This Week in Farming: Balers, bluetongue and dairy beef
Krone Big Pack 1290 HDP Gen 5 © James Andrews Welcome back to another edition of This Week in Farming, your one-stop shop for the best Farmers Weekly content from the past seven days.
First, here are your markets (opens as PDF). Lambs took a bit of a hit, and crops stayed in the doldrums (more below).
We’ve updated our monthly crop input price table, with prices down across the board on last year.
Now on with the show.
Harvest update
Farmers are racing through crops across an ever-growing swathe of the country amid continuing hot weather, with Cambridgeshire farmers Charles and Anna Leadbetter pleasantly surprised by winter barley yields despite very little rain.
Hertfordshire grower Eveey Hunter has been into the oilseed rape, and reported to deputy arable editor Emma Gillbard that OSR yields were down, with the first 100ha of crop averaging 2.5-3t/ha.
Midweek wheat prices slipped further amid reports of large grain stocks and good harvest progress in the US.
And as water abstraction bans come into force in some parts of the country, I use my editorial to press the case for a renewed focus on water resilience as a route to better food security.
Borders and bluetongue latest
Organisers of the Builth Wells NSA ram sale have said they will put on an additional two early ram sales – one in Brecon and one in Hereford – to try and mitigate some of the impact of the recent bluetongue restrictions on cross-border trade.
Industry leaders have also been calling on farmers to step up the rates of vaccination against the fertility-sapping disease in a new social media campaign.
Welsh farmers’ nerves were jangled further this week by some sharp comments from first minister Eluned Morgan as they wait for a big Sustainable Farming Scheme update at the Royal Welsh Show later this month.
Square baler scrutiny
No detail has been spared in the machinery section’s analysis this week of the inner workings of five of the most popular big square balers on the market.
But don’t just take our word for it – the machinery team interviewed five experienced operators about how they felt about these machines just before they started this year’s silly season.
In no particular order we have:
- Will Reed’s Krone Big Pack 1290 HDP Gen 5
- Liam Rooney’s Claas Quadrant 5300 Evolution
- Blackwater Baling’s New Holland BigBaler 1290 HD
- Robert Redman’s Massey Ferguson LB 2234 XD
- Fred Wootton’s Kuhn SB 1290 iD
Dairy beef
Is there a tension between dairy’s drive for smaller, more efficient milk-producing cows and the increasingly lucrative by-product beef from the sector?
That’s explored in this week’s livestock section, alongside articles on managing mobile water troughs and a refresher on best-practice vaccination protocols.
Last but not least, we have Farmer Focus writer Tom Hildreth’s musings on how he’s managed to integrate a new workflow into his life – being a dad!
Congratulations to him and Sophie on the birth of their baby daughter Elsie.
Who’s up and who’s down?
A new name is in the shearing record books this week, Huw Jones, who smashed through the eight-hour solo record with an astonishing total of 663. Congratulations to him.
Feeling down about the prospects for UK agriculture, but buoyant about French farming are friends of Farmers Weekly Jo Franklin and Rob Hodgkins, who revealed more details this week about why they are saying goodbye to Hertfordshire and hello to Limoges.
Listen to the podcast
Don’t forget to tune in to the Farmers Weekly podcast, with Johann Tasker, Louise Impey and Hugh Broom.Â
You’ll find it anywhere you listen to podcasts, or free to listen to on the FW website.