This Week in Farming: Old boys, mixer wagons and grain

Hello and welcome to This Week in Farming, your weekly round-up of the best news, views and in-depth articles from the Farmers Weekly website.

Here are five of the biggest topics we’ve tackled in the past seven days that you won’t want to have missed.

Grain price turmoil

As barley harvest rumbles on between the showers and oilseed rape cutting begins, yields do not look set to break records this year as challenging weather throughout the season has taken its toll on crops.

Farmers will have taken little joy from rising cereal prices this week amid news that it was Russian missile attacks on Ukrainian grain terminals that sent the value of crops higher, following on from the earlier news that the Black Sea grain export deal had been suspended.

Stay up to date with the latest farmgate and futures prices in our markets section.

In cheerier news, here is one farmer who has perhaps seen it all before. South Shropshire farmer John Derricutt is starting his 70th harvest this year.

Food security threat

With the threat to global grain markets high up the news agenda this week, it was topical for two fresh reports to land that examine if the government is doing enough on food security.

No, said the Labour-leaning Institute of Public Policy on Tuesday after convening a series of community panels across England, outlining what more they thought was needed for a just transition.

Farm business analyst Andersons also warned that Scottish output of beef and lamb was set to fall as a result of the UK government’s slew of post-Brexit trade deals, after being asked to examine the issue by the Scottish government.

In my editorial this week I note that the threat from factory-made meat continues to recede for now after Defra secretary Therese Coffey chose to pepper a speech this week with criticism of the novel technology.

Share farming to grow – and why it matters

How can two businesses farm together in as mutually beneficial a way as possible? Contract farming may be set to dwindle in popularity while share farming could rise.

Want to refresh your memory of which is which and why that might be? Check out this useful piece from this week’s Business section.

Here’s one farmer who certainly does know – dairy farmer Neil Baker, whose housed 1,750-head herd is kept fed from land owned by 12 different neighbours on various farming agreements.

Mixer wagon repair advice

One other thing most dairy farmers with housed cattle know their way around is the feeder wagon.

But how well-looked-after is yours? Machinery writer James Andrews went to visit a Keenan-approved mixer wagon refurbishing expert to find out how to keep these hard-working machines going for longer.

Elsewhere in Machinery this week, section editor Oli Mark visits a contractor with a nifty but surprisingly unusual setup – a rake and a baler combined on one tractor.

Growing older gracefully

We’ve all seen the sepia-tinged footage of farming from yesteryear, dredged up from the depths of a television archive.

In this week’s funniest article, opinion columnist Matt Naylor recounts how he has slowly realised that he’s joining the ranks of the heritage characters of yesteryear after giving an oral history to the British Museum.

Just don’t ask him to listen back to it…

FW podcast

Don’t forget this week’s edition of the Farmers Weekly podcast – listen here or bring us with you in the cab by downloading it from your usual podcast platform.