This is the time of year when I visit Sussex cattle breeders to select the best pure Sussex beef steers for collection as soon as spring arrives. The days of having our own breeding herd are long gone but it is always a pleasure to visit the farms each year and catch up with my fellow livestock farmers.
They have done the hard working by getting the dams into calf and ensuring successful births to produce healthy cattle which we buy at around twelve-month-old. I also like to see the dams with this years’ crop of newborn calves, always hoping there are plenty of bull calves as opposed to heifers, ensuring I have a good supply for next year.
They inevitably ask when I will be collecting them, to which my answer must be, “when it eventually stops raining and we can turn them straight out onto the fields”. To be fair there were a couple of nice warm days last week which did help dry the surface, but the fields are just as sodden as its raining yet again.
The beef prices have held up which is good when selling Ote Hall grass-fed Sussex beef to local butchers and farm shops but the price I am having to pay for the yearlings is quite alarming. Hopefully, some of this spring intake will end up being sold in our yet to be Farm Shop and Country Kitchen. But, as we have yet to start laying the foundations due to a funding crisis, time will tell.
It is difficult to keep off the subject of politics. What happens in Westminster impacts on the farming community more than I believe politicians understand. When the PM stood outside No 10 following the recent Rochdale by-election I held my head in my hands – what was that all about? Why raise the profile of the ‘man in the hat’ and his cronies who will hopefully be gone before anyone really notices them?
What is certain and has been since he stepped into No 10, the current PM is never going to win an election. The country needs proper leadership, people with charisma, and a vision, not pen pushers and backroom politicians. Clearly, there are precious few if any on either side, in Westminster.
The NFU has a new President, will Tom Bradshaw buck the trend and persuade the government to actually listen to the farmer’s representative? There was very little in the Budget to put a spring in our steps other than to confirm that agricultural property relief from inheritance tax is to be extended to land managed under environmental agreements. I should hope so too. Unfortunately Mr Hunt has not confirmed that farmers entering biodiversity net gain or natural capital markets can roll the proceeds untaxed directly into their farming or diversification projects, which is something he has been asked to address.
They have done the hard working by getting the dams into calf and ensuring successful births to produce healthy cattle which we buy at around twelve-month-old. I also like to see the dams with this years’ crop of newborn calves, always hoping there are plenty of bull calves as opposed to heifers, ensuring I have a good supply for next year.
They inevitably ask when I will be collecting them, to which my answer must be, “when it eventually stops raining and we can turn them straight out onto the fields”. To be fair there were a couple of nice warm days last week which did help dry the surface, but the fields are just as sodden as its raining yet again.
The beef prices have held up which is good when selling Ote Hall grass-fed Sussex beef to local butchers and farm shops but the price I am having to pay for the yearlings is quite alarming. Hopefully, some of this spring intake will end up being sold in our yet to be Farm Shop and Country Kitchen. But, as we have yet to start laying the foundations due to a funding crisis, time will tell.
It is difficult to keep off the subject of politics. What happens in Westminster impacts on the farming community more than I believe politicians understand. When the PM stood outside No 10 following the recent Rochdale by-election I held my head in my hands – what was that all about? Why raise the profile of the ‘man in the hat’ and his cronies who will hopefully be gone before anyone really notices them?
What is certain and has been since he stepped into No 10, the current PM is never going to win an election. The country needs proper leadership, people with charisma, and a vision, not pen pushers and backroom politicians. Clearly, there are precious few if any on either side, in Westminster.
The NFU has a new President, will Tom Bradshaw buck the trend and persuade the government to actually listen to the farmer’s representative? There was very little in the Budget to put a spring in our steps other than to confirm that agricultural property relief from inheritance tax is to be extended to land managed under environmental agreements. I should hope so too. Unfortunately Mr Hunt has not confirmed that farmers entering biodiversity net gain or natural capital markets can roll the proceeds untaxed directly into their farming or diversification projects, which is something he has been asked to address.
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