OPINION: Next NFU president will have to face ‘inconvenient truths’

Peter Kendall, NFU president for the past eight years, has finally decided to hang up his sound bites and return to his Bedfordshire farm. 

Now we have to vote in a replacement for this charismatic colossus, but what changes of tone might we like to see from the next NFU president? 

In his eight years at the helm, Mr Kendall has almost single-handedly redefined the role of NFU president. Skilled with the media, he understood early on that the culture of 24-hour rolling TV news, email, text, Twitter and Facebook provided an opportunity to spin a story – repeat something clearly and consistently enough and it’s possible to change perceptions.

As far as Mr Kendall was concerned, this meant changing the negative image of farmers. So he quickly set about creating a very different, more upbeat story about British agriculture: an economically robust entity that only required a level playing field and more investment in research and development and it could become a world beater.

The problem, of course, with all this positive talk about British farming is that much of it is nonsense. There’s nothing about the recent profit history of UK agriculture or its structure to suggest that it has world-beating potential, and it is dangerous to pretend to politicians or farmers that it does.

It would be best, then, if our next president is much less strident in emphasising the strengths of our industry.

As Mr Kendall’s presidency draws to a close, the inconvenient truth for him, and any of us trying to make a living from producing food in the UK, is that this country still imports 40% of its food, food that could be grown here, and farmers are as reliant as ever on public subsidy in the form of the SFP for their livelihoods.

Even with €3.5bn a year paid to UK farmers in the form of the single farm payment, one in four farmers now lives within the government definition of “poverty”, and farming charities currently report unprecedented levels of requests for financial and other forms of support from farmers.  

This less positive side of farming is one that the next NFU president might pay more attention to. Before we rush to support super dairies we need to consider the financial effects of such units on traditional family dairy farms. Similarly, now that Sainsbury’s reportedly rely on just three UK growers for their supply of carrots, isn’t it time to question whether the “ever fewer farmers producing a commodity ever more cheaply” approach has gone too far?  Will we only be satisfied when there is one carrot grower left in the UK? 

I’m sure we all wish Mr Kendall well in whatever he does next and his period in office has had many positive aspects – not least his fight to avoid duplication of regulation by government and his attempts to avoid swathes of regulation by encouraging farmers to engage in voluntary environmental initiatives.

But let’s hope the next NFU president has a little more natural sympathy for those not doing so well within UK farming. Let’s hear less talk of needing “losers” to produce “winners”, and begin to tackle our cultural obsession with producing ever cheaper food.

Let’s hope our next leader speaks as passionately about retaining farmers on their farms as he or she does about how efficient farmers must be.

Stephen Carr runs an 800ha sheep, arable and beef farm on the South Downs near Eastbourne in partnership with his wife Fizz. Part is converted to organic status and subject to a Higher Level Stewardship agreement