This Week in Farming: TB focus, combine insight and arrests

Welcome back to This Week in Farming, our regular round-up of the best Farmers Weekly content and a look ahead to the next edition of the FW podcast.

This week we have a special focus on Bovine TB, a forecast of a rush to exit the dairy sector, the latest harvest news and an in-depth look at how well the latest combines – big and small – are working on farm.

Bovine TB

Bovine TB is taking a heavy toll on people, cattle and wildlife. This week’s special focus on the dread-inducing disease reveals the burden it’s placing on farmers and vets, as well as the financial cost, based on a survey of farms in Wales.

Columnist Will Evans, whose herd threw up an inconclusive result in one heifer at the most recent test, talks movingly about being a pawn in a dysfunctional system that could be serving so much better.

Yet there is cause for optimism at a national level, with growing hope that a cattle vaccine could be available by 2025, while chief reporter Phil Case notes in this big-picture look at the situation that TB incidence rates in England are now at their lowest levels for some time.

If you’re in a high-risk area and only have time for one article on the topic, make it this one – a run through of safe cattle handling advice on testing day. Please stay safe out there.

Dairy demand

Is there too much milk in the world? That’s what the global markets are telling us, with a sharp drop in the much-watched Global Dairy Trade price this week.

The news came as the NFU revealed that an increasing number of its members think they will stop producing milk by 2025 as the price dips below the cost of production for many.

Yet does it follow that production would drop? Not if history is any indicator, as I observe in my editorial.

Output has held up well despite significant contraction in farmer numbers in recent decades, suggesting that there’s plenty of producers that remain bullish well into a downturn – but should the industry support ever-greater consolidation?

Harvest update

It’s been another week of frantic activity across much of the country, with wheat pouring into stores between showers.

Traders and grain stores are describing quality as “ridiculously variable”, depending on localised weather conditions, a state of affairs that Farmer Focus writer Robert Drysdale would certainly recognise.

On-farm yields of winter wheat show a wide range of 6.2-13t/ha, according to data gathered up to 8 August by Adas for AHDB.

Latest combine insights

Will it definitely be time to change your combine after this season?

A decision of this financial magnitude takes a lot of thinking through, so we went to speak to farmers who’ve done just that.

If it’s sheer output over a large number of hectares you need, then the John Deere X9 is currently the heavyweight champion.

The team at Buckminster Farm in Lincolnshire have two of the monsters and here’s what they have to say.

If it’s something smaller and a bit more nimble, then the Claas Trion could be an option.

Sentry Cambridgeshire’s farm manager Peter Keates gives us the lowdown on this machine, which will set you back £350,000 delivered on farm (including header).

Good/bad week

Finally, the first try-out of a new feature – who’s had a good week and who’s had a bad one?

Well, it’s definitely been a good week for North Yorkshire-based farm and country supply business Bata shareholders, who wanted it to remain a co-operative, after they won a key vote to stop a move to make it a private limited company.

And it’s definitely been a bad week for four people arrested in relation to the collapse in 2021 of Scottish grain merchant Alexander Inglis & Son. 

Police Scotland said: “Three men aged 48, 49 and 75 years, and a 76-year-old woman, have been arrested in connection with a fraud following a police enquiry relating to a business registered in the Ormiston area of East Lothian.”

Listen to the FW podcast

Don’t forget the latest edition of the Farmers Weekly podcast with Johann Tasker and Hugh Broom.

Listen here or bring us with you in the cab by downloading it from your usual podcast platform.