Food for Thought

The Black Sheep
Sift through the daily musings of a farming journalist

Field Day
Farmers Weekly's Tim Relf takes an alternative look at rural 'goings on'

Taking Stock
Our livestock show and sales blog reveals the real stories from the UK's key auctions

Welcome to Farmers Weekly’s new blog which aims to give you an insight into the latest news and views from the world of food and farming.

I’m Isabel Davies and I have worked on the newsdesk of Farmers Weekly for over seven years. But I should warn you that I am not going to be only person posting here…

The idea is that this is an FW team blog where our journalists can pitch in from wherever they are in the world. This means you are going to find people posting from key events such as the SIMA show in Paris in March or the Cereals event in June.

We've taken two calls in the office from people who have been paid their 2006 single farm payment and I couldn't be more pleased for them.

Yet we can't escape from the fact that there are still plenty of people who haven't had their 2005 payments finalised.

There aren't that many who haven't had anything (and even with the old IACS scheme there were always some people the Rural Payments Agency couldn't pay for months and months). But there are 620 waiting for a top-up payment and another 20,000 with an error.

Admittedly, some of the 20,000 will be people who were overpaid rather than underpaid but it is still pretty depressing.

My prediction is that the partial payments for 2006 will go out pretty much as promised by government (that's starting in mid-Feb for those who have forgotten!). But I reckon the number of errors will be huge and the whole mess will take just as long to sort out as for the 2005 claim year.

Things must be bad at the Rural Payments Agency. I’ve just found out that the main press officer has decamped to the Home Office – talk about out of the frying pan into the fire!

The good news is that he has already been replaced and the new guy has had a lucky break in that the agency actually has something positive to say for once. It turns out that close to 22,000 farmers have now received a full 2006 single farm payment and more are on the way.