Jack Bosworth, FJ Bosworth & Sons. Published 28 August 2025.

Hope everyone is well.

Harvest finished for us on 8 August. It is fair to say yields tailed off the further into the wheats we got. The continuous wheats, now in their eighth year, came back at a poor 6.9 t/ha. Spring barley was also disappointing at 6.1 t/ha.

The knock-on effect of those numbers is significant. At today’s prices it means we will need to buy in roughly £100k more wheat and barley to see us through to harvest 2026. The bigger call now is when to commit to that purchase. Get the timing right and we save money. Get it wrong and we do not. That is the part of the job that does not always make it into the harvest reports.

Thanks again to the whole team for getting harvest in safely. Cultivations and other works carry on, including slurry going onto barley stubbles with buckwheat and oilseed rape drilled in behind it.

A strong run of visits on the pig side

We have had three important visits this month: our vet, our nutritionist, and SRUC. All three told us things worth sharing.

Vet visit, Joe Lunt. A good report back with a lot of praise for gilt development. We are seeing real improvements in litter size, particularly in animals weighing 160 to 170kg at service.

The headline number. Average liveborn per gilt per year is now 36.15 over the last three months, compared with 30.55 in the three months before that. That is a substantial jump in a short space of time, and credit needs to go where credit is due. Gemma brings the gilts through. Alex looks after them at farrowing. The two meet in the middle for service and gestation. Both of them deserve the recognition for the numbers we are now seeing.

Nutritionist visit, Andrew Zarkos-Smith. Andrew came in to walk the unit, discuss feedback and take samples for dispersion testing and raw material quality. Some headline figures from his work:

  • Feed wheat samples averaged 11.45% protein, which we are pleased with.
  • Feed barley samples averaged 9.95% protein.
  • Cold-pressed rape meal is testing higher in oil than previous batches have suggested.

Andrew is now updating the formulas to reflect the differences in raw material quality between harvest 2025 and harvest 2024. This is the sort of work that is invisible from the outside but matters enormously for performance over the next twelve months. If the formulas are not right for what is actually in the bin, you give performance away for the rest of the year.

Body condition scoring with SRUC

Towards the end of August, Emma Baxter from SRUC came down to carry out body condition scoring (BCS). This is part of the project we are running with SRUC, Agsenze and UWE Bristol.

The team scored 197 animals in total, made up of all our pregnant gilts and some low parity sows. The results:

  • Average BCS came in at 3.0, which is the ideal score.
  • Average caliper measurement was 14.55, against an ideal range of 13 to 15.

In plain terms: the herd is sitting right in the middle of the target range. That does not happen by accident. It is the product of consistent, quiet attention to detail from the team day in, day out. Joe and Andrew are part of that picture too, with the vet and nutrition work feeding straight back into the standards we are seeing on the floor.

It is a good moment to reflect on. Disappointing yields one side of the farm, genuinely excellent performance the other. Mixed farming in a nutshell.

Jack Bosworth runs FJ Bosworth & Sons with his father Stuart at Spains Hall, Willingale, Essex. The family business has been farming pigs and arable since 1919, with a focus on home-grown feed, on-site solar-powered milling and farm-to-fork pork through Procters Sausages. FJ Bosworth & Sons is a Farmers Weekly award winner, a National Pig Awards Sustainable Farming Award winner (2024) and Red Tractor assured.

Written by Jack Bosworth

Fourth-generation farmer at Spains Hall, Willingale. Runs the contracting team and writes most of what appears here.