A WELCOME FARMING APPOINTMENT AT THE HEART OF GOVERNMENT

The news that former NFU president Minette Batters – now Baroness Batters – has been appointed by DEFRA to lead a review of farm profitability has been widely welcomed within the agriculture sector, writes Simon Evans.  Batters is well-respected both as an active farmer and for the way she led the NFU through some tricky times.

Her new role will be to listen to farmers and growers, as well as engaging with other government departments whose work impacts farmers.  She will then propose actions for government and industry that will support farming profitability as part of the government’s ‘New Deal for Farmers’.

A standard first task for anyone starting in a new role like this is to conduct a SWOT analysis, and it won’t take her long to realise that there are rather fewer entries in the ‘Strengths’ and ‘Opportunities’ columns than there are in the ‘Weaknesses’ and ‘Threat’s.

In those bulging ‘W’ and ‘T’ boxes will be the measures announced in the autumn Budget, the sudden closure to new applications of the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI), global political uncertainty, and the danger of food and farming getting caught in the crossfire of President Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ trade wars.

But the other side of the analysis is not entirely empty.  Resilience remains a key strength of farming, and whilst opportunities may seem limited at the moment, if government action can bring stability through its spending choices and its international diplomatic efforts, then agriculture could be in a good place to take advantage, especially with a renewed focus on food security (thanks to that global uncertainty), which means that farming will be – or certainly should be - a higher priority in government thinking.

Having someone like Minette Batters working at the heart of DEFRA, presumably aiming to build some much-needed bridges between government and farming, can only be a good thing.  The fact that there is a new ‘Profitability Unit’ within DEFRA is encouraging, and we have to hope that this is something more than warm words and good intentions.

In the DEFRA press release announcing her appointment, Batters is quoted as saying, “There will not be one ‘silver bullet’ to fire but I’m hopeful this review can make a difference to a sector that produces the nation’s food, underpins the rural economy and delivers so much for the environment.” 

If those words had come from a politician, then many farmers would have taken them with a liberal sprinkling of salt.  We have to hope that spoken by the respected former NFU president, they mean rather more than that.