He writes:
On the first day of our second meeting of the Cereals Development Programme class of 2016, we all met up at the NFU head office at Stoneleigh in Warwickshire and quickly reaquainted ourselves with each other over coffee. We were soon into the day properly, being introduced to the work that the NFU does on behalf of its farmers by the Vice President Guy Smith.
I had always known that the NFU did a lot but the variety of areas they get involved in is truly immense, not just the obvious lobbying of MPs both at Westminster and in Europe but also talking to everyone from chemical companies to environmental groups to try and stop the problems occurring before many of us farmers are even aware that there may be anything to be concerned about!
We heard from Phil Bicknell and Guy Gagen about the wide-ranging work of the food and farming and policy teams, there was plenty of time for the Q and A sessions which were almost as long as the presentations themselves in most cases. We then had a tour of the NFU's offices and saw all the various sections hard at work, before heading over to ADHB for lunch.
Dr Martin Grantley Smith gave us an introduction into who the ADHB are and what they do, which in simple terms is a levy body looking after all UK agriculture apart from the poultry and sugar producers. They undertake both market research and crop research all with the aim of making us better and more profitable farmers in these challenging markets. This is not just via increased productivity but also with matching cropping to what is required for export and feed supply chains and where possible deriving value from volatility, which was a great term that I promptly plagiarised and plan to use lots in the future.
For the last part of the afternoon we discussed the Red Tractor scheme, and heard what they do with their remarkably small staff base, which is amazing considering how widely the brand is known and respected.
Day two was all about presentation and media training, which I had been rather looking forward too as I've had the odd press opportunity from my current roles within the NFU and I'm sure I could have done better on each occasion, so I was poised to take notes. Plenty of lessons were learnt from Tessa Morton in the presentation skills session about how to talk to an audience and stay relaxed, who would have thought that breathing out was vastly more important than breathing in?
Some of the points really helped especially when we came to swap over at lunchtime and do some media training with Andy Johnston who has quite a list of journalistic and presenter credits to his name.
Firstly there was a presentation of what to expect from the modern media if we ever get called upon to a TV or radio interview including some techniques to get us back on topic if we ever stray away from the point.
After that we had a go at a proper interview with a full blown TV camera, mostly on the subject of Brexit. Once we had all been through it, we watched them back - critiquing each other so that for round two we could try and better our performances, though in this interview we had a real curveball question at the end to try and catch us off guard about the impact of Donald Trump winning the American election which had happened overnight. Once again we watched them back and everyone had improved as they became more familiar with what was happening.
It was certainly a very worthwhile couple of days it gives us all something to build on going forward. Thanks to all involved and the NFU and Openfield who made it possible.