The NFU conference has kicked off at the Birmingham Metropole Hotel.
FWi has got a full team of hacks reporting live from the event. You can keep up to date via our articles, forum posts and twitter feeds on our NFU conference landing page.
Feedback via Twitter (#nfuconf) and on the forums and we'll respond to your queries where we can...
We've just launched a poll this morning offering the chance to win a trip to South Africa.
As the world's leaders meet in Copenhagen, we're asking how the planet can feed itself.
Specifically, the poll asks: Of the factors listed in the poll below, which ONE do you believe will have the biggest positive impact on feeding
the world?
The five factors are:
1. Removal of trade barriers
2. Government intervention in food production
3. Investment in R & D
4. Uptake of new technologies and genetic modification
5. Broader expertise through education and training
You can vote on the poll and enter the prize draw here
We've been running our new-look polls for a couple of months now.
It's worth taking a look at the home page and casting your vote to help create a better picture of the industry's views on key issues. Takes a few seconds to vote...
http://www.fwi.co.uk
In case you've missed it we've done a short 2 minute video to demonstrate to you all the key features of FWi. Take a look and see for yourself what the site has to offer.
Farming may not be noted as being the sexiest of occupations, but we're doing our best to debunk the myth that it's an unsexy industry.
That's why we've launched a search for Britain's sexiest male and female farmers!
And it seems it's getting wider media attention. Farmlife editor Tim Relf has already done two regional radio interviews this morning!
You can find out more here about Britain's sexiest farmer.
For the more perceptive among you, we have upgraded the academy articles to a cleaner and universal template. There are still some tweaks to do, and a certain amount of "cleaning up" of the old HTML from the old templates, but over the next couple of weeks we should work our way through this.
Next up will be the deployment of our new articles template.
Once they're done there really will only be a handful of pages left on the old-style site...
Finally the new-look FWI is rolled out. It's a great day here at FW towers after months of headaches.
There still some elements of the site (articles for instance) that are on the old platform and these will be moved over in the comign weeks but in the main, you should enjoy browsing the new pages 
If you cannot see the navigation labels on the FWi home page this morning, don't panic. We can't see them either and we will restore them ASAP.
There is an error on FWi which means a site map page is diplaying when
you click on a channel page such as livestock, arable etc. We are
working to fix this ASAP. Apologies for any inconvenience. 
Shadow DEFRA secretary Nick Herbert made all the right noises in his speech at the NFU conference not least with his announcement of a campaign calling for country-of-origin labelling of food.
But that was all that was new. Most of his speech was littered with well-worn farming jokes. For instance the one about the farmer who won the lottery and when asked what he would do with the winnings said he'd keep farming until they were all gone.
But in the Q & A session there was a better joke from a delegate who said government ministers were like nappies - they need changing regularly and often for the same reasons.
Keep up to date with all the news on our NFU conference special report page
National Farmers Union president Peter Kendall has kicked off the NFU annual conference in Birmingham with a call for the government and others to take a long-term view of agriculture and its contribution to the national economy.
Mr Kendall quotes the chairman of Rolls Royce who recently said the country needed a broad portfolio of assets. "If you are a one-trick pony you have to hope that people continue to to like your trick. If they stop liking it, you become pet food." Agriculture, Mr Kendall implies, is a crucial asset worth fostering, otherwise I guess, the UK will become even more of a dogs dinner that it currently is.
But the biggest irony is that Mr Kendall's theme of looking long term, means that (as he points out) there's likely to be a Tory government soon. Cosying up to Hilary Benn might, therefore, be wasted effort.
The NFU's leaders should be shouting a round for shadow minister Nick Herbert...be interesting to see who they're entertaining at the bar!
Keep up to date with the NFU conference live on our special report page.
Another busy week draws to a close.
Look out for the FW team at the NFU conference next week, if you're going, and if not, you can catch up with all the latest from the conference, including live streaming by clicking onto our NFU conference special report page.
Like London buses, it seems advertising complaints being upheld are coming all at once.
Today we're running two stories - one about a BPEX campaign and the other an NFU TB campaign.
Both examples really make you realise how strong these "anti" groups are in comparison with the farming organisations.
Neither example in my view warrants the adverts being withdrawn and yet Compassion in World Farming and The Badger Trust have won the day.
The real sadness is that both were examples of where the campaigns sought to promote the welfare of animals only to be squashed by left-leaning anti-farming quangos.
Farmers should all become bus-travelling atheists...they've a better chance of the ASA's approval.
I've been getting some positive reports from users about the improvements to the home page speed. I hope this is now a more universal experience
FWi's blogs have been going great guns this week, particularly Taking Stock which is camped up in Perth, Scotland for the bull sales; and Phil Clarke's business blog, our latest addition to the FWi blog stable.
Phil's just posted a comment on the latest report on the state of the dairy industry and I see Gwyn Jones has replied...nice to see Phil's musings are being read at the highest level.
Meanwhile Taking Stock's Jon Long has a rather long (excuse the pun) journey back to his home in Kent, but he's posted reams from the sales in Perth which I can tell has a good following judging by the surge in page views I can see on my metrics monitor. You can also view the image gallery from Perth.
A couple of new fixes have been deployed this afternoon which should help improve home page speed.
The first is a fix to a troublesome server - it's taken a while to isolate the problem but we think we have now.
The second relates to the feed which produces the images from FWiSpace on the home page. This has been better optimised and also changed so that you can more easily view the rest of the gallery from which the image came when you click on it.
Hope this helps things for all of you patient and loyal users. We are working very hard to keep improving things for you.
8.24am - Monday: Our FWi forecast is not correct and we are working to fix the file to bring you an accurate forecast. please bear with us.
In our on-going effort to improve the home page download speed, we've deployed two more fixes this afternoon, and certainly here at FW HQ the page seems to be loading more quickly. I hope this is your experience too.
We've launched a new blog - Phil Clarke's business blog.
Phil is our global and economics editor and will be bringing you regular updates and insight into the agribusiness world: What's happening in the markets and why, and much more.
Take a look. He's already got some feedback to his first post.
http://www.fwi.co.uk/blogs/agribusiness/
We have deployed a fix this afternoon which we hope will improve home page load speeds. For the technical among you, we've altered the cach on the weather widget as that seemed to be haning at times and therefore jamming the rest of the page.
Here at FW it does look to us as if this has improved things. I'd like to hear if it's better for you too. We've another fix to deploy tomorrow which should make things better still.
Thanks for your patience.
I know users have been experiencing problems with the load speed of the home page.
We are working very hard to rectify this. Without going into exhaustive detail, it's to do with the density of database calls we're making to populate all the components of the home page. Making amendments to the caching should help and this is part of the fixes we hope to deploy next week.
In the meantime, if the page doesn't load properly you can sometimes clear the problem by refreshing the page (hit Ctrl F5). This sends a new data request to build the page.
If that's no good, closing your browser and going back in can help.
Sorry for the problems, but we're doing what we can to fix them and to keep you informed.
Traffic on the site has gone through the roof in the past 10 days. I'm hoping the new design accounts for some of it, but I guess it's also the rush back to work after the Xmas break!
If you do have any issues with the new home page do please post them here. It helps us to hear from you so we can make changes to improve the service...
Georgina Downs accuses NFU and others of distorting the truth, but I've just sat in the car listening to PM on Radio 4 on which she implied that yields from organic crops will be little different to those of conventional crops and therefore the removal of pesticides will have no impact on productivity.
As an impartial journalist I prefer to deal in the facts and really Georgina if you want to engage in credible debate you should at least get a grip of reality.
One can argue about how many pesticides will be affected and whether those ones are important to UK/EU agriculture or not, but to imply farmers get comparable yields from organic as conventional is just plain misleading.
Labour's proposed National Internship Scheme got me thinking. Should agriculture get involved?
Already it looks as though one or two major companies (such as Barclays) are interested in exploring ways to alleviate the potential problem of 400,000 graduates not finding jobs this summer.
Agriculture as we know is suffering from a lack of new blood, and maybe the UK farming unions could work together as farming's "default" employer, to use this scheme . How good would it be to exploit the recession to position agriculture for the next generation?
It looks as though the government isn't offering any money, but it might be worth Kendall et al sounding out the skills secretary John Denham...
It's been a long journey but at last our our new-look home page is live (see my previous post).Hats off to our technical team who have worked hard and late to get us to where we are.
There are still various issues to resolve so don't think this is IT! Our techy guys are still beavering away in the background.
This is an exciting development for FWi. Not only have we redesigned, but we're moving the whole site onto a new platform which will allow us to be much more fluid in making changes to pages.
I'm hoping the rest of the site will follow within the next two weeks but this home page should give you a real sense of how the rest of the site will look shortly.
This is a coming of age for FWi and as our teaser ads say: "Agriculture is evolving".
Do please raise any issues/ provide feedback as it's your experiences with this new page that will help us iron out any problems.
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