POLITICIANS HAVE TO EARN OUR TRUST AGAIN'

Abi Reader was one of those who feared she would lose her farm under government inheritance tax changes: now she is switching her farm for the corridors of power, as Ruth Mosalski reports

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MOST days, if you want to find Abi Reader you'll have to set your alarm and get your wellies on. Her alarm goes off, just after 5am and she's out of the door, her dog at her side and will return home only when the herd is milked and jobs on the farm completed.

‘There is, she says, nowhere she would rather be.

“It just runs through my veins)’ she said. “From the moment that alarm clock goes off at 10 past, quarter past five, four in the morning and stepping out of that back door with wellies on and with my dog by my side and then spending the whole day on the yard with cows, it's the best place in the world to be,’ she said.

‘A third-generation farmer, farming dairy, sheep and arable, at Goldsland Farm in partnership with her parents and uncle in Wenvoe, just outside Cardiff, but from now on, you should expect to see more of her in the corridors of power, rather than the milking shed as the 44-year-old has just been elected as NFU Cymru president, the first woman to hold the role - although she’s keen to point out, the reason she was voted in by members on January 20 is her skills, not her gender.

Farming is inextricably linked to politics and, given the current climate, she knows there is plenty to do.

But, like thousands of farmers, the last 14 or so months have been racked with uncertainty.

‘The Welsh Government was changing the post-Brexit farming subsidy arrangements via the Sustainable Farming Scheme (SFS) and the agricultural community said the Labour-run administration's approach would have decimated their industry.

‘The anger was palpable, not least when farmers from across Wales headed to the Senedd to protest in their thousands. Abi was one of them.

She has been active in NFU Cymru since 2012, when she joined picketers outside a milk processors to campaign about milk prices.