This Week in Farming: Harvest, SFI update and Mona Dairy

Hello and welcome to the latest edition of This Week in Farming, the quickest way to catch up on the biggest stories from Farmers Weekly in the last seven days.

Before we get to them, here’s your latest market prices, including another big jump for lamb prices on the week, and red diesel now almost 10p/litre cheaper than this time last year.

Now, on with the show.

Harvest update

With harvest progressing rapidly, analysts have pushed up the expected size of the UK wheat crop, after favourable weather helped very low expectations for this year’s small cropping area creep a little bit higher.

There are wild swings in harvest performance of all crops at a farm level after the awful conditions experienced by many last winter and spring, with rapeseed perhaps the most variable.

Good crops are still to be found though. Suffolk farm manager Ryan McCormack pushed his crop rotation out to one in 12, as well as making significant establishment changes, which he says helped protect the crop and bolster yields.

Ryan spoke to deputy arable editor Emma Gillbard.

People management: Dairy edition

Happy employees are at the core of any successful large business, which is why the Livestock team focused on them in this week’s Dairy Update. Here’s three articles that tackle many common issues:

• Tips on motivating staff during block calving
• How a business develops young people to manage dairy farms
• Why it is important to do a staff learning review

Update to Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI)

A raft of changes have been made to the latest version of Defra’s entry tier environmental scheme, the SFI, with some farm advisers warning that the scheme is getting increasingly complex.

This perhaps helps understand why many farmers are missing opportunities to get paid for relatively straightforward actions, such as the moorland survey option, open to upland farmers.

However, uptake has been strong overall, with Strutt & Parker noting this week that more than 200,000ha of farmland had been temporarily taken out of food production by those already in the scheme.

Four jobs, one cultivator

There’s nothing the machinery team likes to do more than salute a money-saving workshop invention, and this week, it’s the turn of Essex farmer Andrew Metson, who has modified a Vaderstad Carrier to do straw raking and seeding as well.

And if drilling is a stop-start job in the wet again this autumn, Suffolk farmer Richard Ling is ready.

Using a dedicated conversion pack, he’s upgraded a spring tine cultivator into a lightweight drill for catch, cover and cash crops.

Who’s up and who’s down?

Feeling positive this week are breeding ewe vendors after a blistering start to ewe sale season at Thame Sheep Fair, with auctioneers reporting trade in most categories £40-50 a head higher than last year’s sale.

In a much less positive mood will be dairy farmers linked to Mona Dairy, the Welsh business that went into administration earlier this year.

Unsecured creditors, including farmers, are owed some £29m, with administrators warning that remaining funds will not be sufficient to make a distribution to them.

Listen to the podcast

Don’t forget to tune into this week’s FW podcast with Johann Tasker and guests.

You’ll find it anywhere you listen to podcasts, or free to listen to on our website.