40. Minette Batters: The Most Powerful Farmer in Britain

27:14I would say it's climate smart farming. It is about decreasing your food production footprint, but it's about producing more on the back of it. So really focusing on how do we tread lighter with our food production. You've got in livestock now, you've got probiotics, you've got feed additives, you've got different breeding genetics, shorter finishing times, all of those lessen the footprint. And indeed, if every cow in the world was as efficient as one in the UK, we'd only need half the number of cows. So we're leading already with our emissions. And don't forget, farming here is very much part of the natural carbon cycle, grazing grass that we can't eat, producing a high quality grass-based protein that is really good for the soil and really good for us with the high quality meat and dairy that it's producing.

28:04Then you've got nature-based solutions. So that is definitely hedges, trees, locking down, pulling back more carbon into the ground. And then you've got renewable energy effectively. And to a certain extent, the bioeconomy, I've got members who are got biorefineries. So they are tomato businesses making all of the packaging out of the tomato plant, hugely exciting stuff um so this is an exciting time not just with what we eat but for green energy for fibers and it can happen what was your reaction to rishish's recent speech about climate net zero i think there was a lot of misunderstanding or for me anyway and how it was presented so that you know there was talk of well we're not going to be having a meat tax well i hadn't realized that they were going to be having a meat tax um so so there were things like that that i just I just didn't quite get because we hadn't heard about a meat tax.

28:57And you hadn't heard you were going to get seven bits. You just saw the head of the NFU would have heard about a plan to put tax on meat. And would have had a lot to say. I think so. Yeah. So it was strange. But what we want to happen is the right policies, the right incentives in place so we can get to net zero. So we are not taxing people. And this is absolutely within the art of the doable. And that is what we've been working on, the policy solution for how we achieve it. And a few and King Charles. I have always seen him as being a really interesting advocate for nature-based solutions for farming in Britain, for small farmers.

29:32Do you reflect a little bit on what his legacy has been over the last few years and the ways that he's thought about farming and supported farmers? It was interesting, wasn't it? The Royal Visit to France and the reception that he got. I mean, I do think he's been an extraordinary leader in this area because he was talking about it long before it was trendy and fashionable and actually faced a lot of ridicule. I've been to Highgrove I've seen the changes and it's difficult farming up there on the Cotswolds you know it's brash it's it's it's hard yards of farming and he has never deviated from that path and so of course when he talks now it is with total sincerity but not only sincerity it is with complete knowledge of what he's talking about and and I think that is what now is putting him in such a good place as as a leader in this area because not only has he believed it for his entire life, he has acted on his beliefs and delivered on his own land.

30:29He needs to tidy up the swimming pool at Highgrove, though. I've swum in that. It was a bit murky. I didn't get to see that. I saw the cows and the sheep. That was all. Now, can we talk about COVID and how that was for the farming community? And also, clearly, they saw it as a health crisis. Do you think the government understood that it could quite quickly have become a food supply crisis as well. And did you worry about where that was heading? So there was a moment, I'd just been elected into my second term and we went into lockdown. So we'd had our elections at the end of February, went into lockdown in March.

31:05And I think there was absolute panic across government that supply chains were going to grind to a standstill. This is 70 million people very nearly on an island, pretty reliant on on imported food from Europe. And when it looked like food supply chains were going to break down and we weren't going to be able to get food in here. And indeed, you know, it wasn't just panic buying of loo rolls. People were panic buying many things. So we were running out of flour. We were running out of milk. So the early days were tumultuous and we were on a war footing. Effectively, we were working very closely with DEFRA colleagues.

31:41Of course, a big lack, I think, of commercial experience in departments. We obviously worked as members of the EU. Who was in charge of DEFRA at that time? George Eustace. And George Eustace is quite an interesting figure here, isn't he? Because he was in DEFRA with me. So even though there were a lot of turnovers and change, I mean, he was there for a long, long time. And I guess he was hanging around on and off for seven, eight years, which is very unusual. He was in there for a long time. But of course, nobody saw this coming. And it was pretty scary. And I think there were many in government.

32:11And I certainly had some messages from some of them basically saying you can have whatever you want. Did you take it? I did. But of course it ended and things changed. And actually it was a huge credit to everybody that food supply did come back on track. Distribution did work. And a united effort from farm to fork to feed the nation. You know, we were as farmers, we were the key workers. We were never the NHS, but we were feeding the nation. And we did together, I think, extraordinary things. And for a time, it brought people so much closer and government so much closer to the importance of food.

32:44But these things never last long and that lesson mustn't be forgotten. Rishi Sunak's non-existent tax on meat notwithstanding, how do you see the future of meat? Are you encouraged or worried by the kind of trend towards veganism and vegetarianism? Do you think we actually understand what that means in terms of food production within the UK? So here in the UK, people's diet will be what people's diet is. The medical advice right now is meat and dairy is a really important part of a healthy balanced diet. But none of us, whatever age we are, are eating enough fruit, vegetables and pulses. So it's absolutely the case that meat and dairy is part of a healthy balanced diet.

33:26And here in the UK, when we don't have feedlot systems, we're not feeding mountains of grain to our animals. We should be exporting what we're not consuming. And that's really, really important because, you know, if we put in reduction targets here, don't forget that was another focus when Henry Dimbleby was leading the food strategy, you know, was about reduction targets. We were absolutely saying, look, we can get better here. We can be climate smart agriculture, but we mustn't restrict what we're doing here. We can do it better, but let's export to other countries that don't have the luxury of the maritime climate that we do.

34:02One of the weird things which is typical of British approach to environment policy is that we offshore our problems. We feel smug about ourselves, but what we actually end up doing is pushing the problem onto New Zealand farms, Australian farms, or pushing the carbon emissions off to China. And then we continue to consume the things here. Absolutely. So I remember having this argument with the Chief Executive of the Lake District National Park who was saying, it would be much better if we don't have our sheep on the grass here. I'm thinking, well, what else is the grass going to do? And we end up importing New Zealand lamb in and doing enormous damage to the New Zealand landscape so that we can feel smug about our own landscape, but we're still eating the lamb.

34:37So I think one of the nice things about on-shoring is that we're taking responsibility for our own production rather than just consuming other people's production. But many people listening to this will have faced the rationing of eggs. We had a billion less eggs produced last year compared to 2019. And yet the British medical advice is if you're elderly, if you're young, if you're pregnant, eat British lion mark eggs. And yet we've been importing eggs from Italy. So we need to get our egg numbers back up. Salad shortages. I mean, everybody remembers all the talk of, you know, Therese coffee saying, well, have a turnip and eat seasonally and don't have a tomato.

35:15But people want, rightly so, to be able to buy what they want when they want. And we can produce a lot more of that here. So that's the key thing. What we're good at. It isn't just about proteins. The real challenge right now is being so reliant on Spain to produce all of our salads, so reliant on Morocco. A weather event in Morocco, none of the salad got here. We should be producing it here. And I visited at Glass House not that long ago, totally sustainable, pulling hot water out of a city using heat pumps and not reliant on gas. We could be producing all of the nation's peppers, all of the tomatoes pretty much all year round.

35:52Why would we not want to do that? And where do you stand on meat that's getting manufactured synthetically? It's unaffordable in the first instance, so it's very costly. And I think there are huge concerns with the health implications of things that have been modified that we are not genetically keeping up with. So our food system has changed so much in the last 50 years. and as we go to the next level of synthetic meats stem cell technology that is producing these synthetic meats this this is our bodies there is nothing more important that we do than than feed ourselves and and what we eat is what we are and it just appalls me that the lack of work that has gone into what is this going to do to our bodies we face huge challenges now with type 2 diabetes with cancer a lot of it linked to highly processed food and the fact that we are eating too much of it.

36:48So there are big health implications here. And it's all about taking food seriously and really understanding and educating our kids and our schools to be passionate about what they're eating. What I've heard in pretty much everything you've said is a sort of sense of real frustration that people in power and people in politics generally don't really get this stuff despite all the debate that goes on around it and i'll be honest i watched part of your conference this year because i was quite interested because kia starmer was going to be speaking at it and i'd be interested in your impressions on him but i i couldn't believe terese coffee's speech i sort of felt that she's speech she's that she's in charge of your sector i don't know what was she and did terese coffee just remind us she's in charge of this sector And I just thought, is she deliberately being insulting by not taking you seriously or what?

37:44It was a weird time. I met with her two days later and she said, could I come and have a drink and a chat and go through things? And that was good. And that settled things down. But it did feel a very odd time. Remind us of the speech. I don't think all listeners will have heard it. Alistair's more of an NFU geek than maybe some of our listeners. What happened in that speech? What was it that was upsetting for members? I think the challenge was that we'd faced this extraordinary situation with eggs. So it was, you know, front page news. And that day we'd faced literally every newspaper out there was talking about salad shortages and rationing of salads.

38:22So Asda was the first one to say, you can only have two bags of lettuce effectively and six tomatoes. and so we're facing rationing of salads and there was no nod to any of that at all and actually in the Q &A I challenged her on market failure in the egg sector and said well what were they going to do about it because within the Agricultural Act there are powers given to the UK government to deal with these issues and she said well she didn't see it was market failure and I said well there's a billion less eggs clearly it's market failure and I've got members that are going out of business because they are not getting a return back to the farm gate for what it's costing them So it was a very odd time.

38:59Can we bring you on to Keir Summers? So what is it that you'd really like to see if you were writing a manifesto for Labour, given that at the moment it looks likely that they'll win the next election? What would be a great manifesto from them for farmers? What would you like to see for farmers out of Labour? So the big thing that is missing is we've legislated targets for the environment, clean water, tree planting, taking land out of production, water quality, all really important things. and I'm absolutely fully in favour of what's happening. But we've got targets on house building. Labour's got targets on house building.

39:33It's got targets on green energy. What we don't have a target for is food production. And so the first thing I would like to see them do is say, look, producing food matters. Feeding the people of this country matters. We are going to set a self-sufficiency target and we are going to make sure that we stick to that. And we're not going to be producing pineapples and lemons here, but there are many things that we should be producing here. If they do that, then we need a comprehensive food strategy that delivers all of that. And we'd also like to see presumably something more on subsidies. I know the Lib Dems have come forward, so they'll put a billion pounds into Elms.

40:06Is that enough? Sorry, to explain to people, this is part of the environmental subsidies. This is part of keeping the uplands alive, part of the story that we're talking about with upland farms. It's not just about food production. Often the food production doesn't really help a small family farm in the uplands because it will favour the more efficient. What would you like to see in terms of commitments to these subsidy schemes? from Labour? Well, obviously, it's to be appreciated and applauded that the Lib Dems have come out and offered more money. I think, though, when you're not in power, offering more money is quite easy to do.

40:35Or if you're the Lib Dems. No comment. We're apolitical and we have to work with everyone and enjoy it too. But, you know, it's about the plan. The plan has been what's missing and we need a plan and a strategy. And that has to start with saying food matters. And, you know, we have to treat environment and food production as two sides of the same coin, not separate them. They're continually being separated. We've got to have both. That's what I'd like to see Labour do. And just tell me what the sense that from your members at the conference that Keir Starmer emanated, what your perception was?

41:12Well, the extraordinary thing was that his announcement was actually one of Rishi Sunak's policy proposals when he was on the campaign trail. So he talked about 50 % in public procurement. That's our hospitals, schools, prisons, military, 50 % of that being British. And that was what Keir Starmer announced because conservatives have failed to announce it. So that seemed quite odd, but it's appreciated. But we still don't have those things that Rishi Sunak committed to. And I think knowing the man that he is, he will have gone into it with a lot of thought, a lot of detail behind it. So he committed to 50 % of British.

41:49Don't forget, this is not new news for the London Olympics. We were 100 % British. I mean, it's what a lot of countries do. And it's an important marketplace. So,£4 billion worth of marketplace. And Keir Starmer announced it because the Conservatives hadn't. So, as I say, I'd like to see Keir go further and announce a target. But he was empathetic. The audience liked him. What is lacking with Labour at the moment is policy. We need to see more policy. We need to see a plan, a proposal that is meaningful. These are businesses that I represent. And just on that, because, you know, I sort of said you see yourself as a union leader, but you are the leader of a major organisation that is trying to influence public policy.

42:32How do you approach something like a coming election? How do you try to get the ideas that you've just outlined to Rory? What do you do to try to get the parties to do that? Because as you know, even despite Boris Johnson basically burning his own manifesto, manifestos still do matter. So how do you get stuff into the manifesto? I think the really exciting thing now is that everybody is recognising that the rural vote matters, the farming vote matters and the people who are associated to rural constituencies. They are feeling hard done by. They are feeling left out of a sort of a metropolitan urban policy portfolio, if you like.

43:07So I think it's an exciting time in that the rural vote matters. It will be competitive in the run up to the next election. So we are at the moment producing our own manifesto. Now, I don't run a dictatorship, so this isn't and can't be my manifesto. It will be literally across all land areas, across all sectors. We will bring that manifesto together. We are and always do engaging with Labour, with Lib Dems, with the Green Party, and really trying to tick the boxes off. Will you sign up to this? We've got huge implications with trade, with access to people, with the future policy. So we will have done and are doing a huge amount of work on our manifesto, and then we will be trying to get it off.

43:48And our conference next February, which will be my last, there'll be a hustings between all parties, and that will be, you know, we'll have well over a thousand members in the ICC. That will be my members' chance to really challenge politicians about what their plan is. Farmers often from the outside seem to have these very strange kind of almost enviable lives. I mean, there's a real heroism to farming. And I think, I guess, Jeremy Clarkson and everyone has already given much more prominence to these issues. But it's also a tough and quite lonely job, isn't it? And I sometimes felt in my constituents that we underestimated some of the stress and pressure on mental health, on suicide.

44:28Do you want to reflect a little bit, along with all the great successes in farming, of which there are an enormous amount, what some of the stresses can be? So I think probably my saddest and lowest moments in this job are hearing stories effectively from our members about men and women that have committed suicide. It is a lonely job. It is an isolated job and it is a stressful job. Help us to understand what makes it stressful. What are the kinds of things that often bring stress to farmers? I think, you know, if you imagine you've got your office outside, so you are at the mercy of all weather events.

45:01And you are, if I look at my own business, you are on call. We're a livestock business. You are on call 24-7. And there could be debt in a small farm. Absolutely. I mean, not just small businesses, but farming is long term. So you are planning for a long term. You're obviously planning often for the next generation to be coming into that business, whether you're a tenant or a landowner. So I think it's isolated. Certainly at the moment, huge pressure because there's been such lack of plan and there's been such differentiation effectively between different leaders. so lack of plan hasn't helped uncertainty is the last thing farmers want and you are working in a very isolated and lonely environment often so it is a big issue and we need to do much more to get help into rural areas you know we are always talking about it's okay not to be okay and to speak up but but what then what's the next steps how can we provide the help that is needed and we've got great charities the farm fcn the farm crisis network does a huge amount ravi and others to help in this area, but there's much more we can do.

46:07Can I just, with my mental health campaigning hat on, say that commit suicide suggests suicide is still a crime or a sin? I think that's absolutely right. And I've been working with an amazing couple, Andy and Linda Eden, whose son, Len, took his own life, aged 22. And Andy talks about achieving positive mental health all the time. and so our language really needs to learn from people that have been through what the Edens have been through and they've just driven a tractor right across the country and hearing them talk about their son but they continually say don't talk about mental health negatively what we're all striving for is positive mental health can we talk briefly about Ukraine because I know you've also got connections out there and have been involved in what's going on with farmers there Just talk us about that.

46:59It's hard to sort of put into words how challenging the situation is. So Maria Dudak, who's the Ukrainian Agrarian Forum Director, I've had a lot of conversations with from day one. We helped bring Maria and her sons over to have a holiday in Wales, as she said, to get them out of a war zone. And, you know, all the thoughts and the, you know, you can't imagine what it's like when you are living effectively in shelters and she's still doing her job as a director. So everybody's feeling the impact of Russia invading Ukraine and what it's done to cost inflation of farm inputs and food inflation. But when you hear firsthand from what these farmers are facing, they're facing, you know, farms that have been targeted by the Russians, cows that are literally burnt alive, fields that are mined, and they are continually, as a nation, working through, working through, working through.

47:53and you know they are still planting harvesting doing everything they can to keep farming in a situation that the rest of us cannot even begin to contemplate so what i've heard from maria it really makes the the has on the back of the neck stand up it's it makes me feel enormously grateful to be here and you've you've had the most extraordinary life you've you know completely presumably blew away your father's expectations he was never expecting you to lead the nfu you've gone through so many different changes in your life. You're now coming to the end of your time. At the NFU. At the NFU. You're not planning a sudden demise.

48:30It's just that Rory did talk on the podcast recently about how he was having a dream about just about to be guillotined. So I don't know whether that's still at his subconscious. There's too much dreaming going on in the podcast. And you're young, as Alice is pointing out. So give us a sense of how you think about closing off 10 years, how you think about legacy. And I guess most interesting for listeners, what does someone let you do next? What do you do if you've made it to the top of this very interesting thing? Had, I think, an incredibly interesting and fulfilling life and then suddenly in your mid-50s find yourself thrown off into a different world?

49:04I never set out to have a role in the NFU. My passion was to farm. And so I've been effectively 10 years not being able to farm in a way that I would have been. So I really look forward to going back to the farm to continuing to build my business. There are things that I desperately want to get over the line in the next five years. And, you know, when I came into this role, it was so frustrating for it all to be about the first woman. As a woman, all you want to be seen as, as the best person to do that job. So, my focus and probably what matters more to me than anything else is I want people at the end of my tenure to think, you know, she was a woman, but she did as good a job as any of the men.

49:46And it'll be great to have another woman. The thought of ever dropping a ball or ever doing anything wrong and people saying, oh, don't you remember that time when we had a woman leading the NFU? I mean, that for me, I will do and have done everything I can to avoid that. Success will be when it's not newsworthy to be a woman. That is what I want my legacy to be. Will you try to have any impact upon who succeeds you or will you step aside in that process? We are proudly democratic. Lots of organisations claim to be so, yeah. So I have been elected into this role for my third term. I had to get 75 % of the vote.

50:23So the next president of the NFU will be elected into that role. But whoever the next president is, you know, the NFU is an extraordinary, dynamic, diverse organization. And, you know, it's been around for well over 100 years. I'm very confident it will be around in another 100 years and doing what it does. Well, listen, thanks for all your time. It's been lovely to talk to you. Thanks for having me. I've really enjoyed it. Thank you very much.

50:51Well, if I were a member of the DEFRA team or the shadow DEFRA team, I would listen very, very carefully to some of that because I thought she had some very interesting analysis and ideas. I mean, I've obviously known her for some time because I was a DEFRA minister. And it's amazing seeing how much the NFU has moved and what it's had to adjust to. I mean, she's talked about Covid, she talked about Brexit. There's also been a massive revolution in its approach to environmental policy. The stuff we didn't get into, I mean, 40 % of our rivers are in bad condition. There are a lot of questions around how much polluters should pay, how much farmers should be responsible for the state of our rivers.

51:34But goodness, she's come a long way. And it's really interesting. She's not quite a politician, but she's got to act almost like She's pretty political, I'd say. I think she knows how to influence. I actually do think if, you know, she said they were going to sort of produce a big document and call it their manifesto. I think they probably should do that. They have to do that for their members. But then I think they need to really crunch it down and just try and say to the parties, you know, if you want to deliver on your promises, this is how you're going to do it. And you were saying, I'm being unfair because you were saying just off air to her, but I think you were absolutely right.

52:06That what she needs to do is she needs to read the party manifestos, realize that it's a page basically on agriculture. And she needs to write that page of A4. What are the seven or eight bullet points that they need to deliver? Maybe what she should do is put the podcast when it comes out, put it into chat GPT and say, if you had to turn this into a one page manifesto with the current Labour leadership, what would it say? But I wonder if she would have been a, because she was a very successful jockey. Yeah. You know, she ran quite a lot of winners. And she trained with one of the most famous trainers in Britain.

52:36Yeah. Huge flat successes, jump successes. No, I think that's another thing. I wonder whether part of her focus and part of what's made her, she didn't have a conventional academic career. But I think something you write about in your book on leadership, the way in which a very high level elite sport can actually be amazingly good for forming character and confidence. Oh, Rory's moving on to sport. Oh, we'll get you interested eventually. No, I thought she was very, very good. Whoever follows her, I think she's quite a hard act to follow. And it was a big thing. I mean, she wasn't, when I was in death, seen as the front runner.

53:08She was the slightly surprise candidate to come through. And as she says, she comes from a smaller farming background. But goodness, she's got a problem. I mean, she's being polite, but at the heart of the NFU, are massive standoffs between different interests and every decision she makes. If she says one of her phrases where we're going to produce more food on less land, that has big implications for farmers up in the uplands who are then going to end up facing rewilding. I did debates with her. One of the reasons I know is we did a debate against George Monbiot together a few years ago on this whole rewilding debate.

53:44I wonder whether she's right. I mean, she's sort of saying, well, George Monbiot is out in the extreme and most of the British public are with her and want to see a farm landscape. But it's difficult to know, isn't it? because I didn't get enough into how they're going to appeal to the next generation. I suspect people in their teens, early 20s are a constituent she's really going to have to reach out to. And I think they're more skeptical. They're much more sympathetic towards more radical environment climate policies, which can be difficult for farming. Although she is a big sort of proprietor of fruit and veg.

54:14Maybe this is me misinteresting what she said. She's not an evangelist for more old-fashioned traditional farming. I think she's kind of moved with the times pretty, pretty well. It is also, I mean, it's obviously a cliche that she bought her, but I do think that Jeremy Clarkson's program on Amazon has transformed sympathy and interest in farming in Britain. I think it's an incredible media impact. Yeah, I mean, if you haven't watched it, it is the greatest, funniest program. But what he does is by mocking himself, just show how difficult a farmer's life is. Interesting. Roy Stewart praises Jeremy Clarkson.

54:47Jeremy, I know you listen. So you're welcome anytime. We'd love to have you. Roy, thanks a lot. Thank you.

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