ON a Nottinghamshire farm last Sunday, 2,500 litres of diesel were syphoned off and stolen by

unwelcome visitors.

Recent statistics are pretty horrifying in that rural fuel thefts have rocketed from 849 in 2011/12 to 7,447 last year; and those are only the reported incidents.

There is little more to say except to make you aware of the problem.

 

Beef trade drops

It is really disappointing that since Christmas the beef trade has been under continuous pressure and yet perversely store cattle have held their price.

The slide gathered momentum when some of the larger Irish controlled abattoirs announced that they were no longer going to use bull beef on the pretext that the meat was killing dark.

Everyone in the trade knows this was pretty much rubbish and used as an excuse to drive down the price.

The effect on the bull trade was immediate, which fell by 20p/kilo overnight but gradually this has had a knock on effect to the steers and heifers; and this has culminated in a drop of around 40p/50p/kilo over the 6 month period.

This means that the average beast ready for slaughter is worth about £300 less than it was; and that is clearly not a situation that can continue for very long.

It is interesting that I got an email from Northern Ireland last week indicating that they were having similar trouble with the main wholesalers artificially manipulating the market.

Over there one of the principal abattoirs has decided to pay farmers £50 less if the animal has been on more than four farms during its lifetime.

In addition, they are imposing more penalties if there has been a movement through a livestock market in the last 90 days. It is insidious the way they are trying to turn the screw on the live market and to eliminate competition so that they can totally control price.

On the above evidence it is important to keep supporting the auction to keep as many marketing channels open as possible.

 

Cap 2015 update

Another update was displayed on our valuers website this morning showing more examples of what is to come next year and the preparatory work we all have to do to avoid penalties.

The definition of permanent grass is becoming clearer and is now defined as any land which has been in grass for more than five years and that includes fields which have been reseeded without an intervening crop.

Projecting this through into a livestock farming situation we can look at a farmer with 50 hectares of eligible agricultural area of which five hectares are put in with spring barley each year, 20 hectares are temporary grass rotated with the barley and the other 25 hectares is permanent grass.

With the 10 hectare threshold for Crop Diversification and 15 hectare threshold for Ecological Focus Areas, (EFA) he is caught by both of these regimes.

For CD he already has 2 crops on his arable land, namely temporary grass and spring barley but the main crop is 80 per cent of the area and he will therefore have to readjust his cropping each year to keep below 75 per cent for a single crop.

However, for EFA obligations more than 75 per cent of his arable area is down to temporary grass and he is therefore exempt.

You can extrapolate this type of calculation to fit your own farming enterprise and I fear the conclusion we are all going to reach is that the new CAP regime will be more complicated than the existing one. Don’t leave it too late to take advice.