Photo: Caroline Spelman

Farmers and landowners were this weekend digesting the appointment of a new Secretary of State at the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs – and first impressions were good.

For Caroline Spelman MP is a genuine expert on modern farming with a Europe-wide reputation – unlike her Labour predecessor Hilary Benn, a vegetarian, who to many farmers seemed more interested in politically correct environmental projects than the actual process of providing food for the nation’s tables.

Mrs Spelman, a mother of three, has been MP for Meriden since 1997, but before that had an extensive career in agriculture, including many years working in the often fraught fields of European Union farming.

She was deputy director of the International Federation of European Beet Growers and a research fellow at the Centre for European Agricultural Studies. Her appoint was announced by David Cameron at the weekend and, thanking him, she said:

“I am delighted to have been appointed Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. The department is responsible for many of the things that are vital to our quality of life - the food we eat, the air we breathe and how we manage the land we live on and the seas that surround our shores.

“I will work across government and beyond to respond to the challenges of increasing food production, adapting to climate change, protecting our natural environment and ensuring we live sustainably.”

Writes our countryside commentator John Sheard:”Ever since its creation a decade ago in the wake of the foot and mouth debacle – when the old Ministry of Agriculture was scrapped and blamed for a politically led disaster – Defra has been treated with deep suspicion by many country folk and particularly farmers.

“The first Secretary, Margaret Beckett, presided over a bureaucratic nightmare; the second, David Miliband used it as a stepping stone to higher things, and Hilary Benn’s vegetarianism did not go down at all well with livestock breeders and hill farmers here in the Yorkshire Dales.

“Mrs. Spelman is, as yet, an unknown quantity but she spent 15 years as a high-ranking professional in agriculture on a pan-European platform so she should know what she is talking about.

“It is particularly interesting that she is an expert of the agricultural production of non-food crops, one of the most promising prospects for British farming in areas like bio-fuels and artificial building materials.

“However, it seems unlikely that farmers will get one of their greatest wishes, the reintroduction of a Minister of Agriculture. That would probably go against the wishes of the Liberal Democrats in the new coalition government, for they are even keener than David Cameron to emphasis their ‘green’ credentials.”