Richard Weeks and I have been busy throughout November, joining in with a range of NFU regional events ranging from Annual Open meetings, winter conferences and regional environmental open days in the South West and North West.
These events gave us the opportunity to represent NFU Energy to a good number of NFU members and, at the same time, meet up with many regional NFU staff members. Each of the meetings has been well attended, with typically between 60 and 200 per event, so between us, we met in the region of 1000 members in total.
The meetings each had a headline guest speaker, typically one of the three senior office holders of the NFU, Minette Batters (President), Guy Smith (NFU Deputy President) or Stuart Roberts (NFU Vice President), together with a range of interesting national and local speakers. They were certainly informative, interesting and at times thought-provoking and led to much healthy debate amongst those gathered together.
It has been valuable for Richard and myself, as we were able to gain a good insight into the national and local issues impacting the farming community. Much discussion was unsurprisingly about Brexit and its potential impact on farming, badger culls and TB, as well as the growing pressures on the meat and dairy sectors. Not forgetting some pretty interesting debate last week around the recent BBC documentary, Meat: A Threat To Our Planet.
A few take away messages from this round of meetings include a good number of members yet to be introduced to NFU Energy, the range of services we offer and the member benefits available to them, a good number of queries about small scale domestic solar and wind as well as water turbines. There was a lot of interest to learn more our brokerage services; especially the NFU Electricity Buying Group. We also had some interesting questions for larger-scale renewables and account management opportunities, which we will be busy following up on in the coming days. On a more concerning note, we also heard from several members who expressed frustration with the sheer number of unsolicited calls they receive, some of which appear also to be misleading, in respect of their domestic energy contracts. Vigilance is certainly required.
If you met Richard or me recently and would like to ask any further questions or if you haven’t met either of us yet but would like to some advice on your domestic or business energy, then please give us a call on 024 7669 6512.