Editor’s View: Defra are nursing punches without a decent plan
Emma Reynolds © Uwe Deffner/Alamy Stock Photo There’s rarely a time when farm business advisers and accountants aren’t reminding farmers of the need for good forward financial planning.
I hear bankers are asking a lot more questions of some of their arable clients as borrowing comes up for review, with one consultancy firm claiming to have done more cashflow analysis in the past six months than in the previous several years combined.
And after a period when many in the dairy sector have enjoyed a decent margin, it looks like the pendulum is swinging back towards tighter times, with buyers large and small sending prices into reverse this week.
See also: Fresh SFI delay storing up ‘massive problems’ for farmers in 2026
About the author
So perhaps more scrutiny will shortly be falling on how good a plan they have for their spending too.
Still, it is hard to shake off the perception in some quarters that this sort of work is somehow rather nerdish and uncool – or even a waste of time, given how hard it is in farming to predict the future.
Instead, the people in agriculture that many of us instinctively admire are usually those practical types that, when a crisis blows up out of nowhere, manage to keep a cool head and find a way through it.
Take for example operators such as Allan WJ Wilson, this week’s interviewee in Contractor Comment, who retells how he battled his combine fire with the help of neighbouring farmers and then – with superb dealer support – kept the pause in harvesting to a minimum.
Yet it is the details hidden later in the article that reveal he runs a tight ship on the financial side as well, notably that he is already weighing up all his decisions about next year’s fleet.
Many of you will know boxing’s Mike Tyson’s quote about everyone having a plan until they get punched in the face.
A lot of farmers just call that another day at the office. Poor old Defra sure has had a bloody nose for a large part of the year, too. It’s hard not to feel sorry for them sometimes.
Our coverage of the 2024 Labour party conference saw farming lobbyists lamenting a lack of a plan and vision for farming.
Twelve months on, not a great deal has changed.
As we report this week, it seems that next April is now the earliest that English farmers can hope for the Sustainable Farming Incentive scheme to open, putting pressure on those who had budgeted for income from delivering environmental services that now won’t be forthcoming.
The best the new Defra secretary Emma Reynolds could manage to say at an NFU fringe event was that she was committed to listening to – and understanding – farmers, making herself sound like an explorer who had just stumbled across a previously undiscovered tribe.
I suppose, in fairness, that is how most Labour MPs treat the countryside.
But while the change in ministerial team has exacerbated the delays, the department has also had to battle a swathe of other personnel changes, IT problems, a major fight with the Treasury and much more.
Farmers attempting to budget for the future should be putting in zero pounds from the government until such such time as Defra demonstrates it is a credible partner with agriculture again.