Ben, what did you make of it? Well,

I think from an agricultural perspective, there wasn't a great deal in there, was there, for us really, which, as you say, after the horror show of two years ago, maybe the lack of surprise comes as no surprise to many people.

I mean, it was John Healy's first budget it's clearly got kind of a high wire act in terms of balancing the national budget but some of the reaction to it from the uh from farming leaders has been has been very strong which i think tells its uh tells its own story but the main things for uh for farming were that the red uh diesel duty uh cut will be extended alongside the wider uh 5p duty cut until next year uh national minimum wage is going to increase by 3.9 percent which is going to have an impact for a lot of employers.

Business rates threshold for small business relief for retail, hospitality and leisure businesses is going to go from £12,000 to £18,000, which for certain farmers who diversified could have implications.

There was also some other announcements that the funding of up to £15 million to build on farm reservoirs, which was announced back in August, but there was a point made before the budget that that's going to be online soon.

And we've also had the announcement around tariff cuts to fertiliser from November, which has kind of been welcomed, but there's obviously other things looming on the fertiliser front.

Not least the fact that it's absolutely sky high prices, which is no good for anybody.

solve this issue that we may or may not get ourselves into um all the sort of bits and bobs around the fertilizer tax and and the 5p off on red diesel great thanks very much but when the prices are as high as they are it doesn't make a huge amount of difference there's part of me that's quite i'm quite pleased it's quiet because two years ago it was just you know a disaster zone but i feel like we've just missed a massive opportunity

so Digging a little bit deeper in the PR point of view, what can good PR bring, both from magazines and the publishing side of things, but also the businesses that want to get that message out?

So I'm not being blasé that when I say that when I joined Pinstone, I didn't realize quite how much during my time at Fire's Guardian we used to use Pinstone content.

And I think that that is, you know, I would always trust my section editors to get on with.

what they were doing into source from where they saw fit.

And if you think about it at Farmers Guardian on a really big week in autumn or spring, we could have 170 page edition of the magazine, probably 110 pages of which would be editorial when you have those big supplements.

And I think that, you know, within the journalistic context, good PR can really just lend itself to providing you with good content that kind of hits the mark that you're trying to achieve.

And I always say that, you know, good PR content respects both the journalist and the client.

So as you head into your next venture, what learnings will you be bringing to your next in-house comms role, do you think?

Do you think it is actually achievable?

[laughs] Well, I think that is the criticism that, that these reports always come, come in for, because ultimately they're, they're quite often created within that kind of policy vacuum, aren't they? I mean, th- this would've been worked on quite a bit in the past, and if we, if we reflect on the changes of this week, we've got a new, a new prime minister, Andy Burnham, in number 10.

Uh, we've got Angela Eagle, who's come back into Defra.

Um, she was the farming minister.

Now she's the Defra secretary.

So Emma Reynolds is on the way out.

So you've got this kind of wholesale change again at, at, at the head of Westminster and within Number 10 Downing Street.

[laughs]