Editor’s view: Red Tractor anger puts NFU in tricky spot
© Red Tractor That Red Tractor is a puppet for the retailers to offer them reputational protection if a farmer supplier does something out of line is old news.
The reason why many farmers have reluctantly tolerated the time and cost involved with this assurance body’s meddling up until this point, despite there being no premium for doing so, is twofold.
See also: Editor’s view: It’s no bad thing to reveal realities of farming
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One, they felt that the wider reputation of the industry was also being protected when these aforementioned bad apples grabbed the headlines.
Two, they bought into the idea that a single inspection was better than a multitude of different tickets and schemes being required for a farming enterprise’s various customers.
While the first point may still stand, it feels as if the events of the past week are shifting opinion on the second.
Such is the fury about how the Greener Farms Commitment (GFC) module has been launched, with retailers so transparently laying the grounds to pick the pockets of farmers, that many are now minded to take their chances with any alternative.
However, it is not just about this module. This is the match that has rekindled the dissatisfaction of a huge heap of tinder-dry farmers already grumpy with the body for reasons great and small. But what will that white-hot anger achieve?
Is this going to be another spleen-venting session with no outcome or will this renewed unhappiness lead to tangible changes?
As yet there is no remorse from Red Tractor or the retailers themselves.
They are perhaps content to wait this out in the way they have done before.
With NFU Council meeting this week, the focus has been on their role in this, with a split emerging between some delegates and senior officeholders over the extent to which this should be fought.
Deputy president Tom Bradshaw – who is the frontrunner to succeed Minette Batters as president next year – is the union’s Red Tractor board member.
He has been questioned over what he knew and when, and the extent to which he opposed this before.
So far he still supports the principle of the GFC while only venting his anger at the NFU being sidelined within Red Tractor during the module’s development.
His adherence to this line will surely be tested to the limit in the months ahead as he appears first at ordinary member meetings and then at the five regional hustings ahead of the election for the new top table at the NFU Conference next February.
Conditions are ripe for a presidential challenger to emerge who is willing to channel the anger of the membership more vigorously, although a glance at the history books tells us that outsiders rarely succeed in grabbing the prize.
Yet the fact remains that this module is wildly unpopular. The idea that farmers will have to put their hands in their own pockets to burnish the credentials of the supermarkets is outrageous and no one believes that it will stay voluntary for long.
So why is the NFU not taking a harder line? Is it the recognition that it cannot command a majority on the Red Tractor board to throw this module onto the scrapheap?
Is it that it genuinely believes this will remain an optional module that won’t stifle farmers’ manoeuvres to extract a price premium from customers in return for investing in more sustainable farming?
Or is this entrenched loyalty to an organisation it helped found and still believes is the least bad option compared with the alternatives?
Whatever the answer, this is the sternest test the presidential team has faced in some time.