of labour and a demand that farmers produce more at less cost to the environment. my guest today is minette batters. she farms right here. she s also president of the national farmers union. as a society, are we asking our farmers for the impossible? minette batters, welcome to hardtalk. thank you for having me. it s a great pleasure to be on yourfarm. and the sun is shining and, in some ways, you would think the sun would be shining on farmers. food prices are spiralling higher. you would think that would be good news for farmers. is it? it s it s quite extraordinary. i don t think, in my lifetime, i ve ever faced into anything like the cost inflation that we re facing with our inputs now. so, we re seeing triple digit inflation on on fertiliser, we ve seen diesel costs up by 57%, feed costs up by nearly 60%. these are huge price pressures and, of course. you have chosen to alight upon the price pressures, i chose to start by talking about the prices you are receiving b
my guest today is minette batters. she farms right here, she s also president of the national farmers union. as a society, are we asking our farmers for the impossible? minette batters, welcome to hardtalk. thank you for having me. it s a great pleasure to be on yourfarm. and the sun is shining and, in some ways, you would think the sun would be shining on farmers. food prices are spiralling higher. you would think that would be good news for farmers. is it? it s it s quite extraordinary. i don t think, in my lifetime, i ve ever faced into anything like the cost inflation that we re facing with our inputs now. so, we re seeing triple digit inflation on on fertiliser, we ve seen diesel costs up by 57%, feed costs up by nearly 60%. these are huge price pressures and, of course. you have chosen to alight upon the price pressures, i chose to start by talking about the prices you are receiving because we know that consumers are struggling to meet the prices of the basic foods
the previous year, been paying effectively £200 a ton and they were paying £1,000 a ton for nitrogen fertiliser, so they were facing huge input costs. but then, of course, you ve got your poultry farmers, you ve got your livestock, your dairy farmers who ve to pay a much higher price for that feed because the global commodity price, as you say, skyrocketed, all driven by russia invading ukraine. yeah. when it comes to the biggest obstacles to farmers today you ve talked about the shocks of covid, of the ukraine war, the various different disruptions and supply chain problems, isn t the truth that the biggest problem of all with the vote to leave the european union and we reckon that roughly half of farmers actually did vote for brexit so, in a sense, farmers looking at their problems today, many of them only have themselves to blame? brexit i don t think farmers