Perhaps you need to emerge into each morning to the moo of Farming Today to know that often the first item to be covered after news and weather at Six pertains to the horrors of quackery and witchcraft espoused by those who promote using earth’s unmediated harvest?

This unofficial slot for denigrating all things non-pharmaceutical suggests the laddy doth protest too much (who funds such puzzling impropaganda?)

In a recent Abacus programme we called What in Earth? there was talk about the role contemporary methods of farming have on gut health along with the intriguing impact pharmaceuticals gimlet into the economy. Not as shareholder dividends but the cost of NHS provision to those afflicted by their use. [At some stage I’m sure I’ll grasp the logic of damaging one part of the body to benefit another ~ lamentable consequences of popping pills.]

This matters, in case you were wondering, in light of Mugabe’s exiting the world’s stage. Yes, let me finish. If we don’t speak truth to power, power morphs into a malign, corrosive form that shapes what we do and how we think. No-one stopped him though it was clear his skills were exhausted by 1981.

Zimbabwe, as fertile and productive an Eden as Africa contained, had for decades enjoyed buoyant plenty in virtue of well-ordered farms. When the farmers were murdered, land decayed lacking ordered cultivation.

At the time of writing, the monstrous Mugabe continues to resist displacement perhaps to wring from his removers immunity from prosecution for his family?

What are we doing in allowing such people power, in swallowing all that pharmaceutical companies tell us, ignorantly condoning use of agrichemicals and poor welfare practises to produce cheap food? Have we all gone raving mad or are we only now waking from a torpor whose grip rendered positive evolution inert?