Last week saw our teams across Wales attending a myriad of county shows, meeting with politicians and stakeholders, as well as catching up with members and FUW Insurance Services customers.

The shows are an important element of the farming calendar; not only do they allow us to showcase the very best our sector has to offer, but it also highlights the wide reach agriculture has and why farming matters.

We saw many second and third sector businesses at the shows and they all rely on agriculture. The rural economy keeps turning because of our industry. We were therefore extremely concerned about news that further spending cuts are expected from the Welsh Government and that each Minister needs to make spending cuts, including agriculture.

This will be a concern to many farm businesses. We have just seen the Welsh Agriculture Minister pull the plug on the Glastir scheme and we are now potentially expecting further reductions in the budget that goes directly to our family farms and by default the second and third sector businesses that rely on our industry.

No administration is immune from spending cuts and we know that inflation and rising costs affect all sectors. However, the knock-on impact for the agriculture sector has the potential to cripple the wider rural economy and our small and medium sized family farms.

Therefore, further cuts for agriculture would be wholly unacceptable. Farmers are being asked to do much more than ever and our industry is facing a bill for compliance with new Welsh Government water resources legislation that is the best part of £ half a billion and equates to an average of tens of thousands of pounds each for the family farms that feed our nation at a time of global food shortages.

We must also remember that the amount of direct support received by farmers in Wales has already fallen by about 25 per cent in real terms since 2015, and will fall further due to inflation this year - so any nominal cuts to what Welsh farmers receive would exacerbate what is already a massive cut to payments that make up an average of around 80 per cent of Welsh farm profits.

We strongly urge the Welsh Government and the UK Government to address the shortfall in funding for Wales and by default for agriculture. Members can rest assured that we raised this with politicians from all political parties who we met with at the shows, including the First Minister Mark Drakeford and Welsh Agriculture Minister Lesley Griffiths and we will keep lobbying in Cardiff and Westminster to ensure we have the budgets we need to support our family farms in Wales.