Farmers are our future
Over several months, I've enjoyed visiting farmers across the region to understand the challenges they face and hear what they want from a Conservative government.
For those farmers, we are promising to increase the protected UK-wide agriculture budget by £1 billion over the coming parliament.
And farmers will be able to spend every penny of this on boosting domestic food production.
However, there is no mention of an agriculture budget in the Labour manifesto, something National Farmers Union President,Tom Bradshaw, said was “deeply disappointing”.
We will also maintain our approach to Environmental Land Management (ELM) schemes and build on the work done so far to ensure it works for all farmers, including tenant and upland farmers.
And, thanks to a campaign led by a Conservative MP, seven of the UK’s major retailers have now responded to the call for supermarkets to back the nation’s farmers by adding ‘buy British’ tabs to their websites.
