This Week in Farming: Trump, classic tractors and SFI snatch

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). After a whipsaw week, OSR settled above its week-earlier levels, as did fat lambs in the live ring, with both well above year-earlier levels too.

Now, on with the show.

Trump in town

A tremor went through farm lobbyists this week as Air Force One delivered president Donald Trump for his historic second state visit.

He brought with him a phalanx of senior cabinet members including agriculture secretary Brooke Rollins, who, as I note in my editorial, met new Defra secretary Emma Reynolds.

As some farming groups joined the anti-Trump protests in Westminster, the NFU and Dairy UK feared further food concessions in the US-UK trade deal.

But Ms Rollin’s key objective seems to have been to celebrate the existing US win on bioethanol.

Farm safety fears

Away from the political hubbub, the real crisis on farms continues to be our industry’s appalling safety record, with a fresh spate of fatal accidents bringing grief to families and friends of the victims.

Our recent Farm Safety Stars campaign is aimed at educating children to be ambassadors for safety in their families, helping them learn about the risks on farm through a series of 12 age-appropriate worksheets.

You can download PDFs of the resources to print them out for your children.

Old but gold

Farmers Weekly‘s front cover story this week features Wiltshire farmer Hugh Bartlett’s Ford FW-30, one of several older tractors in his fleet that he says are helping him keep the costs of farming to a minimum.

We’ve got new tractor fans covered as well with stories on New Holland’s latest upgrades to its T7 series and a new transmission and other updates for Valtra’s base spec 105hp A105 and 115hp A115 tractors.

And fans of big brutes may be interested to learn there’s going to be even more horsepower for the monster Case IH Steiger Quadtrac, with the firm upping the 16-litre FPT Cursor engine to an output of 853hp.

Cropping decisions

Westerwolds are known for their output, but their quick-growing ability is also being praised by a Ceredigion dairy farmer as a method for holding on to soil after maize as a cover crop.

“It doesn’t make sense not to grow a cover crop of grass after maize – the cost of getting the job done is nothing compared with the benefits,” says Llyr Griffiths.

One crop that might be out of favour next season, though, is sugar beet, as a marginal price of £30/t will see growers trim cropping area back to their highest-yielding fields.

Louise Impey spoke to farmers, consultants and NFU Sugar Board chairman Kit Papworth to find out more about what’s in store for 2026.

Who’s up and who’s down?

Quids-in this week and feeling merry (perhaps) is the Rural Payments Agency after it decided to shake down farmers in England who were in the 2022 SFI scheme for £250 each after revealing their management fee was overpaid because Defra shut the scheme early.

Feeling glum are fans of the Royal Welsh Spring Festival after the Royal Welsh Agricultural Society announced the annual event, which it acquired in 2001, is to be scrapped.

Listen to the podcast

Don’t forget to tune in to the Farmers Weekly podcast, with Johann Tasker, Louise Impey and Hugh Broom.

This week, they dig further into cropping plans for next season, look at a fresh plan for British food producers penned by a new group made up of rural Labour MPs, and talk about jobs ahead of a new conference helping people carve a career in agriculture.

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