The Source

In 2024, arable farmers across the UK saw a huge increase in ergot in cereal crops and felt the financial impact through grain rejections and the loss of premium prices for their hard-earned harvests. The reasons were hardly a mystery. Difficult drilling conditions in autumn 2023, followed by a warm, wet spring and a cool, rainy summer, created ideal conditions for the fungus to germinate and spread. Thanks to a return to drier weather, ergot levels fell again in 2025, but the disease still poses a real risk to farmers’ bottom lines.

Minette Batters’ recent Farming Profitability Report predicts farm input costs will rise to 30% higher in 2026 than they were in 2020. With procurement of inputs typically representing 30-70% of any farm business’s revenue, it’s clear that effective procurement can have a major impact on profitability. AF’s Head of Machinery & General Inputs, Kristian Dunham, explores how procurement thinking is already embedded in farming - and why rising costs highlighted in recent analysis from Minette Batters mean procurement strategy will become even more important.

The Greenhouse Gas (GHG) protocol provides standards and guidance for how carbon footprints should be constructed and calculated, to ensure that the results are comparable between businesses or projects. After many years of draft versions and public consultations, the GHG protocol has released a finalised ‘Land Sector and Removals Standard’ (LSRS)

This Nuffield Farming Scholarship Study focuses on farms that have chosen the route of direct selling, particularly where value has been added to the farm’s primary produce - for example, when a dairy farm uses its milk to produce cheese or ice cream

Growing crops without pesticides is technically and economically feasible under certain conditions. Creating such production systems involves diversifying crop rotations, developing appropriate marketing channels, and determining the economic value of the products from these systems. These are the findings of a study in France on nine cropping systems (agronomic crops and multicrop-livestock systems) designed in conjunction with extension specialists and farmers.

AFBI has been leading research that shows that separating slurry into solid and liquid fractions can help reduce phosphorus, improve nutrient use, protect water quality and even create new income streams.

To find out more about the role currently being played by native equine breeds, the Rare Breeds Survival Trust (RBST) has carried out a survey to examine the extent to which they are being used. The survey was carried out as part of the HBLB-funded RBST Native Equine Project and received 40 responses

The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 represents the biggest shake-up of residential tenancy law in a generation. While much of the attention has focused on urban private landlords, the changes are just as important for farmers and rural estates providing accommodation to employees.

This overview summarises the updated carbon footprint assessment completed using the farm carbon toolkit for the Allerton Project’s farming operations for the season 2024/25. It highlights the main contributors to the farm’s low net emissions and explores future risks, particularly those linked to uncertainty around the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) scheme.

The Agricultural Price Index (API) reflects the change in the price farmers have paid for goods and services. After the volatility seen in 2022, prices have been more stable over the last few years.

Results indicate that microalgae, insects, and single-cell proteins exhibit crude protein levels comparable to soybean meal. Moreover, insects, seaweeds, and animal by-products (ABPs) often present superior essential amino acid profiles and high intestinal digestibility. From an environmental perspective, insects, seaweeds and microalgae offer excellent land-use efficiency and significant enteric methane mitigation (17–74.6%), though current economic viability is hindered by high processing costs and emerging supply chains.

Decades of research has shown promise for using microbiome science to solve several problems facing agriculture, but these findings have not yet been translated to practical recommendations for growers, according to a team of scientists in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences.