Former NFU President: 'My farming manifesto'

Watch Caron Bell's report

The rolling fields of Wiltshire feel a long way from Westminster, but they are home to one of farming's most influential figures.

As President of the National Farmers' Union, Minette Batters has spent six years representing the UK's £14 billion agriculture sector at the highest levels of government.

Having stepped down this year, she now feels able to speak her mind more freely in the run-up to the election, and has mixed feelings about the parties' promises.

"All the manifestos are a bit light on ambition", she told ITV News.

She says she is "extremely worried" that Labour has only 87 words about food and farming in its manifesto and dismisses Reform's plan to tax firms with foreign workers as "bonkers".

As for the Liberal Democrats, Minette Batters says she likes their pledge of an extra billion pounds for farmers, "but it's easy to promise that when you know you're not going to be in government."

She's more impressed by the Conservatives, giving them "a big tick" for their plan to introduce legally-binding targets for UK food production - the only party to do so.

So what would Batters put in her manifesto? Money is top of her list.

"The (farming) budget is desperately important", she said.

Currently the government pays UK farmers around £2.4 billion a year. The Conservatives, Lib Dems, Reform and the Greens have promised to increase this; Labour has not.

Batters' second priority, is based around food production.

"Setting legally-binding targets for food production. It's bonkers that these other parties don't have a target", she said.

And thirdly, food strategy.

"I'd like to see the next government coming in with a meaningful food policy that is going to really energise the nation to get cooking from scratch", she said.

Most of all, she says farmers want certainty after a tough decade. Brexit, Covid, Ukraine, inflation and climate change have all posed huge challenges to the industry.

But some of Batters' views are controversial. She believes the UK can reach net zero without reducing meat and dairy farming, something the government's Climate Change Committee disagrees with.

She dismisses rewilding as "pretty disastrous", and she also wants British farms to be allowed to hire more foreign workers.

So who is Minette Batters voting for in her Salisbury constituency?

"I've been proudly apolitical at the NFU all my life", she told us.

"I want to keep influencing the debate so I'm certainly not nailing my political colours to any mast."