Farm Life

With Brexit and the climate change agenda, the agriculture community probably felt the 2020s were going to be challenging.

Rachel and husband Stephen and family farm 66ha (163 acres) mainly tenanted at Baildon, West Yorkshire. They milk 85 pedigree Holstein and Jerseys, selling milk to Meadow Foods. They also have an on farm vending machine. Their son, Ben, works full-time on farm and daughters Felicity and Zoe also work in the agricultural sector. Rachel is a director of the local farmers’ market.

As I sit down to write this we are in the middle of some seriously wet weather.

As world leaders gathered in Glasgow this week for the COP26 climate summit, the irony of their collective carbon footprint was lost on no one.

David Mitchell, 25, is a third generation farmer, farming 200 native suckler cows and 750 ewes outside Wiston, Biggar. A past Biggar YFC chair, he is currently Lanarkshire vice-chair and sits on the National Ag and Rural Affairs Committee.

It is easy for livestock farmers to become depressed about the apparent ascendancy of the vegan lobby but according to one expert there is a positive story to tell about meat.

Farmers in England and Wales want to move away from centralised supply chains where they have little say over prices and not enough connection to shoppers, new research from Sustain has found.

Farmers and rural communities in Cumbria have been hit hard by heavy rainfall, sparking Met Office warnings of ’life-threatening’ floods.

MPs on the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee have warned farmers are at risk of going bust during a ‘haphazard’ transition away from the Basic Payment Scheme (BPS).

Pumpkin picking has become the latest craze in the UK on the run up to Halloween, with umpteen patches being set-up on farms throughout the country. Katrina Macarthur finds out more.