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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 forfarmers, is it? it s quite extraordinary. i don t think in my lifetime i have everfaced into anything like the cost inflation we are facing with our inputs now. we are seeing triple digit inflation on fertiliser, we ve seen diesel costs up by 57%, feed costs up by nearly 60%, these are huge price pressures. you have chosen to alight upon the price pressures, i ve chose to start about talking about the prices you are receiving because we know that consumers are struggling to meet the prices of the basic food stuffs that they buy at the ....
Well, i don t think food has been recognised as a public good. i would say that producing food is a public good, and indeed, if you talk to economists, they will say, well, food security is a public good, but food production isn t. we have got to make sure we have the same approach for delivering for the environment as we have for delivering our food, and if we have a market failure situation, you know, the direct support payment was one way for farmers if the market fell off a cliff, don t forget the offices outside that they would be able to keep feeding their livestock and keep feeding theirfamilies, so there are very, very challenging parts of our country that are being very reliant on direct support. do you think farmers are instinctively inclined to be good custodians of the environment? i ask that partly because i see that the nfu is still supporting the use of neonicotinoids, chemicals, something which across europe has been banned, but you at the nfu here in the united k ....
Per therm, now we are seeing the price of gas having come down, we are still seeing it over 150% higher. so all of these costs with production, whether that be feed costs, energy costs, fuel costs, someone has got to pay for that. there is a limit to what consumers can afford to pay then you have the whole supply chain the retailer, the packer, so it s about getting a fair return for farmers and growers to keep them producing the food that we want. the economist magazine just a couple of months ago looked to the income of cereal farmers across the country and they reckoned their income had risen more than 68% in the last year. we sometimes get a little cynical about farmers, they plead poverty and yet you dig away at their actual accounts and they are doing rather well. isn t that the case for at least some farmers even now? you ve got a story of two halves. for arable farmers, yes, they probably had a once in 30 year harvest, don t forget the cost ....
Themselves to blame? brexit, i don t think farmers were any different to anybody else, families across the country were divided, farmers were divided. i actually felt we should remain and i took a public position on it. many didn t so they were divided on whether they wanted to remain in the eu or leave. ultimately, we chose to leave and i personally am enormously grateful we are in a democratic society, and we voted to leave and we have left. did the government lie to farmers about what the impact of brexit would be? well, there was one sheet of all, wasn t there? and there were three strap lines on that sheet of all, the easiest trade deal in history, more money because we won t be investing it in europe and a bonfire regulation , well, actually none of that has come true. when it comes to the practical impact of brexit on farms like yours, labour is a huge need for agricultural producers. ....
Job in the world. and yet 28% of farmers according to your own nfu survey last year 28% of them looking actively at the possibility of giving up? 7,000 businesses were lost from 2019 to 2022. they either consolidated or they got out of the industry. i mean, there is no denying that it is you don t shut the office door. i never come back and think, i am going to have two days and stay indoors. you are on call 24/7 if you are a livestock farmer, and that is just how it is. but i genuinely think that, actually, the road that we are on now, the journey to carbon neutralfood production, the ability to produce so many more of ourfibres, fuel, food in a way that is truly sustainable, i think it is becoming a very, very exciting time and the young people when i speak to the young people, they do not have the baggage of our generation. theyjust see this as ....