Baroness Batters: ‘We Need To Reconnect Young People With Where Their Food Comes From’

Reading Harvest, a new book by Baroness Batters charting her role as the first female president of the National Farmers’ Union (2018–2024), during which time she weathered both Covid and Brexit, I became shamefully aware of how little I knew about farming. But what struck me more was that most of our politicians and policymakers have proved just as woefully ignorant.

‘When I started at the NFU, I was shocked by how many people assume food appears on the shelves as if by magic,’ she tells me. ‘Unlike Finland – the world’s happiest country – or Japan, Britain has encouraged people out of the fields and into business parks and the service-based economy. No-one goes holiday fruitpicking anymore. Children don’t learn fundamental life skills like cooking at school, and unlike in Europe, farmers’ markets are seen as the preserve of the well-heeled. Instead, we rely on plastic-wrapped supermarket food. Everybody should have the right to nutritious, affordable British food, but we need the policies to deliver it.’

Minette Batters was born in 1967 on a farm near Salisbury. Her passion was riding, but her father dissuaded her from staying in the racing world and she duly trained as a Le Cordon Bleu chef and set up a catering business. The more she realised her real passion was farming, the more adamant her father became that she should not take over the family farm. ‘Farming was seen as something men did,’ she says. Still, she took it on aged 31 and joined the National Farmers’ Union.

‘It was tough, and juggling children with aspects you can’t control like bad weather, calving and lambing could feel overwhelming.’ One reason for writing Harvest, she adds, was to say to other women in farming, ‘This is how it is, but it can be done’. Batters also wanted to put the debate about importing chlorine-washed chicken and hormone-treated beef after Brexit into the public domain.

‘Campaigning with Jamie Oliver, within a month we got a million people signing up against importing food that would be illegal to produce here. By changing hearts and minds, momentum built and Boris Johnson realised the government had to do something.’ We talk about Johnson and how his default position was to laugh. ‘He was very good at that,’ Batters concedes with a grin. ‘He’d be cracking jokes all the time, but I could see the toll the job was taking and how deflated he became.’

Family farms are flailing: ‘Our 47,000 farmers are struggling on an average income of just £34,000. If only we realised what those farms offer. I dream that alongside supermarkets, we’ll have locally produced food and local processing. Take the huge success of microbreweries or Jeremy Clarkson’s The Farmer’s Dog pub, reviving that connection between pub, shop and community.’

Batters tells me housing developers are not planting fruit trees or vegetables because biodiversity net gains exclude them. ‘Government policy is keeping allotments and orchards out of new garden cities. It’s a tragic, bonkers mistake to exclude food from our landscape.’

She has recently produced a report for government with 57 recommendations; one is that children must be taught about food. ‘All young people can learn to cook from scratch. Instead of just focusing on food’s profitability, what will get us through a crisis is reconnecting people to food.’

On her farm, Batters now also grows cut flowers and runs a successful wedding business. Her daughter is a nurse and her son wants to be an accountant, but she hopes the farm will feature in their futures. As a crossbench peer, she continues fighting to close the urban-rural gap. ‘I won’t stop until people really value the countryside and young people see farming as a viable career. After all, medicine increasingly shows how important our gut is in both physical and mental health. Food has the uncharted potential to drive enormous change for good, and we must put it back on the curriculum and centre stage.’

Harvest by Minette Batters is out now.

Baroness Batters In Brief

• A book that changed me: James Rebanks’ The Shepherd’s Life.
• Favourite view: From my farm I can see Salisbury Cathedral’s spire to the north, and the Downton church if I look south.
• Desert island disc: 500 Miles by The Proclaimers. It reminds me of happy weddings we’ve had in our barn.
• Where I relax: I don’t, unless I leave the farm behind me. Only then do I give myself permission to stop.
• Dinner guest: David Attenborough. I’d love to talk to him about the opportunities of food and agriculture.
• Favourite artwork: As a child I was intrigued by Monet’s Water Lilies, but there’s a picture at home I love of sheep on a Shropshire hillside.