‘Jeremy Clarkson is good for farmers – the PM let us down’
The National Farmers’ Union president tells Peter Stanford how the Government has broken its promises to support UK agriculture and food production
Minette Batters is walking to a favourite vantage point on her family farm in south Wiltshire, from where she tells me you can see the spire of Salisbury Cathedral. On the way our photographer spots a vintage tractor peeping out of a shed.
“Oh no,” says Batters. “Not a picture of me on an old tractor!”
It is an exchange that neatly sums up some of the traits that have made this 54-year-old mother of teenage twins a farmers’ leader like no other – above and beyond the fact that, when she was elected in 2018, she was the first female president of the National Farmers’ Union in its 114-year history.
The headlines that her smashing of the glass ceiling attracted would quickly have faded if Batters hadn’t made such an impression with her determination to modernise what can seem a conservative industry. “I am always told I am very direct,” she says, “which I think is a good thing in my role.”
Once back in the kitchen of her picture-postcard farmhouse, that trademark plain-speaking is quickly turned on the Government. In particular, Batters is alarmed by its failure, thus far, to spell out how the new post-Brexit regime of £2billion of farming subsidies will actually work.
And the clock is ticking, since it’s due to start in 2024 under its grandly named Environmental Land Management scheme (ELMs). “This is a government that writes the press releases and then develops the policy. We don’t have the details, we don’t know what is expected of us. We don’t know what money we are going to get for what we are doing,” as Batters puts it.
And for all her efforts to engage with ministers, she is still none the wiser. “There seems to me to be almost a rejection of coherent policy at the moment,” she says.
All they have to go on are three broad categories: “a sustainable farming initiative, a local nature recovery strategy and landscape recovery. Our main question is – where is food production in all of this?”
Batters quotes the phrase used by ministers about ELMs – “public monies” are now to be used for “public goods”.
“Is food production not a public good in the Government’s eyes?” she wonders aloud.
This seeming disinterest comes at a time of fragile supply chains, empty supermarket shelves and rising prices. “When I buy a coffee at the station, it will cost 40 times more than buying my family a bag of carrots. That’s nuts. We are devaluing products, especially fresh produce, and so people are chucking half of it away.”
Equally concerning, she continues, are the other priorities in the works for farming.
“A third of all monies available under landscape recovery, for example, are earmarked for rewilding” – the drive to put aside existing farm land and let nature take its course. The sums of money involved, Batters fears, will prompt some landowners to take back control of tenanted farms (which make up half of the total number).
“This is about landowners – not tenant farmers like me – who will get around £2,335 per hectare, a huge amount of money, for doing nothing.
“What we fundamentally need are policies to deliver sustainable agriculture. That at is what we are missing.”
Minette Hill, as she was, and her brother were brought up on the he farm she now runs. Her father ather farmed it in partnership as a tenant. He doubted ted whether a woman an could run a farm, , but his daughter has proved him wrong. The tenancy eventually came to her in 1998 (after a spell as a jockey and then caterer), and she very much in charge. Her husband, Malcolm, is not involved in its management.
"Bizarrely," she reflects on how times have changed, "I now find myself saying to my children [17-year-old twins Holly and George] 'I'll build a business, I'll keep it going. Let me know at some stage if you are interested. And of course their reply is just, `oh, OK'
They may yet come around, since as a cheerleader for fanning as a career, Batters can't be bettered.
"I think farming is the greatest job on earth," she enthuses. "You are effectively at one with nature. I don't think you can beat the feeling of seeing new life come into the world."
She is, she admits, profoundly attached to the 300 acres of chalk gravel grassland where she raises 300 suckler cows for their beef, plus around 100 sheep, as well as running a horse livery business and converting a barn into a wedding venue.
Here, her experience is in line with the drive for diversification that is increasingly essential to modern agriculture – as seen in recent news stories about Jeremy Clarkson, who was refused permission to build a café on his 1,000-acre farm in Oxfordshire.
Batters herself has waited two years for permission to convert a beautiful 16th century grain store into a holiday let. She has plenty of positive words for Clarkson.
“He has been a phenomenal force for good because he shows real farming. It’s not Countryfile,” she says. Her members agree and, in October, voted him their farming champion of the year.
Before taking on the NFU presidency, Batters had risen through the ranks of the county branch, then became deputy president, and is currently the only name on the ballot paper to be elected next month for a third two-year term.
“It is full on,” she concedes. “I start at five o’clock in the morning and it is often 24/7. I am first and foremost a mum. On the farm, I have two fantastic people who work for me. And I am pretty much full-time at the NFU in London, but I do all the work here on the farm at weekends.”
Does her good humour and resilience ever run out?
“I’ve had moments. Two months ago I ended up on a call with the Permanent Secretary at Defra. I had had a challenging few days with farmers in a bad place, and a lot of conflict going on. Very unlike me, I burst into tears in front of her. It suddenly all got too much.”
It was, she insists, a rare lapse. “I am absolutely fine, but when you bring in financial challenges – such as those many farmers in family businesses are facing [the average profit of farms in the UK is £22,800] – along with all the uncertainty about the future, things can get really difficult.”
A study last year by the Farm Safety Foundation found that as many as 88 per cent of farmers under 40 named poor mental health as their biggest problem today. A fair number of them have been on the phone to Batters.
While recent figures show a growing number of equity-rich townies buying up land in the countryside to become hobby farmers, her callers tell her a very different story of life at agriculture’s sharp end.
“I have had pig farmers recently who call me absolutely distraught. So far we have had to kill 40,000 healthy pigs.”
The shortage of abattoir workers, after EU nationals returned home in response to Covid and Brexit, made headlines in December. “It hasn’t gone away,” says Batters. “We are still in crisis.”
She has repeatedly asked for a meeting with Priti Patel, or a Home Office minister, about the urgent need to change immigration rules that have also seen crops being left to rot. But she has been rebuffed. “I know she
‘We’re an island nation, so why would we not take food security as seriously as defence?’
must be a busy woman, but it is extraordinary. A blanket push back.”
In October 2020, Batters did meet Boris Johnson to go through her concerns. It was reported at the time that he had reassured her, “I would rather die than hurt British farmers.” Has he, in her opinion, kept to that promise?
“No,” she answers. “I am often told, ‘oh you are so daft to believe him’, but in their 2019 election manifesto, they absolutely committed that they would not undermine farmers in the free trade negotiations that followed Brexit. And as far as I am concerned, this Prime Minister has.”
The Government, she adds, has given Australia, “the best deal they have ever had” at the expense of British farmers – who will have to adhere to rules that are stricter and hence more costly to follow than those which apply to Australian farmers – whose beef will be competing with theirs on a tariff-free basis in supermarkets.
“Did the Prime Minister set out to do harm? I don’t believe he did it deliberately, but he just didn’t go through the details,” she says.
On the up-side she points to her success (“after four years of lobbying”) in getting the Government to agree to employ eight “agriculture counsellors” – technical experts who will play a role in efforts to open up new markets, especially in Asia and China, for British farm produce. Australia has 22 already, so Britain has some ground to make up.
Batters met the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, at a reception recently and told him about the planned new appointments. “And he said, ‘I cannot think why we didn’t do it earlier’. I would completely agree with him.”
Could it potentially be a new role for Jeremy Clarkson? Batters won’t rule it out.
If local and national government seem determined to make her job harder, what keeps her going is the support of “the vast majority of the British people” for the farming industry.
“They want to buy more British food. They value self sufficiency and food security. We are an island nation with 60million people, so why would we not take food security as seriously as defence? They understand that.”
Given a clean slate, what would her formula be to fill the current policy vacuum around agriculture from 2024?
“I believe we have to deliver a multi-faceted return for any public investment. So that’s got to be about food production, growing the fibres of the future effectively in the new net zero world, and green energy [she has persuaded the NFU to set a target of 2040 for going carbon neutral].
“We have to do that alongside providing public access to the countryside, supporting farmland birds, all the other different things that people want.”
In other words, then, “public monies for public goods”.