Fake Tesco farms

 

I was reading a marketing training guide the other day and it said “Customers expect brands to be open, honest and authentic. They are increasingly interested in understanding provenance and are much more marketing-savvy than they used to be. Brands must be as clear as they can be, to avoid confusing customers in any way”.

Well, I do not think that anyone from Tesco’s marketing department has been on this course or indeed, any other marketing course.

Actually, having had second thoughts about this, quite possibly I’m wrong and they have all been sent on a training programme entitled “How to be as economical with the truth as possible”.

Tesco’s you see, have a range of branded farms with quintessentially rural sounding British names, such as Nightingale farms, Willow farms, Woodside farms and Redmere farms. Oh, that’s nice – supporting British farmers.

But you really don’t have to dig that deep to find out that these farms are completely 'fictional' farm brands. Yep – these farms do not actually exist.

Let me give you an example. Below is a photo of a label from a packet of Tesco Garlic from Redmere farms. Turn it over however, and you will see that it has been sourced from China!

Now, is this a little “un-truth”, a fib or a full-blown lie. Well, I am not certain – but it sure as hell is not squeaky clean is it?   

The other thing that Tesco has started to use is the phrase “Trusted farms”. This term means what? Trusted to be cheap as chips? Trusted to keep shelves full, whatever the cost to the animal?  It certainly does not have any legal definition when applied to animal welfare.

The ham joint in the photograph does not even have a country of origin written on it. But that’s OK folks, because after all, it is from a trusted farm.

I will leave you to make up your own mind about this marketing ploy. But I just want you and Tesco to know, that I most certainly did not buy either the ham or the garlic.

Wasps are amazing!

 

Last year I saw that I had wasps going in and out of a brick air vent in the front of my house. I always leave wasps nests alone if they are not bothering anyone, and apart from avoiding the use of a short cut through path, this nest was not an issue.

I have now removed the unused, old nest as it was obviously blocking up the air vent. As you can see from the photo, it is a good size and rather elongated instead of round, as it had to be built to fit along the channel within the house.

Wasp's nest with tennis ball for size comparison

The inside of the wasp's nest

I recovered a couple of dead wasps from the nest and identified them as Vespula vulgaris, the common wasp.

The queens which were born last year, are the only survivors from the nest and having mated, will now be hibernating over-winter somewhere away from the nest.

When the queen emerges from hibernation in the early spring. She establishes her nest usually in a cavity in the ground or a tree, and as she builds each cell, she lays an egg in it.

After about 30 days, her first offspring, which will be workers, emerge as adults. These will all be female wasps and they will take over the foraging, nest building and maintenance duties, while also tending to new broods. Meanwhile, this extra help allows the queen to concentrate on laying egg after egg.

I watched many of these workers chomping away on my wooden fence throughout the summer, taking away small amounts of wood which they then chew into a paste-like pulp mixed with their saliva. They then form this pulp into the outer wall and also into hexagon-shaped paper cells within. The whole nest resembles a structure made from delicate sort of paper-mache.

From these new broods will hatch carnivorous larvae, which the adult wasps will bring food to in the form of aphids and other insects. In return, the larvae excrete a sugary liquid for the workers to eat.

The single queen who resided in my nest could have produced up to 10,000 workers, who in turn potentially may have gathered up to 250,000 aphids or equivalent!

Wasps are also pollinators of flowers and crops. Adult wasps don’t need much protein (the bugs they prey on are for the developing brood in the nest) but they do need sugar, which they get in the form of nectar from flowers. In the process of finding it, wasps pick up and transfer pollen from flower to flower. Unlike many bees, wasps do not mind what flowers they visit – as generalist pollinators they are often more abundant than bees in degraded or fragmented habitats and so are important ‘back-up’ pollinators in these areas.

Once the colony is big enough, the queen will switch to laying a sexual brood - these are males and the sexual females capable of becoming next year’s queens. When the sexual brood emerges, they leave the nest to mate and then the queens will find somewhere to hibernate over the winter.

So, should you find a wasps nest somewhere that is not going to cause you any immediate problems, then leave them be, as they are both fascinating and useful creatures!  

BP’s “dirty little secret”

 

Bernard Looney became BP’s boss about a year ago and one of the first things he did was to commit the company to a net zero carbon footprint by 2050 or sooner. Quite a statement for such a company to make. Obviously to achieve this, there will have to be some very difficult decisions to make, including potentially getting rid of a number of investments which may be “hard to swallow” for shareholders of the company.

Let me tell you about one such investment.

BP have a 20% holding in a state controlled Russian company called Rosneft. This company is undertaking one of the biggest oil projects in history. So what, that is surely what BP do – invest in oil amongst other things.

Yep, but why does the company include the money earned from this project in its annual financial performance, which is out this week, but fails to include Rosneft’s emissions in its climate aims?  

I wonder if this huge project based in the pristine, northernmost tip of the Siberian Artic, is just too lucrative to bail out of yet, despite its dirty black, rather than green credentials?  

Now, when I say that this is a huge project, by George, I mean huge!

The project, whose committee is chaired by former German chancellor Gerhard Schroder, is worth $134 billion and has required two new airports, a new port, a 480-mile-long pipeline and 15 new towns to support the 400,000 workers.

This raises the concern that BP’s ambitions to cut their carbon footprint, only covers their own output, not Rosneft’s or oil that is traded.

Rosneft pumped out about 2.1 billion barrels of oil and gas in 2019, putting BP’s share at more than 400 million barrels. You might begin to see why they are reluctant to cut themselves free from such a lucrative business.

I am not the only one asking if BP’s statement of “net zero by 2050 or sooner” simply means that they have three decades to make a decision on Rosneft?