Duncan Brown

HR is really good at crisis-responses. But as political, economic and labour market challenges remain, what's the future for your pay and reward practices? Based on our new Handbook of Reward Management Practice, here are some of the key trends & threads. lnkd.in/ef3WfsQH

@SamaHoole Which would you rather have: more factory farms or more Knepps?

The Knepp Estate in West Sussex is the most famous rewilding project in Britain. It is on Springwatch, in the broadsheets, in a bestselling book. It is the place everyone points to when they want to show you what the land does the moment humans step back and stop farming it. Look at the nightingales, the purple emperors, the storks. Proof, apparently, that we should get the animals off the land and let it go wild. There is one problem with using Knepp this way. You have to never look at what is standing in the fields. Knepp is full of animals. Deliberately, by design, as the entire point. When Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree gave up on intensive farming around 2000, on heavy Sussex clay that had run the estate £1.5 million into debt, they did the reverse. They brought more animals in, of more kinds, took down seventy miles of fencing, and let them roam. Old English longhorn cattle. Tamworth pigs. Exmoor ponies. Red, fallow and roe deer. Stand-ins for the wild aurochs, boar and horses we wiped out long ago. Their grazing, browsing, trampling, rootling and dung is the engine that builds the whole mosaic of scrub and wood pasture the rare birds need. Too few animals and it chokes into dense woodland. Too many and it flattens to bare grass. The cattle are the reason the nightingale is there at all. And Knepp does not leave nature to it. There are no wolves in Sussex, so the herds would breed until they ate the place bare. So Knepp culls them every autumn. The deer are shot by a licensed stalker. The cattle and pigs go to a small organic abattoir. Knepp calls this, without flinching, stepping into the role of the missing apex predator. A managed herd, grazing grass, culled before winter for meat. There is a word for that, and it is a very old one. Then comes the part that should end the argument outright. They sell the meat. Knepp Wild Range: an online butchery and a restaurant, longhorn beef aged on the bone for weeks, Tamworth pork off pigs fattened on autumn acorns, venison, charcuterie cured in house. Heston Blumenthal calls the longhorn the best beef in the world. Knepp markets the lot as the most sustainable meat you can buy, and its own website argues, in words any carnivore would recognise, that pasture-fed meat is good for you and that grazing ruminants are one of the best carbon sinks on the planet. So Britain's flagship rewilding project is a former arable farm, gone broke under the plough, rescued by swapping the crops for free-roaming cattle, pigs, ponies and deer, then counting them, culling them, and selling them as premium grass-fed steak. This is the thing held up as the case for taking animals off the land. Post a Knepp turtle dove with a caption about what nature does once we stop eating meat, and you have it exactly upside down. The turtle dove is sponsored by the longhorn. The green cathedral was built by a herd of cattle, and paid for, in part, by selling the surplus as steak. None of which means we should turn all of Britain into Knepp. We shouldn't. It grows a fraction of the food the land could, and nobody lives on nightingales. But on the one principle it actually demonstrates, it is unanswerable, and it is the precise principle the people quoting it want dead. Put the grazing animals back and the wildlife pours in. Take them away and it drains out. The poster child for the end of livestock is a working meat farm. Go and read its menu.

Epic moment 🔥 🇺🇸Trump at 5:00 PM — “No President has done this. We got Iran to talk nukes. Maybe even give them up. This is First time ever.” 🇺🇸Obama at 6:00 PM — “Did it already. No missiles fired. Moved 97% of their enriched uranium out. We didn't have to kill a whole bunch of people or shut down the Strait of Hormuz like you.”🔥👏

From yesterday’s @FT #lostgeneration

This chart is bonkers. I think there's two possible explanations for why the UK runs so far ahead of other European countries – neither of them good. And the annual April jump speaks to a wider issue. For more detail, see my column in this weekend's Observer (link below).

dont feel too bad for Arsenal. Here's their players' wages hounslowherald.com/the-price-of-a…

Artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships, and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate or even simulate, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational, and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. #MagnificaHumanitas

Next 'expert' on AI you read, this is how OpenAI's own head of research sees the future impact: 'We are operating from the assumption that AI will have a massive impact on the economy and that we have little idea of what that will be or where it will go.' ft.com/content/12bdee…

'The answer to youth worklessness is not to pull one sector down to bring another up. It is to make aspiration work, through stronger colleges, stronger universities and stronger routes from both into good work'. ft.com/content/5d381d… via @FT

Awhhhh.. too true @Banxcartoons

Moving workers' small pension pots, without their consent, after just 12 months, is too short to give them a fair chance to re-start contributions. Hope the Regs will give at least 2 yrs Altmann seeks to amend small pots proposals via @@corpadviser corporate-adviser.com/altmann-urges-…

Sunderland in Europe a decade after that Brexit vote. Reform local councillors must be sheepish.

OK I fact checked and this is true! theealingbeaverproject.com/services/mitig…

'Ultimately, the soft left believes in fighting for as much socialism as a democracy will allow. A socialism applies a moral, economic framework to blunt the UK’s vastly uneven wealth distribution on the health, freedom and happiness of our citizens'. ft.com/content/6d5371…

... but that's partly because our average wage is lower than these countries and our top to bottom inequality higher

remarkable: uk getting less not more transparent on pay. Where is HR?! personneltoday.com/hr/uk-going-ba…

High youth unemployment and disillusionment: 'Anya, a 20-year-old student in New Delhi said the online protest reflected grievance among her peers at a system they perceived as “rigged”.“Everyone is left to fend for themselves,” she said.' Sound familiar?! ft.com/content/2bfed8…

The sun comes out and Britons come up. Edwards Bay in Tynemouth, nearly 7pm 😎

For #thicktrunktuesday - it is said an Oak takes 300 years to grow, 300 years to live, and 300 years to die. Certainly Richmond Park’s veteran oaks live long, long past their death as a living tree to become a home for bats and birds, food for fungi and beetles, and more.

'As national reform gathers pace, policymakers should be asking themselves: are we designing employment support around systems, or around people?' Excellent cfab report ageing-better.org.uk/blogs/commissi…