This Week in Farming: Budget, beef price and bokashi

Welcome back to This Week in Farming, your regular run through the best Farmers Weekly content from the past seven days.

Before we get started, here are your markets. Beef up, lambs flat, and another slide on the milling wheat premium. At least diesel’s back, too.

Now, on with the show.

Budget 2024: What’s happened so far?

No prizes for guessing where we’re starting this week.

Shockwaves rippled out from parliament across the countryside as farmers digested the impact of chancellor Rachel Reeves’ long-awaited Budget, particularly those much-talked-about changes to inheritance tax.

Here’s our coverage of each announcement that will have some impact on farming:

• Budget delivers heavy cut to farming’s inheritance tax reliefs
• Minimum wage hike to £12.21 an hour causes trouble for growers
• Days numbered for delinked payments in England after Budget
• Barnett formula switch risks devolved ag funding
• Double-cab pickups get higher tax and lower capital allowance

Budget 2024: What happens next?

Run your eye down the list above and it’s clear this was not a fiscal event designed to thrill farmers, to say the least.

Already lobby groups are making plans to fight back against the proposed changes to inheritance tax, with the NFU set to bring 600 farmers to London for a mass meeting between them and their constituency MPs.

The CLA is also mobilising its members to send a deluge of correspondence to MPs on the topic.

Beef price marches on

As mentioned above, the beef price is currently bringing cheer to those with cattle to sell.

It was particularly encouraging to learn this week it’s helping drive a further reduction in dairy calf slaughter.

While the price of bought-in feed is lower than it was, there’s no substitute for growing grass in most systems, and that’s the focus of our slurry and muck special this week.

Check out this article on the grass yield benefits of a slurry inoculant, how to assess the nutritional value of manure, and how a Welsh farmer fermented manure using the bokashi method to increase its nitrogen content.

The late late (drilling) show

The relatively calm weather of late has brought a smile to the faces of plenty of arable farmers, too, as they’ve taken advantage of it to crack on with drilling previously sodden fields.

Our agronomists hold forth on the topic in this week’s edition of Crop Watch, while we’ve also got a special additional feature with advice on how to achieve late drilling success.

Clearly, though, there are still a lot of places too wet to turn a wheel, as Farmer Focus writer Robin Aird notes in his latest submission.

Who’s up and who’s down?

Feeling nervous this week are the farm tenants of Northumberland’s Rothbury Estate, after The Wildlife Trusts revealed the startling news that it has purchased the large land holding.

This has given rise to concerns among some tenants that they will have to significantly adapt their farming practices to suit their new landlord.

On the up this week is National Sheep Association chair Phil Stocker, who has been given a new job as the independent chair of the newly created Dartmoor Land Use Management Group.

Listen to the podcast

Don’t forget to tune into this week’s FW podcast, with Johann Tasker and guests who will bring you even more of the latest Budget analysis.

You’ll find it anywhere you listen to podcasts, or free to listen to on our website.