The Farmers’ Union of Wales is urging members to report all incidents of livestock attacks to the police to ensure that the right actions can be taken.

FUW Deputy President Ian Rickman said: “Avoidable losses, such as those that occur when a dog chases or attacks livestock, remain a significant source of frustration for the livestock sector in Wales. 

“Industry initiatives, such as the FUW campaign “Your dog, Your responsibility” which widened the message to respecting the countryside, picking up after your dog, keeping dogs on a lead near livestock and making sure dogs don’t escape from home, have had some impact but sadly we keep hearing about more incidents recently.”

If you need advice on pre-planning applications, reviewing constraints, project viability, and master-planning, then our new partnership with RML Consultants might be just the professional helping hand you need. The FUW is therefore excited to announce our new partner contract with the company who will deliver town and country planning services for members predominantly in North Wales. 

RML was established by Managing Director Ivor Richards OBE, in 1984, to provide multi-disciplined engineering, landscape and environmental consultancy.  Originally specialising in brownfield remediation, the company gained a reputation for high-quality design in sensitive landscapes and for applying the principles of ‘working with nature’.  RML has published national guidance documents based on decades of experience and technical expertise. 

The Farmers’ Union of Wales is once again preparing for one of its key events - the annual Farmhouse Breakfast week, which will run from Monday 18 - Sunday 24 January 2021.

Under normal circumstances the FUW would be looking forward to sitting around kitchen tables with friends, family and neighbours up and down the country - sharing our thoughts, worries, concerns and anything else on our mind. Of course, given the on-going Covid-19 restrictions, the  usual way of running this campaign is sadly not an option.

FUW President Glyn Roberts said: “However, the ethos of sitting around the kitchen table to enjoy the wonderful produce our farmers produce from eggs, cheese, bacon, sausages to butters and yoghurts etc, is still very much do-able at home with our closest family.”

As we enter a New Year in which we all hope to return to some kind of normality, the UK’s genuine departure from the European Union after a lengthy divorce suggests 2021 will be anything but normal, irrespective of what progress is made in tackling the current coronavirus pandemic. Having breathed a collective sigh of relief after the UK and EU finally reached agreement on Christmas Eve - thereby avoiding the nightmare of tariffs that would have reduce farmgate prices for some products by 30% or more - from 1 January 2021 we will nevertheless start to see the impacts of non-tariff barriers which will make 2021 difficult to say the least for many Welsh businesses.

As the one-hundred-plus members who joined our Brexit webinar on December 17 learned, the Export Health Certificates required by food manufacturers to export products to the EU will cost around £150 to £200 each, meaning the total UK bill for certificates alone is expected to be between £45 million and £60 million in 2021 if exports continue at current rates. This is equivalent to between 3% and 4% of the value of current UK meat exports. Meanwhile, the additional costs of these and other non-tariff barriers are estimated to be between 4% and 8% - equivalent to a reduction of between 19p and 40p per deadweight kilo based on last year’s SQQ lamb prices.

We also have certainty regarding the budget that will replace our EU Common Agricultural Policy budget: in December 2019, the UK Government announced a Welsh BPS budget that took no account of the 15% Pillar Transfer, leaving a funding gap of £42 million. Then in November this year, they announced a Welsh funding allocation that increases this funding gap for 2021-2022 to £137 million - equivalent to a cut of around 41%.