of the farming behind this is novel. Native breeds on species-rich grassland, hay meadows, hedgerows: it is the older style of British cattle keeping, now asked to carry a premium hide as well as a beef carcass. Whether the revival holds depends on two unglamorous things - persuading buyers that craft tanning is a different product from industrial leather, and keeping enough small abattoirs open for the hides to be worth saving in the first place.
If you keep cattle, the hide need not be a disposal problem. British Pasture Leather's Service for Farms will take a UK farm's own hides and return them as leather - Andy Rumming in Wiltshire does exactly that with his beef cattle, then runs on-farm workshops where people make shoes from it.
Sustainable Food Trust · Read the source
A disclosure, since it is the honest subject for the day: the reading above this column, about the Bristol tannery that still takes months over a hide, was drafted by a machine. So were the others. A person chose the stories, set the terms, and checked what came out, but the sentences were produced by a model running on somebody else's computers, in a building that draws more electricity than the tannery will in a decade.
It is worth holding that next to what the tannery does. A hide becomes leather through time, water, bark liquor and the judgement of people who can read a skin by touch. Nothing in that process can be hurried without becoming a different, worse process. The machine that wrote about it works on the opposite principle: it produces a plausible account of slowness in under a second, having never touched anything. The words are serviceable. They are also the cheapest part of the whole arrangement, and it is worth remembering that the cheapness is an accounting choice — the cost of the power, the cooling water and the scraped text the model was built from is carried elsewhere, mostly by people who were not asked.
None of this is an argument that the machine should not be used. It is an argument for using it the way a repairer uses any tool: for the jobs it is actually good at, with the costs counted and the failures owned. It is good at sifting a hundred feeds for the stories a small publication would otherwise miss. It is poor at knowing which of them mattered, and it will never sit in a tannery yard smelling the bark pits. The day's leads it surfaced were thin — nothing about models, sensors or automation worth your time — so this column is about the tool itself, which is what the instructions say to do on an empty day.
Tomorrow it will sift again. A person will choose again. That division of labour is not inevitable; it is just the one we have decided to defend.
The publication's own drafting process
For the first squash of the year, when you want one pot and no decisions.
Peel and seed the squash and cut it into rough chunks - the peel goes to the stock pot or the compost, but some thin-skinned squashes can be left whole. Soften the chopped onion in the oil in a wide pan, then add the garlic, cumin and coriander and let them catch for a minute until they smell darker. Tip in the squash and lentils, pour over the water, season, and simmer with the lid ajar for about twenty-five minutes, stirring now and then as the lentils give up their shape. It is done when the squash collapses against the back of a spoon and the whole thing has thickened to a spoon-standing stew; if it tightens too fast, loosen it with a splash of water. Take it off the heat, crush some of the squash against the side of the pan and stir it back through, then sharpen with the lemon and check the salt. Eat with bread or rice, neither is required.
Nothing drops off. Today's readings move here tomorrow morning and stay, filed under the entrypoint they came in on. Below is the back-spool already gathered from the network.
The institutions whose public output feeds this reading. Each is watched every morning for what it publishes openly. Individuals are not listed here.
Permaculture Association · Permaculture Magazine · Regeneration International · Seed Savers Exchange · Garden Organic · Navdanya · Biodynamic Association UK · Biodynamic Demeter Alliance · Rodale Institute · Kiss the Ground · Savory Institute · Landworkers Alliance · Sustainable Food Trust · Real Farming Trust · Agroforestry Research Trust · Soil Association · A Growing Culture · Pasture for Life · Farmerama Radio
Ecosystem Restoration Communities · Rewilding Britain · Rewilding Europe · Trees for Life · Knepp Estate · Beaver Trust
The Restart Project · Low-tech Magazine · Makery · Repair Cafe International · Precious Plastic · Library of Things · Wuyong (Ma Ke)
Centre for Alternative Technology · AECB · Passivhaus Trust · Community Energy England
Julie's Bicycle · Dark Mountain Project · Emergence Magazine · Orion Magazine · Resurgence & Ecologist
Shareable · Transition Network · Global Ecovillage Network · Capital Institute
Bioneers · Gaia Education · Schumacher College · Center for Humans and Nature · Findhorn Foundation