Baroness Batters says UK farmers are beset by uncertainty and Rachel Reeves, right, isn’t helping (Image: Jonathan Buckmaster / Express)
When I call to chat to Baroness Batters about her new memoir, she is busy helping a calf through a traumatic arrival. The former National Farmers’ Union president, who is now a crossbench peer in the House of Lords, makes no apology for the delay. Catching her breath before returning to the job at hand, she says: “I’m just doing a really difficult calving, so you’re going to have to give me ten minutes.”
The moment is typical of an intensity of purpose that has not slowed since 1998. That was the year she was married and heard a family friend – making a speech on behalf of her father – praise the quality of her homemade lasagne, as if this was her most notable achievement to date.
“In that instant, I realised I didn’t want that life and wanted to do more,” says the fifth-generation tenant farmer. “I didn’t know what my battle for a personal ‘gold medal’ was going to look like; I just knew that it was down to me to turn my life around and make a difference.”
Read more: Lisa Hogan details ‘biggest challenge’ on farm as they wait for council decision
Read more: ‘Naive’ Rachel Reeves slammed over Britain’s most hated tax as families hit hard
Baroness Batters working on her 300-acre farm in Wiltshire (Image: Jonathan Buckmaster / Express)
She has been doing just that ever since. Shortly after her marriage she negotiated the tenancy of Barford Park Farm with her father’s landlord and began building her own business from just 15 cows. In 2011, she launched Ladies in Beef with Princess Anne at London’s Butchers’ Hall, determined to reshape farming’s male-dominated image. In 2018, she was elected as the first female president in the National Farmers’ Union’s 118-year history. She held the post for six years, following re-election, and during a period of unprecedented agricultural crisis. She entered the House of Lords two years ago.
Through all this she has maintained her tenant farm, several businesses and her family. Now aged 58, Minette Batters has shared her story in her first book, Harvest, a deeply heart-felt homage to farming, family and food production.
Soon she’s back on the line with a note of relief in her voice after the calf is safely delivered. Explaining why the calving was so tricky, she says of the mother: “It’s a heifer – a cow that’s not had a calf before. Sometimes they have problems.
“She wasn’t having regular contractions. I normally leave them two hours and if they haven’t made any progress I help them.”
She walks me through the process with matter-of-fact precision: gloved up and pulling calving ropes in time with the contractions and “not just wrenching something but working with it”, as she puts it.
“The heifer is now up, I’ve left them to bond. If the mother doesn’t want to take ownership, you’re in trouble. For me, cost goes out the window. If a cow needs a caesarean, you do what you have to do and don’t think about it until afterwards. You’re running 24-hour care for your livestock, and calves don’t wait for business hours.”
It’s this devotion – to her animals and to the industry she was born into and has spent decades fighting for – that has made her one of the most influential voices in British agriculture. Describing how the journey began with that wedding speech, she says: “My failed school days flashed in front of me.
“Yes, I was the life and soul of the party, I could cook a bit, and I was a moderate rider, but that was it. I felt I’d been struck by a force so much bigger than myself, and said to myself that my wedding day would be the last day of the old me. I didn’t know what I would do, but I knew that my epitaph would say more than ‘she made a good lasagne’.”
Soon she had secured the farm. “I vowed to build the best business I could from scratch,” she says. “I would work every hour that ever existed. I would make my mark.”
Minette Batters, in white, riding horse Special at Badbury Rings (Image: Courtesy Baroness Batters)
Growing up in Downton, South Wiltshire in the 1970s, she was dyslexic, disruptive at school and often “fairly unruly”. Her late father ran the farm like a military operation. Their only family holiday together was going to the Royal Show, the largest agricultural show in the country.
When she expressed interest in agricultural college, her father’s response was blunt: “Women don’t farm. We don’t have a succession legacy, so neither you nor your brother will be able to farm here.” But she was determined. Having worked as an amateur jockey, assistant racehorse trainer, and Cordon Bleu-trained wedding caterer, she negotiated directly with the landowner to take on the tenancy of Barford Park Farm, selling her house to fund it.
Soon other tenant farmers in the region recognised that she was a force to be reckoned with. “I began to realise that I wanted to change the status quo rather than accept it,” she says. “I wanted the common perception of farming as male-dominated to be reconciled with what it really is: family-run farms nearly always run by men and women working together.”
When local farmers urged her to stand for the NFU she was sceptical. By this point, her marriage had broken down and she was running the farm single-handedly. In her book she writes of telling them: “I cannot see anywhere on earth that a single mother running a farm she doesn’t own could be a national NFU office holder.” One of them replied: “And that’s precisely why you must stand. You’re one of us, a tenant farmer.”
She was voted in as deputy president before becoming president, working with four prime ministers. She discovered that they wield enormous power.
“If you speak to them and make the case well enough, they can overrule a department and make a decision,” she tells me. “That happened with both Boris and Rishi.” Her relationship with her father, who suffered a severe head injury as a young man and later dementia, was complex. “We were probably very alike, both being very headstrong,” she says. “I think he would be very proud of me although he probably wouldn’t say so.”
Harvest by Minette Batters is out now (Image: Ebury)
Telling how she learned from the years when she was at loggerheads with him, she says: “I kept pressing at the same door when what I needed to do was step back and approach things in a different way.” It is a lesson she applies to everything now. She turned down a CBE twice while in post, because she felt it would compromise her independence.
And her workload was relentless: two phones, three email addresses, two children and a farm to run. “I found leadership at the NFU mind-blowingly lonely,” she admits. But she also found her voice. She is especially dismayed by the confusion in which farmers are operating. “We left the EU a decade ago without a plan for farming, other than to produce a lot less food and import a lot more.
“Ten years on, the world is upside down with geo-political challenges and climate change and we still don’t have a plan. I’ve just put a bull in with my heifers to calve, but I have no idea what the national plan for farming will be in spring. British farmers are beset by uncertainty.”
In the Lords she was tasked to lead a major independent farming profitability review for the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs, and delivered 57 targeted economic recommendations. Five months after publication she is still awaiting feedback or implementation. Her frustration is palpable.
“We have to shore up our food security,” she says. “We are 70 million people living on an island. We have to get real. We’ve got to be producing food and delivering for nature at the same time.”
She fears the distraction of a Labour leadership contest will worsen the situation. “If we go into a full-on leadership election government departments will go into lockdown,” she says. “Then what will happen is another reshuffle. Getting a new ministerial team up to speed will lose us another year. We’ve got to be producing food and delivering for nature at the same time.” As for the controversial family farm tax, she describes it as “the straw that broke the camel’s back”.
She says: “Even though the threshold has been raised, most farmers still think the family farm tax should be axed. I don’t think the conversation has gone away.” Her farm now includes spring and autumn calving Aberdeen Angus cross suckler cows, sheep for grazing, spring barley, a wedding barn seating 150, holiday annexes, and a walled flower garden she bought from her landlords in 2020.
She says of British produce: “We’re currently in the asparagus season. It is unique. Our food is a most glorious asset.” But the challenges are always mounting. “Fixed costs have gone up over the past five years by 30%,” she says. “Red diesel has doubled since the war in the Middle East.”
As a tenant farmer who does not own her land, she has told her twins George and Holly, both at university: “Get a skill outside farming. Don’t presume it will be here.”Despite all the challenges of trying to turn a profit on her own farm with a small team of local workers who depend on her for their livelihoods, her new life in the House of Lords feels exciting.
“I’m still learning the ropes, but after a decade of influence in Parliament from the outside, it’s liberating to return to being me – a tenant farmer from Wiltshire – but still able to influence our national way of life.”
She laughs at the suggestion that since leaving the NFU role her life is calmer. “Actually, it’s busier than ever. At the NFU, I had a huge team of staff, but on the farm there is no margin for any of us to fall over.” She wants young people to understand farming is not a backwater industry but one at the cutting edge of innovation. “The UK has an enormous opportunity to lead the world in an agricultural revolution: more food on less land with less cost,” she says.
And that heifer she calved this morning? By the time we finish talking, the calf is up and drinking. Mother and baby are bonding. It’s the kind of victory that has defined Minette Batters’s journey from overlooked to indispensable.
- Harvest by Minette Batters (Ebury, £22) is out now