On her wedding day, Minette Batters was, like many English brides, subjected to gentle public underestimation. An old friend, delivering a speech about her, “made lots of jokes about the funny things that I’d done, then said, ‘The great thing about Minette is that she makes the best lasagne I’ve ever had.’”
For Batters, “it was like being struck by lightning . . . I remember thinking, that is not going on my gravestone. I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I’m going to work harder, I will do something different.”
She was a 28-year-old chef (she had catered for her own wedding) and had a plan to take on the rundown family beef farm. She went on to revive the farm. She also scaled the National Farmers’ Union, England and Wales’s biggest farming lobby, becoming its first female president in 2018.
Her involvement in the NFU was “part of the lasagne moment. I was going to do something to set the record straight . . . Thank God he said that. What hurt was that he was right . . . If that hadn’t happened, I think I would have got into my seventies and thought, what’s it all been about? You only ever regret in life what you haven’t done.”
The NFU had often been the preserve of gruff men. A former president told Batters: “Minette, farmers really need to know you’ve got balls, you’re five foot three.” In her youth, Batters had been an amateur jockey, winning more than 30 point-to-point races and bearing the scars to prove it. She had broken her back falling off one horse. The last joint on her left little finger still juts out at an alarming angle. Her right arm “is fairly useless”. Her collarbone “is no longer connected” to her sternum. She didn’t need lessons in anatomy (and, for the record, she is 5ft 4in).
Batters brought new openness and campaigning focus to the NFU. The woman who let others pronounce at her wedding — and once feared public speaking — became ever-present in the media, dealing with Covid, Brexit and the war in Ukraine.
Sitting across a wooden table in her charming local pub, I would dare anyone to underestimate Batters — or indeed dislike her. But I had come to Wiltshire with two issues in mind.
One was her dealings with Conservative politicians. Batters stepped down as NFU president in February after a tenure that won widespread acclaim, but her critics argue that she trusted Boris Johnson too much on Brexit. “She was naive,” says Liz Webster, a pro-EU farmer.
The other is the environment. Despite their bucolic image, Britain’s farms now emit more greenhouse gases than its power stations. They cause more river pollution than the country’s hated sewage companies. Batters was a progressive voice on climate change, but she has backtracked. She wants politicians to focus on producing more food, even though the UK’s agricultural sector hasn’t reduced emissions in the past decade and is now dealing with climate havoc. In the 18 months to March, England saw the most rain since records began in 1836. Partly as a result, farmers’ business confidence was the worst since the NFU started surveying it in 2010. “It’s just been horrendous, hasn’t it?” she says.
Outside the pub, the sun has finally arrived. Spring is, as Jeremy Clarkson says in his hit TV show Clarkson’s Farm, the time of year when farming “can be the best job in the world”.
“You get to this time of year, and I think I could never stop doing it,” says Batters. “I’d like to still be doing it when I’m 80. You see a calf being born and it’s great, because that’s the next harvest coming on.”
I survey the menu, and wonder if the co-founder of a group called Ladies in Beef will judge me for ordering a veggie option. “I certainly won’t,” she laughs. I choose beetroot flatbread, and she picks a Caesar salad.
Her father was sceptical about her taking on the family farm. But she negotiated with the landowner that, if she restored some derelict cottages, he would agree a lease. To make it a viable business, she ran a catering business and turned a barn into a wedding venue. Today, she says, “I’d love to think I was a CEO, the reality is that I’m sort of loo-cleaner.”
Nothing quite prepared her for Brexit, where policy lurched wildly. Michael Gove, when environment secretary, started to make the £3bn in annual farming subsidies conditional not on how much land farmers occupied, but on what environmental benefits they provided. Dealing with politics was like “dragging a bull through a bog”, says Batters. “I can remember having some days where it literally felt too much.”
Batters voted Remain, but farmers were split. “I never felt there was a problem with leaving. It was how we left.” In 2020, she enlisted Jamie Oliver into a campaign for food standards in trade deals; a million people signed an NFU petition. At a meeting in October 2020, Johnson told her that he “would rather die than hurt British farmers”. She said afterwards: “I think he really means that.”
“Everybody said — the joys of social media — ‘Uh, she’s so stupid to believe him.’ It wasn’t a question of whether I believed or not, it was a question of recording it in the public domain . . . He did go back on it.”
Johnson dropped a trade deal with the US, which would have allowed imports of hormone-injected beef into Britain, but signed deals with Australia and New Zealand with few safeguards for British farmers. His free-trading successor, Liz Truss, was “awful”. Didn’t she care about the sector? “She cared about Liz.” But Batters is positive about Rishi Sunak, who has shifted from green goals to talk of food security.
Critics say the prime minister confuses food security with national self-sufficiency: relying on any one region for our food might make us less secure, given the impact of extreme weather. Anyway, his plans to grow more fruit and vegetables in Britain are hampered by his own migration policy. “In 2020 the Home Office, with Priti Patel, was saying you can have 10,000 seasonal workers. We were saying that wipes out the sector: the sector needs a minimum of 70,000. You’re not going to be producing any asparagus, strawberries, raspberries.”
The quota for seasonal workers is now up to 55,000 a year. It’s still not enough, says Batters. “Now I’m out of the NFU, I can be free to speak my mind completely. All of our growers advertise here for British people. Nobody wants to do it. We have educated everybody out of doing the jobs that underpin our everyday lives.
“My daughter’s doing a nursing degree. She works in a care home in the holidays. She’s the only British worker. This is in south Wiltshire. That’s bonkers.” Batters wants young people to be obliged to do a form of national service, potentially in agriculture.
Could farmers just pay workers better instead? “Pay pickers £30 an hour! Who’s going to buy the strawberries at the end of it?”
She insists that picking jobs are not low-skilled: workers pick 10 lettuces a minute for four or five hours. “A robot can’t do it. It will be able to do it maybe in 20 years’ time. Ditto with strawberries.”
The idea of work outside formal education is personal for Batters, who struggled at school with undiagnosed dyslexia. “It’s a very odd thing to have a brain that just doesn’t function like other people’s do.” Aged 56, she still feels the social judgment at not having gone to university, and is toying with a Master’s: “Half of me would really like to do a degree, just to say . . . ”
But farming is just 0.6 per cent of UK GDP. Doesn’t it already get more political attention than bigger sectors, such as gaming or the arts? Farming “underpins pretty much all of the rural economy”, says Batters. “That GDP figure is totally fraudulent.”
What would she say to people who say many farmers voted Leave, they should live with the consequences? “I completely agree with that. A lot of people did vote for Brexit. The deal was very appealing. People just need to put the past behind them.” Would she vote Tory now? “The one thing I shall hang on to is being apolitical. Because I do want to keep influencing.” She seems sceptical of Labour, saying the party lacks a trade policy and that its planned alignment with the EU would be “very difficult” to execute. She fears another Trump trade deal isn’t “off the agenda”.
Outside, the sun has turned to pouring rain. We talk about Clarkson’s Farm, in which the maverick presenter battles geography and bureaucracy. “Farmers love Clarkson, because he shows that you have to work through it.”
Clarkson likes “designing everything so it goes wrong”. But “he is the kindest guy. Phenomenally intelligent. He has an ability to resonate with my children and my mother — because he makes it so amusing, and because he’s got the money to try these new ideas.”
I am enjoying my flatbread: finally a pub sandwich that doesn’t require me to dislocate my jaw. Batters picks professionally at her lettuce and bacon. She is incensed by how Britain eats. “I would never buy a ready meal.” She forswears packaged cereals, preferring porridge with water.
Yet she criticises Henry Dimbleby’s National Food Strategy for proposing a tax on unhealthy foods. “If you start taxing people without taking them on that journey, that is cruel beyond cruel.” What is her alternative? “We don’t teach people about food in schools any more, we don’t teach them how to cook.” A four-time marathon runner, she cites a study suggesting nearly half of all cancers are linked to obesity. “When are we going to take food seriously?”
The friendly landlady announces she is going for a nap, but urges us to stay talking. Angry EU farmers have blocked roads and sprayed manure in protest at green rules. Could it happen in Britain? “Yeah, it’s got very close,” says Batters, citing NFU-backed protests in Wales.
In 2019, she announced that agriculture would aim to reach net zero by 2040. “The whole idea was to pitch farmers as a solution, and to open the doors that were locked to farming.”
Her plan had a red line: farmers would not reduce livestock numbers. Instead it relied heavily on bioenergy with carbon capture and storage. Most analysts think that doesn’t add up: the biofuels would need to be grown, taking up lots of land.
Her own mixed farm of 60 breeding cows is reducing emissions, replacing expensive fertiliser with nitrogen-fixing clover: “I don’t use any nitrogen fertiliser at all now.” Improving genetics and killing cows younger can also help, she says. “That’s what net zero is about. A lot of people’s interpretation of net zero is produce nothing.”
But the Climate Change Committee, the UK’s official adviser on net zero, is clear that such changes are not enough. Cows and sheep produce methane, and graze on land that could store more carbon. Britain must change what it eats and how it farms: the CCC proposes cutting sheep and cow numbers by 10 per cent by 2050, and freeing up a fifth of farmland for forests and peatlands. Its former head suggested the government has “run scared” of farmers.
“As the National Farmers’ Union, we would never be saying we need to have less livestock here, would we? . . . We’ve got the same number of ruminants that we had back in the age of the dinosaur,” Batters says, puzzlingly. (I later check that ruminants evolved after dinosaurs went extinct.)
What if the government decided to follow the science and cut livestock numbers? “That is a completely morally bankrupt route. We’ve got to feed 70mn people. What are you going to feed them on?” I’d recommend my beetroot flatbread.
Seriously, I’m depressed at the assumption that food production has to mean the current level of livestock production. Many of Britain’s livestock are fed crops that could be eaten by humans; others eat imported feed.
Maybe it’s my wine, but I start to find Batters’ arguments muddled. I suggest that some unprofitable upland farms could be places for biodiversity, carbon storage and tourism. In her experience, abandoned land has “nothing in it”. How did she counter the CCC’s arguments on methane? “It’s not focused on the soil nutrients that are needed . . . Farming’s got to change. It can and it’s doing it.” Indeed, many livestock farmers argue that the emissions from cows and sheep can be offset by storing carbon in the soil and using manure as fertiliser; sadly, scientists don’t agree.
I mention that more British rivers are polluted by farms than by sewage. “You can’t compare farming with water companies,” she says. Would she really defend the chicken sheds whose waste is harming the River Wye? “Poultry here is probably some of the best broiler meat production anywhere in the world. Yeah, there’s a phosphate issue, so we need to be able to strip that out.” During her presidency, the NFU lobbied against stricter rules on manure and fertiliser flowing into rivers, calling the move “irrational”.
Batters fairly argues that farmers must be compensated for the green transition. She also wants a return to some fixed subsidies to compensate farmers for the effects of climate change. “Whichever party says, ‘We know that you’re going to be dealing with drought, flooding events and extreme weather — and we’re going to have a land payment that deals with stability,’ farmers are going to say, ‘You’ve got my vote.’” She supports Sunak’s move, in the name of food security, to restrict solar farms on productive land (“really heartening”); she is also turning over part of her farm to growing flowers.
I ask when she last saw Boris Johnson. At a 2022 by-election, “he put his hand on my shoulder, and said, ‘I’m so sorry about my [pro-rewilding] Build Back Beaver speech.” Did he mean it? “Don’t think he did.” Beavers, which have been shown to alleviate flooding, have returned to the nearby River Avon. Any problems as a result? “There will be!”
We say goodbye, and I head back to the station to find that my train is delayed by heavy rain — falling on ground saturated in mid-May. The world is filled with good, impressive, ambitious people who refuse to look climate science in the eye. Why do we so underestimate ourselves? When will we set the record straight? I leave Wiltshire, wondering if we collectively will ever have one of Batters’ lasagne moments.
Henry Mance is the FT’s chief features writer
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