A combine that went up within two hours of starting work sparked five weeks of hard-won experience on The Farming Forum: 110 contributions on what starts combine fires, from failed bearings and DPF regens to static on plastic panels, and what prevents them. Insurers discount premiums 15% for accredited suppression systems, yet neither manufacturers nor dealers offer them on new machines. After a second tinder-dry harvest, that distribution gap is the question the trade is left holding.

Read More →

A resident’s video of a slurry tanker rounding a village corner has The Farming Forum asking whether the poor road reputation of young tractor drivers is deserved. Across 101 contributions, farmers and contractors debated speed, phone use, a Mickey mouse tractor test, telematics that already log every speed reading, and whether recruitment pressure is putting the least experienced staff on the most public-facing job. The unresolved question: does the industry act on its own data before a formal test arrives?

Read More →

Breeding sheep sales opened 2026 in full cry, with mule shearlings £50 a head up on last year and champion pens at £330. But a two-month conversation on The Farming Forum shows a trade bracing itself: bluetongue spreading, drought-starved grass, ewes going home unsold at recent sales and warnings that the money may run out before the sheep do. What farmers are saying about prices, replacements and margins, counted and quoted, with the full analysis and slide deck for the trade.

Read More →

The farm vote has stopped being Reform’s by default. Eight months after Reform took a clear majority of The Farming Forum’s election poll, a repeat run has the Conservatives back in front, Restore taking a sixth of the ballot from a standing start, and one voter in ten refusing to pick any party at all.

Read More →

UK livestock farms opened winter forage stocks in mid July as the driest July in 190 years burnt off grass across the south and east. A 222-contribution conversation on The Farming Forum describes suckler cows on hay in high summer, lambs weaned early onto creep feed at around £350 a tonne, farm springs dry for the first time in living memory and silage moving 90 miles. Agri Web Media analyses what the exchange signals for the feed, seed and water trade this autumn.

Read More →

Oilseed rape is back in arable plans for harvest 2027. A Farming Forum conversation with 108 contributions and 8,848 views follows growers expanding their OSR area for the margin, waiting out a bone-dry August to drill, and weighing hybrid seed bills against farm-saved alternatives, all under the shadow of pyrethroid-resistant cabbage stem flea beetle. With AHDB forecasting a 30 per cent area rebound from 2025’s 42-year low, the trade question is whether this autumn’s establishment rewards the bet.

Read More →

Farmers on The Farming Forum spent six weeks measuring the 2026 drought against 1976 and 1995, and by the time the rain arrived the questions had turned commercial: how much grass is dead, what the dry summer has done to stretched livestock budgets, and why the water was not there when farms needed it. With 107 contributions and 6,315 views, the conversation tracks the drought declarations, the £65 million support package with no hardship payment, and the reseeding and water storage decisions now facing the trade.

Read More →

Accounts of fumigated cargo holds and infested shipments opened one of the summer’s more pointed conversations on The Farming Forum, and it quickly became a referendum on farm assurance. Across 138 contributions and 7,080 views, growers asked why UK grain must be Red Tractor assured to enter feed mills while imported grain arrives with no farm-level assurance at all. Arable and livestock voices pulled in different directions on the remedy, but on the double standard the conversation spoke with one voice.

Read More →

A farmer’s question about whether to fit a front end loader to a Case IH Puma or buy a used 120hp loader tractor drew 106 contributions and 4,415 views on The Farming Forum. The conversation split into two equal camps, tractor and loader against dedicated handlers, with retrofit loaders quoted at £12,000 to £16,000 fitted and new loader tractor promotions from around £65,000 with 0% finance. Second-hand condition risk and field damage from heavy telehandlers gave each side its sharpest arguments.

Read More →

A 173-contribution Farming Forum census of combines in daily use found working machines of 20, 30 and nearly 40 years old cutting commercially significant acreages. Contributors linked the stalled replacement cycle to machine prices, shrinking combinable acreage and a maintenance culture that makes rebuilding cheaper than trading. AEA figures show combine orders down 30% in 2024/25, the weakest in the association’s records.

Read More →