NFU President: Farmers are feeling let down – and it’s Labour that could reap the rewards

Standing at the top of a sloping field in north Essex on a sunny morning, Tom Bradshaw is pointing out the landmarks spread out below over the valley of the River Colne on the 63-hectare farm that has been in his family for four generations. In his wellies and scruffy work clothes, he is clearly in his element as he recounts how, from the moment when as a six-year-old his father let him start helping out in the milking shed, he knew for certain that he wanted to be a farmer.

That commitment remains undiminished, but this energetic, thoughtful enthusiast for all things agricultural is going to need every last ounce of energy as the newly-elected president of the National Farmers’ Union. For while the landscape in front of him exudes a sense of permanence, he fears the farming industry is facing a crisis. “We are at a stage of vulnerability,” he warns in the starkest of terms, “that we haven’t seen for generations.”

Back in the busy farmhouse that he shares with his wife, Emily, and son and daughter, aged seven and five, the 41-year-old, one of the youngest-ever NFU leaders, runs through the long list of the daunting range of challenges that face him, his members and, he insists, every single one of us who rely on them to put food on supermarket shelves and in our cupboards. The most immediate cause for concern is the past six months of rain-sodden weather that played havoc with the planting of crops last autumn as well as this spring.

It will, he predicts, impact on food supply come the summer. “We are not going to produce the output that we would expect of those crops.” Yet the public and politicians appear either unaware or unperturbed by the potential disaster unfolding in the fields.

Food production – the UK currently produces around 60 per cent overall of what we eat (dropping to as low as 20 per cent of fruit and veg) – and food security is a key issue for him and his members. “While we have conflict in Ukraine, the situation in Gaza, and the impact of climate change, which I believe is the biggest challenge facing us today, it feels like the world is taking food production for granted,” Bradshaw says. “We have 70 million people here living on an island and having a plan for how they are going to be fed is crucially important. We cannot just import our way out of trouble.”

Crucial to such planning are the government ministers who, in a post-Brexit world that promised farmers a better deal, have lost the confidence of many of the NFU’s 46,000 members with their chaotic efforts to replace old European Union Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) subsidies based on how much land was farmed with new environment-friendly incentives. The anger felt by some farmers led them last month to drive their tractors past the Palace of Westminster in London, blowing their horns, waving Union Jacks, and brandishing banners that read, “No Farmers, No Food, No Future”.

The time-honoured stereotype has long been of the Conservatives as the party of the countryside, but that is no longer a given, Bradshaw says. “Historically our members would have been big supporters of the Conservative Party, but many are feeling let down, particularly by the international trade deals [which they believe disadvantage British farmers]. They are not going to forget about that quickly.”

Earlier this year, in an attempt to reassure members, Rishi Sunak made a point of attending the NFU’s annual conference. “When he came, he said to us, ‘you don’t do this for the money’. Sorry, we can’t do it without the money. A lot of our members live on very little.”

The average annual profit made on farms in the UK is just £22,800.

The Sunak administration, Bradshaw says, “has to demonstrate that they really are different, and that they will support farming and food production. And I don’t think that is a given.”

His high-profile and widely-admired predecessor as NFU president, Minette Batters, the first female in the role in the NFU’s 120-year history, will be a hard act to follow. “I can’t try to be Minette. While I recognise all her strengths, I have to try and do it my way. If I try to be her, I will fail.”

She was often scathing about the ministers she dealt with, including in a 2022 interview with The Telegraph where she reported that they variously failed to understand the scale of changes under way post-Brexit, declined to engage with her about them, didn’t listen when they did, and – in the case of then prime minister Boris Johnson – lied to her face about not wanting to damage British farmers.

Is Bradshaw receiving the same treatment? “It is in some ways the same Conservative government, but it is also different. I think [recently appointed after being demoted from Health and Social Care] Steve Barclay is doing a good job as Secretary of State at Defra so far, but we have an election coming up and I don’t think [ministers] can be clear about their plans when you are only planning for six months’ time. Policy becomes very short term.”

Rejecting for now giving NFU backing to on-the-streets protests such as the one seen at Westminster recently, he nevertheless continues to place his faith in jaw-jaw not war-war. “We have to decide how we create the greatest political influence. Is it by jumping up and down publicly, or is it by going through the door and having a conversation? I think we can do it better by going through the door.”

To that end, Bradshaw was in Downing Street in the week before Easter, meeting officials, but not the Prime Minister. Yet his commitment to negotiation does not prevent him calling out attempts by ministers to pull the wool over the eyes of farmers to generate positive, voter-attracting headlines.

“Last week there was an announcement where the Secretary of State said he had committed an extra £400 million to the agriculture budget this year. That is a complete myth. The £400 million is there but only because they didn’t spend it as planned in previous two years. That is a statement we do need to call out because it is not new money. Trying to get credit for investing an extra £400 million in the industry is pretty poor.”

The stakes are too high for such electioneering. “I do genuinely believe that what happens over the next five years will dictate the future for generations, but there are such a multitude of challenges and, whether you like it or not, it is political relationships that make the wheels go round. So we need to be in the room having those conversations.”

Growing up on Fletchers Farm outside the village of Fordham, Tom Bradshaw was the middle of three brothers. His older sibling – now an accountant and entrepreneur – had no similar passion for farming which made the often tricky question of succession easier than on other family enterprises.

After studying agricultural business management at Wye College in Kent – the former rural studies outpost of Imperial College London – he took up the reins on the farm on graduating in 2004. Like all seven other farms in the same valley, it was transitioning away from cows to growing crops.

Supermarkets in search of the lowest possible prices are often blamed for this shift, but Bradshaw takes a broader view. “We always have to be mindful that the supermarkets are UK farming’s biggest customer. It is a really important relationship, but it is one that has to work for everybody.”

At Fletchers Farm, there has been diversification, with a busy equestrian centre in the old milking parlour (run by his wife), and a contracting business. It must have been a big burden for him to shoulder at such an early age. The Farming Safety Foundation reported in 2022 that 92 per cent of UK farmers under 40 ranked poor mental health as the biggest hidden problem in their profession, and 36 per cent said that they “possibly” or “probably” were suffering from depression.

“I have always been told that I am old for my years, and that I look older than I am,” Bradshaw replies with a smile. And while he is acutely aware of the particular stresses and strains on all farmers, with 7,000 leaving the profession since 2019, his own love of farming has never dipped.

His relationship with the NFU, though, has been much more volatile. “I was invited to go to my first NFU conference in 2005 and I left it saying, ‘I’m never going there again’. I hadn’t found it interesting.”

What changed was that in 2010 he was awarded a Nuffield Scholarship that enabled him to travel to Australia, New Zealand, Germany, France and America looking at global agriculture. “I left England thinking we were world-leading and I came back recognising that we had a lot to learn.”

As part of that learning process, he agreed to be co-opted in 2014 onto the NFU’s National Crops Board. It was the start of his rapid climb through the ranks, latterly serving as vice president and then deputy president under Batters.

“In those early years, I saw that the NFU does make a real difference. Without the NFU, who is there fighting the corner for farmers like me? That is what gave me the appetite to do more.”

His new role is full-time, which has meant bringing in managers to take over the day-to-day running of his own farm. “There is a tension between home and work,” he admits. “I had to accept at a very early stage where my priority would lie between the farm, my young family and the NFU. There was no way I could do all of it.”

He is clearly a hands-on father. His face positively lights up when he tells of how his young children join him in the vegetable patch outside the window of the farm’s kitchen where we are sitting. It is a chance, he says, to teach them the importance of embracing the “seasonality” of different home-grown food stuffs rather than relying on expensive, all-year-round imports.

“I guess somewhere I believe I can make a bigger difference for the industry by doing what I do for the NFU than I would by working within my own farm. There are short-term sacrifices for our farm business and I am very alive to that.”

There is, it quickly is becoming clear, nothing pompous or self-aggrandising about Bradshaw. Indeed, he is the first to call himself out if he feels he is going into presidential mode. “I’m making being president sound a bit altruistic, but we are living through extremely volatile times.”

He is also pragmatic enough to accept that sometimes his own chosen tactics have to adapt to particular circumstances. While he didn’t endorse the tractor protests outside Westminster, he did support the Welsh branch of the NFU in a silent protest last month outside the Senedd, home to the principality’s devolved assembly. 5,500 pairs of wellies of all shapes and sizes were placed on the steps to represent the farmers who could lose their livelihoods because of the new post-Brexit subsidy regime being brought in there.

“That was a very specific protest on a single issue,” explains Bradshaw, “and it worked because it made 37 members of the Senedd come out and engage with us.” That was in stark contrast, he points out, to a much more vocal and confrontational protest outside the same building the previous week, when several thousand Welsh farmers turned up with tractors and banners. Rather than engage Assembly members, he says, it had alienated them.

There have been many versions proposed in both England and Wales for ELMs, the environmental land management schemes that will be part and parcel of the new subsidy regime for farms to replace the £2 billion that used to come in under CAP. In Wales, the current plan would make any payments dependent on farmers’ having 10 per cent of their land used for tree cover and a further 10 per cent as natural habitats.

In England, no percentage has been set for its scheme, though moves are now afoot in Westminster to set a cap. Such constant amendments may demonstrate the success of NFU lobbying ministers to make changes, but it also contributes to the impression of ministers making policy on the hoof.

For his own part Bradshaw makes plain that he is not opposed to the goal of better environmental protection. Between 15 and 20 per cent of his own farm is used to support natural habitats. However once again he believes that ministers have made a mess of implementation.

“The Brexit deal got delayed but our ministers at Defra were not willing to delay the transition and so put themselves under huge time pressure to deliver a scheme,” he says. “Their department was the most impacted by withdrawal from the EU and it became a totem pole.”

With the threat of a no-deal on the table right up to the last moment, he suggests, insufficient time and resources were allocated to working out exactly what the post-Brexit landscape would look like on farms. “They didn’t consult and they didn’t listen. They delivered a scheme under a restricted timescale and there are areas of it that I think they got wrong. They should have taken some of our warnings at face value.”

There has been similar haste in making new trade deals once the UK left the European Union.  When the then international trade secretary Liz Truss signed a deal with Australia in 2021, it opened our market to food produced to lower welfare standards than are in place at home, and therefore cheaper.

That is plain unfair, says Bradshaw. “If we are expected to produce to standards here then we should expect all the food sold in this country to be produced to that standard. And if as a country we don’t care about those standards, then our members should have the competitive advantage to produce to lower standards. You can’t have it both ways.”

Such criticism of the current Government naturally brings us round to the prospect, as indicated in opinion poll after opinion poll, that by the end of the year, he will be dealing with Labour ministers.

“At the NFU we are proudly apolitical, but in the four years I’ve been in the NFU team, I have built up a strong relationship with shadow farming minister Daniel Zeichner, who has been in post throughout that period.”

On policy, the “right to roam” has been a bone of contention between the NFU and previous Labour leaders, but there has been progress, Bradshaw reports. Jeremy Corbyn’s 2019 pledge to introduce such a right (it already exists in Scotland) caused dismay among farmers, worried about dogs off-lead bothering their livestock. “Now they have changed their language which is positive and are talking about the ‘right to responsible access’.”

Relationships between farmers and Labour governments have never been easy. Tony Blair faced a countryside backlash when he legislated to outlaw fox-hunting. Will a Keir Starmer regime fare any better?

“As the polls stand at the moment, we could have Labour politicians in [rural] seats they never thought they would have, and that gives us a wonderful opportunity to influence Labour thinking in a way that we may never have been able to do previously.”

He isn’t getting carried away, though. “A week in politics is a long time but in farming we think in years, decades, generations.”