and pressure from supermarkets is causing a crisis of confidence. we ve got this massive shortage from ukraine and russia. andrew ward says a quadrupling of fertiliser prices mean his crop could be down this year. if the fertiliser is so expensive and it is not viable to apply the maximum amount, then the tonnes we get will be less, which means there will be less food. we are only about 65% self sufficient in the uk at the minute, and that is dropping all the time. and so we need to get more food produced in the uk and not less. and we need to rely less on imports. i have never known it so volatile, so stressful. i get up in the morning and sometimes i wonder why am i doing that? as this graph shows, farmers costs have risen even faster than food or general prices, which mean something has got to give prices must rise or some farmers will go bust. livestock farmers are under the same pressures, plus last year thousands of pigs were destroyed thanks to a post brexit shortage of butch
so volatile, so stressful. i get up in the morning and sometimes i wonder why am i doing that? as this graph shows, farmers costs have risen even faster than food or general prices, which mean something s got to give prices must rise or some farmers will go bust. livestock farmers are under the same pressures, plus last year thousands of pigs were destroyed thanks to a post brexit shortage of butchers and abattoir workers. many are now cutting herd sizes. we sell about 3,500 pigs a week. tom allen, in oxfordshire, says he s losing £30 to £40 per pig, which means he s downsizing. we ve reduced by about a third. the industry as a whole now is getting in for 20, 25% of pig producers stopping producing pigs, quite often mainly independent producers, like myself. what that means is that there will be a shortage of pig meat coming quite quickly. agriculture s facing a lot of challenges. you ve got high input prices like feed, fuel, fertiliser, limited ability to pass that on,
there s a real world cost to all those lives. covid demonstrated the disinformation and misinformation can be deadly. don t believe me? well, let s dig into the data. in the early days of the pandemic, deaths were concentrated in urban areas, primarily in blue states as this graph shows. there were no vaccines available. but by that fall, death rates in more rural red counties leapt ahead. you can see the sharp dropoff when vaccines became widely available in february and march of 2021. by that point some 500,000 people in america had already died of covid. but vaccine resistance was already dividing us along partisan lines. when the next wave hit in the next summer of 2021, you can see the majority of deaths came from counties that voted heavily for trump, because there were lower levels of vaccination. during the delta wave in the fall of 21, death rates and low vaccination counties were about
the first thing to remember is we re still going up. all right? we re just not going up as fast. by high, i mean, extremely high. look at the numbers. the last 12 months, inflation, the ppi, the factory, the wholesale level, has been going up by 11%. now, if you bear in mind that consumer inflation is 8.5%, give or take, that shows you that 3% of it is being kept in the factory. 3% is being paid by companies, by the margin, before it s actually passed on to consumers. month over month, we don t really worry about. it s still very high, 0.5%. 11% is unsustainable as a ppi, if you like, wholesale level for factories. look at the way the graph shows. the graph will show perfectly the awfulness of the current inflation situation, which is why the president says it s now his number one domestic priority. because we ve really never had anything like this for decades. you got to go back to the 1980s
republicans have moved further to the right than democrats have to the left. the dynamic was playing out even before the big lie litmus test. the deeper problem, as pew research points out, is that house democrats have grown more liberal and republicans much more conservative. the middle, moderate to liberal republicans could sometimes find modern ground on contentious issues has vanished. it s no worder why so many moderates make up 37% of americans in gallup s 2021 poll can feel underrepresented. again, the problem is not that the far left has taken over our political institutions. in fact, congress has become more conservative over the past 50 years as this graph shows. that s why all americans overall have moved slightly to the left over the past two decades as the washington post points out, stating musk s illustration is simply wrong. how can something so wrong feel so right to so many folks? well, it s the old game of what aboutism in a political world