This Week in Farming: Meat scandal latest and energy special

Hello and welcome to the Easter edition of This Week in Farming.

If there’s a let-up in the springtime jobs, why not snack on these tasty journalistic treats from the Farmers Weekly newsroom alongside your chocolate eggs – now more plentiful in many supermarkets than the natural type.

Meat: Our Expectations

Our reporting last week on food fraud and food safety failings in the meat sector sent shockwaves through the national media and even led to questions in parliament.

While the attention of the general public might have moved on, we haven’t.

We want to use this shocking story as an opportunity to bring together the industry and give a platform to those who want to bring about change  – which means we’ll hopefully never have to write a story like that again.

That begins by having an honest conversation with everyone in the food chain, from farmers to consumers, about what needs to happen.

And that’s why we’ve launched a new campaign to help that happen called Meat: Our Expectations.

Read the ideas that we’ve come up with from our conversations with experts so far – and find out how you can have your say.

Energy special

This week Farmers Weekly has been taking a close look at how energy costs can be minimised, following the stinging price hikes over the past year.

The changes have had a significant impact on food production, with our exclusive polling revealing that one-third of farmers have already cut back their output, and 44% plan to in the next 12 months.

While many businesses won’t be able to fully offset the higher costs, here’s some helpful advice on what can be done:

• Business advice on installing solar – including costs
• Advice for dairy farmers on minimising energy usage
• How one farm is turning waste into sellable bio-LNG

Wireless electric fencing

Also in the livestock section this week is the latest information on wireless electric fencing – as administered through collars.

Read how one farmer has put the technology to work on his coastal farm in Devon and what it cost.

Drilling delays

There may have been some brighter weather this week, but regular showers are still hampering the ability of growers to get spring crops in the ground, including sugar beet.

The arable team recently visited Cambridgeshire farmers Adam and Tom Rayner, who didn’t manage to plant a single seed of the 400ha of beet they are planning to establish this season – putting them later than they’ve ever been previously.

Read the article and watch the on-farm video.

Farmer Focus writer Keith Challen is fed up, too, with plenty of spring barley still to get in the ground and many of his lighter-land neighbours already drilled up.

Also in this week’s arable section is an in-depth look at how the free advice from Defra’s Future Farm Resilience Fund is helping to shape the future on one Kent estate.

US versus UK farming

Normally plain-speaking columnist Guy Smith’s got his dictionary out this week to mull farmers being at the mercy of “vicissitudes”.

Find out exactly what he’s on about, including why the widening gap between how the US government treats its farmers compared to how they are treated here should give us all pause for thought.

FW podcast

Coming up in this week’s edition of the Farmers Weekly podcast, I join regular presenter Hugh Broom for a discussion on the Meat: Our Expectations campaign, and he speaks to an expert on what new biodiversity net gain rules mean for farm building developments.

Listen here to be the first to hear it when it drops or bring us with you in the cab by downloading it from your usual podcast platform.