Woman farmer digs in to fight for post on the male-dominated NFU

A woman to lead Britain's farmers? Not impossible, and perhaps sooner than you think. Britain's best-known female farmer, Marie Skinner, is trying to break into the overwhelmingly male-dominated upper ranks of the National Farmers' Union.

The Norfolk arable farmer, who sits on a batch of Government quangos and writes columns for a sheaf of agricultural magazines besides looking after 500 acres of wheat, barley and sugar beet with her husband, Chris, is standing for the post of NFU deputy president in elections next month.

She says she wants the NFU to modernise and adapt to a world in which government and EU subsidies of the past 30 years will no longer be a guarantee of farmers' income. Family farms must look beyond farming to survive, she says, and diversify to tourism and safeguarding the environment.

Mrs Skinner, who frequently appears in the media, does not deny she would eventually like the union's top job, but is refraining from a challenge to the incumbent president, Ben Gill, who is seeking unopposed a third two-year term.

"Ben has done such a good job over foot-and-mouth, over the last very difficult year, that if I stood against him it might appear as criticism, rather than raising issues," she said. "I would have no problem in working with Ben."

But Mrs Skinner does have a problem with the electoral procedure. The voters are the governing council of the union and although she had served on it for five years she is not now a member and she will have no platform to address them: she can attend the meeting on 7 February, but not speak.

The council met last week to discuss the issue and declined to change its position. "I don't know why," Mrs Skinner said. "All that would do is enable me to say what I am standing for and why, and to be denied that is a major problem. What are they afraid of?"

An NFU spokeswoman said: "All that will happen at the meeting will be that a secret ballot will take place. No one is allowed to make an address or speak, so there is no formal basis for anyone to stand up and say anything; not only for Marie Skinner but for all the other candidates, including Ben Gill."

The council that will not hear Mrs Skinner's pitch for office has 94 members, 93 of them men. Mrs Skinner thinks many are looking to the comfortable past, when the post-war subsidy regime and the EU's common agricultural policy meant that for decades farmers had a guaranteed market and a guaranteed price for everything they produced.

But recent exposure to world agricultural market prices means that crop and livestock production, although still the basis for farming, will provide only small profit margins, she says, so farmers must be flexible in adapting new sources of income, such as environmental protection, tourism or rural businesses, or they will go under. At her own farm near Norwich, she and her husband have developed a livery yard and a conference centre to supplement their income from crops.

She says the NFU needs to modernise to adapt to this climate. Among other changes she would like to see is a small council, directly accountable to the membership.

An unbiased observer would probably concede Mrs Skinner has an impressive CV. She is a senior member of such varied official bodies as the Home-Grown Cereals Authority, the Government's new National Rural Affairs Forum and the East England Development Agency.

Mrs Skinner also trained as a biologist and married into farming: she and her husband have two sons, aged 17 and 20, and a daughter of 22. She also writes columns for Crops magazine, NFU Countryside and Farmers' Weekly.

Her opponents in the election for deputy president will be the incumbent, Tim Bennett, of Carmarthenshire; the present vice-president, Michael Paske; Rad Thomas, a Leicestershire farmer; and Richard Haddock, a radical West Country farmer who unsuccessfully stood against Mr Gill for the presidency two years ago.