Rishi Sunak claimed to have farmers’ backs but their union’s president is far from convinced, as he spars with the government over floods, falling markets and fraught retailer relations‘This is the first time I’ve had my lawn cut by somebody else,” says Tom Bradshaw, the new president of the National Farmers’ Union. Just over a month after being voted...

To protect our local river we had to prove it was being used for swimming. But that, bizarrely, is the reason we were rejectedThe state of Britain’s rivers is incredibly depressing: the water companies dump too much sewage, the farmers dump too much muck, and the regulators are too cowed and underfunded to do their job and stop them.It wasn’t always...

More than half of the country’s forestry is in community and Indigenous hands – and from CO2 absorption to reducing poverty the results are impressiveDexter Melchor Matías works in the Zapotec Indigenous town of Ixtlán de Juárez, about 1,600ft (490 metres) above the wide Oaxaca valley in Mexico, where community forestry has become a way of life. Like...

Susan Hall became member a day after an exposé about its contents – much of which is directed at Sadiq KhanTory staff running network of anti-Ulez Facebook groups riddled with racism and abuseSusan Hall, the Tory candidate for London mayor, has joined a Facebook group which contains Islamophobic hate speech and abusive comments about her opponent Sadiq...

Stanhope, Weardale: This old quarry is so full of life now that among the jackdaws and nesting blue tits is something else that eludes meSounds of ringing picks and hammers, clattering rockfalls, squealing railway wagon wheels on iron tracks: a cacophony that, a century ago, carried on the wind into the centre of the town, a mile downhill. Then, Ashes...

Trifluoroacetic acid found in drinking water and rain is thought to damage fertility and child developmentRapidly rising levels of TFA, a class of “forever chemical” thought to damage fertility and child development, are being found in drinking water, blood and rain, causing alarm among experts.TFA, or trifluoroacetic acid, is a type of per- and polyfluoroalkyl...