Rachel Gilmour

It is always a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Turner. I rarely miss an opportunity to speak about farming in this place. It was a privilege last October to be elected by Government MPs as the co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on farming. I suspect that there is too often a perception in Whitehall that farmers do rather well. Land rich? Perhaps. Cash rich? Rarely. It is too rarely acknowledged that many farmers earn little more than £20,000 a year. My region, the south-west, has the lowest average farming business income of anywhere in the country, at just £35,100 per farm. My farmers are not landed gentry. They are people who work with their hands. They are up before dawn, toiling through the winter. As I said in the House yesterday, the Brexit deal we ended up with has strangled trade in food, farming and fishing. We need a comprehensive sanitary and phytosanitary agreement with the Europeans as soon as possible. It would reduce trade friction and lower costs for farmers directly. The effects of getting things wrong in this area spread far beyond the farm gate. As farms fall, so do butchers, delivery drivers, packagers, suppliers, labourers and contractors. The elephant in the room is that food security is national security. There is simply no substitute for a farmer. Without them, we all go hungry.