Ahead of the people going to the polls on 8 June, we examine what the main political parties are promising to do for farmers and the agri sector.

The Conservative Party

Theresa May

The Conservative manifesto offers the headline promise of continuing to channel the same budget of support currently paid to the farming sector.

The manifesto offers little detail on the promised new agri-environment system. It has been over six month since Andrea Leadsom announced the two green papers on the environment and food and farming at the oxford farming conference.

The part also mentions the need for compulsory CCTV in abattoirs.

The Scottish National Party (SNP)

Nicola Sturgeon

The party says it wants to “have full control of EU agricultural funding following Brexit”.

The SNP manifesto focuses in on convergence money, which is the fight for repatriation of UK support payments to Scotland, due to our lower than average area payment.

The party also goes on the reaffirm its stance against the use of genetically modified plants.

The Labour Party

Jeremy Corbyn

The Labour party is championing production standards in food quality and welfare, promising to prevent imports of cheap and, oftentimes, inferior produce. This may be a challenge with the World Trade Organisation.

It also want to “reconfigure funds for farming” to support smaller traders and communities.

The Liberal Democrats

Tim Farron

The Liberal Democrats wants to refocus support towards producing healthy food and public benefits and away from direct support. It sites countryside protection, flood prevention, food production and climate-change mitigation. It would appear that the party wants to support smaller farms and move support away from large landowners. This looks like it wants increased capping of support payments.

Summary

All the main parties want to protect our high welfare standards and most go so far as to seek improving them.

How this will be done remains to be seen as we already have very high welfare standards.