A rewarding trip to Kenya, planning a maiden speech in the Lords and hope for farming’s roadmap in 2025 and beyond.
After two years planning, securing a literary agent and writing a proposal, I have finally signed on the dotted line of my first book contract. My inaugural visit to meet my now agent, Euan Thorneycroft, was back in the summer of 2023. I was very clear in my own mind that the book needed to cover all aspects of the negative trade deals that I had witnessed in my time at the NFU. After an hour of listening to my thoughts on why this book should be written, Euan said gently: ‘Minette, you might be very interested in the minutia of trade policy, but most people are not.’ ‘But they need to know what happened,’ I’d retorted.
In the end, we settled on the book being a memoir/manifesto, allowing me to chart the often stormy waters of my time working with four Prime Ministers and six Defra Secretaries. Each chapter, however, will come back to my farm. It starts when I’m five years old in 1973 as the UK prepares to join the Common Market and will finish with a manifesto for food and farming. It will be published by Ebury, a non-fiction division of Penguin, in the summer of 2026 — a decade on from the Brexit referendum; the title is Harvest.
The Christmas period is always an opportunity for reflection and a time to plan for the year ahead. It has been wonderful to have my children back from university and to catch up with friends and neighbours over a glass or two. We try to get the farm well prepared for the break so that everyone can have a quiet two weeks. Looking back, I struggle to believe that this time last year I was still president of the NFU. It has taken me a while to reboot my life and to get used to organising my own diary — at the NFU, every hour of the day was mapped out and briefings would appear in my calendar for whatever the day had in store.
It is also strange to be responsible only for my own opinions, rather than paraphrasing everything that 46,000 members might expect me to say. I’ll never stop feeling enormous responsibility for the farmers I was privileged to represent and I hope that in the Lords I can continue to make a difference on their behalf. With Parliament on recess, I’ve been preparing my maiden speech, constantly mindful of Black Rod’s sound advice: ‘Focus on quality over quantity.’ Right now, the future of farming is at a major crossroads; Defra is busy planning a 25-year Farming Roadmap. I hope it is bold and meaningful — it needs to be. The viability of farms across the country will depend on it.
‘‘Our children want the big jobs,’ they said. Who can blame them, isn’t that what we all want, for our children to have a better life?’
A highlight of 2024 was partaking in the Farm Africa: Grow for Good Challenge in Kenya. I was one of 14 women who travelled to Embu county, which sits in the foothills of Mount Kenya. Our challenge was cycling 75km (46½ miles) to three different smallholder farms. Judy, Perpetua and Juliet were our hosts and they, in turn, benefited from us working on their farms. We made compost, weeded, planted, cut fodder for goats and basically did whatever tasks needed doing. It was exhausting, humbling and inspiring in equal measure.
Farm Africa is transforming lives, as the farmers the charity helps learn to farm more sustainably; they’re seeing yields increase and their weekly income treble. This means that their families are self-sufficient and they can sell surplus produce to the community. In Africa, a small amount of funding goes a very long way. Children as young as six walk four miles or more to school each day; one bowl of corn-based porridge suffices for breakfast and lunch. At the end of the day, they walk home again.
Life appears unbelievably hard: there is little to no sanitation, yet the children wear brilliant-white shirts as part of their uniforms. Neither do you hear them crying — this is a country that’s focused on survival. Unsurprisingly, education is a prized resource: everyone knows it’s the route out. All the farmers we met either had children at university in Nairobi or who had gone to work elsewhere: ‘Our children want the big jobs,’ they said. Who can blame them, isn’t that what we all want, for our children to have a better life?
Kenya has 7.5 million smallholder farmers, who look after land of between one and five acres; they account for 80% of the country’s agricultural output. As an ambassador and former trustee of Farm Africa, I thought I knew a lot about what the charity was achieving. I naively believed we could help teach our fellow African farmers how to farm. How wrong I’ve been; we have so much to learn from Africa.
Baroness Batters is a crossbench peer and former NFU president. She runs a beef farm and rural business in Wiltshire
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