This Week in Farming: FW Awards, Hawkstone Choir and FW Live

Welcome back to another edition of This Week in Farming, your regular round-up of the best content from Farmers Weekly.

First, here’s your markets (opens as PDF) as red meat prices continue their upward momentum, and this month’s update to arable chemical input prices, with a big jump for Belkar.

Now, on with the show…

Farmers Weekly Awards

…and what a show it was as the agricultural industry partied the night away at this year’s Farmers Weekly Awards on Thursday (1 October) in London.

The Hawkstone Farmers Choir was there to entertain the 950-strong crowd and returned to the stage to collect the Farming Champion Award.

Later, awards host Colin Murray’s energetic performance kept guests in the room and the thousands watching along on Facebook live entertained as we rattled through the categories, culminating in James Chapman lifting Farmer of the Year.

Dr Alastair Leake, from the Allerton Project, took home the Lifetime Achievement Award for pioneering work investigating how to better combine productive farming with biodiversity enhancement. 

And you can read through all of the other category winners here.

Farmers Weekly Live

It’s been a busy few weeks for the FW team as we also held the final of Britain’s Fittest Farmer last weekend at Jeremy Clarkson and Lisa Hogan’s Diddly Squat Farm Shop.

Check out all the winners here – it’s truly impressive how they have managed to train for this event alongside all the other segments of their busy lives.

And once we have regrouped from the Awards, FW staffers will be turning their attention to a brand new event we’re launching next July in Stoneleigh – Farmers Weekly Live.

We want to make this an essential event for farmers who are serious about staying in the business of farming – and can use this event as a source of practical, positive information to help get themselves to the next level.

Register your interest here and we’ll send you a questionnaire for you to have your say on what it would take for us to achieve that.

Moving on up

In my editorial this week, I explain a little bit more about what I mean, using some of our Awards winners as examples of farming businesses who have increased their independence and business resilience by doing things differently.

We have other examples this week of farmers who are building the future, including how the Neill family in the Scottish borders have updated their handling facilities to improve cattle weighing efficacy and safety.

And in the latest edition of Contractor Comment, the team at Ballymena-based DJ McKay and Son tell machinery editor Oli Mark their plans for a more efficient in-house workshop to help keep up with customer workloads.

Who’s up and who’s down?

Beyond our lovely Award winners, it’s users of AHDB’s Farmbench that are on the up this week after the levy board partially backtracked on its decision to close the service by pledging to maintain a reduced offering for the next 12 months.

And feeling gloomy are crop disease boffins, after SDHI fungicide-resistant phoma was discovered in UK oilseed rape crops.

Listen to the FW Podcast

Don’t forget to listen to the latest Farmers Weekly Podcast, brought to you by Johann Tasker, Hugh Broom and Louise Impey.

You’ll find it anywhere you get your podcasts, or listen free on the FW website.