Farmer Focus: Just about beating the cropping budget
© Phil Weedon I was at my local machinery dealer waiting for combine parts to be picked while desperately trying not to succumb to the lure of shiny spanners.
It was harvest-time, and I found myself locked in conversation with a fellow farmer.
He said something that struck a chord: over the past two years, he hadn’t managed to hit a single cropping budget.
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If I’d reacted like one of my young adults, I’d have thrown my hands in the air and shouted, “Oh my God, same!”
Instead, I settled for a sympathetic nod, trying not to give the game away.
A few days earlier I had had another conversation, this time with someone who spends his professional life talking to farmers across the country.
He told me that the fixed cost target for most combinable crop growers is £500/ha.
Again, I shook my head slowly, eyebrows raised to signal that such a figure sounded outrageously high.
In reality, if you added 51p to that “monkey” (ask your local cockney), you’d be staring straight into the honest heart of the Shimpling spreadsheet.
We adjusted our budgets down a couple of years ago, only to miss even those in harvests 2023 and 2024. Not much fun for us or for our clients.
In my last column I wrote that harvest 2025 was by no means a disaster at Shimpling Park Farm, and that still stands.
Now, knowing our actual yields and assuming we achieve our budgeted price per tonne, we will have beaten our budget, by a very precise 3.6883%.
Only just enough, but at least it puts some fun back into the game.
As my combine parts finally arrived, he added one last comment: “There are going to be some big changes in combinable farming over the next two years.”
It already feels like they’re playing out as I write.
