By Aimee Mahony, NFU chief poultry adviser
Parliament has been in recess in recent months and is set to return at the beginning of September. There is a level of engagement that continues with key ministers during the summer recess and MP’s have been in their constituencies which has given us the opportunity to engage on the important issues affecting the poultry sector.
As we move into the autumn there are several planned engagements where key lobbying asks can be shared and we wait with much anticipation to hear further detail on the strategies that the new government is developing.
It feels good to be able to share the positive news of recent announcements around free range egg marketing regulations when government-imposed AI housing measures are in place. This has been one of the NFU’s key policy asks on avian influenza and although a long time in the making, it is something we are pleased to finally see the government commit to. Our ask on this has always been for GB policy to be aligned and it was disappointing that the Welsh Government were not working together with Defra and the Scottish Government from the start. However, it is now good to see that they are consulting on this same issue and we very much hope that there will be more good news as an outcome of this.
We are fast approaching conference season with a number of poultry specific events in the coming weeks and months. I hope to see many of you at these various occasions and look forward to hearing different views from presenters and attendees alike.
I recently gained a better perspective from those that have no connection to farming when I presented to a class of year ten students as part of the NFU Education ‘farmers for schools’ programme. It was the end of term and I’d been asked to speak to a class of teenagers who hadn’t, for various reasons, been able to go on a school trip. Therefore, I entered the classroom with some trepidation, wondering how engaged an audience it would be, but I was pleasantly surprised and hopefully shared a glimpse of the wonderful world of poultry with them with a view to the skills the sector requires right across the supply chain.
For most of the students in that room, food and farming wasn’t necessarily that high on their agenda but when the teacher asked if anybody had seen Clarkson’s Farm, the enthusiasm really went up a gear. I overheard that some of them had never thought about farming as a career choice until the focus that had been brought upon it by my presentation and that television programmes like Clarkson’s Farm are really helping to raise the profile of the trials and tribulations that farming entails. If I made the difference to just one student’s view of the poultry sector that day, then that’s a good start and collectively we can all keep chipping away at the misconceptions which sadly do exist.