Farmers must help raise awareness of the importance of agriculture during post-Brexit negotiations as industry risks being pushed to the sidelines.
The NFU have been holding a series of consultations, most recently in Exeter where deputy President Minette Batters urged farmers to contact their local MPs to ensure agriculture will be represented in the coming talks.
Policy director Andrew Clark said the need to contact MPs was vital as future decisions that will shape farmers will be made at Whitehall.
"There’s no reason to continue as we are, we need to look at what combination we should have," said Clark on the subject of what model the UK could pursue outside the EU.
"The sooner we can get trade agreements in place, the better."
Access to the European market
Farmers have also been meeting in London to discuss the future beef and lamb sectors.
Representatives echoed much of what has been said in the previous months namely access to the European market and a confident agricultural policy.
"On trade, our livestock farmers, particularly sheep, need access to European markets to support our production and price while the quality of our beef merits trade arrangements that recognise existing and potential markets," said NFU Scotland Livestock Committee Chairman, Charlie Adam.
"We need to use Brexit as an opportunity to focus support and policy on those doing the farming and to see a move towards more sensible regulation and proportionate policing."
NFU livestock chairman Charles Sercombe said regulatory burdens remain a thorny issue for many livestock producers.
"We recognise that any significant change could impact on our ability to trade within the single market.
"Therefore, our challenge to government is to ensure regulation is proportionate, is not ‘gold plated’ but encourages compliance."
Invest in the workforce
Professor Tim Lang, professor of Food Policy at City University London's Centre for Food Policy, has said that leaving the European Union will expose a "decades-old failure to invest in food skills and equitable infrastructure for sustainable development."
Professor Lang – a Lancashire hill farmer before becoming an academic and establishing himself as a leading expert on food issues – said: "Are Brexiters ready to go into the picking fields and factories where foreigners work?"
He told Farming UK that the current system couldn’t operate without foreign labour.
Stephen Devlin, an economist with the New Economics Foundation, has said that the UK will need to make farming jobs more attractive to British workers.
He has produced a report, ‘Agricultural Labour in the UK’, in which he highlights the importance of migrant labour.
He said data showed that foreign workers carried out most of the seasonal, unskilled labour in the UK farming sector.
Threaten Britain's food security
Professor Lang has warned that Brexit could even threaten Britain’s food security.
He told FarmingUK that, in the 1980s, the United Kingdom was 82 per cent self-sufficient in food. This had fallen to 61 per cent.
The country was running a food trade gap and the fall in the value of Sterling since the EU referendum had made imports more expensive.
“Our food exports are worth about £19 billion and they are things like whiskey and biscuits. Imports are worth about £40 billion and they are the good stuff like vegetables that we need for a healthy life,” he said.
Professor Lang said that the UK’s food system was vulnerable. Over the last 30 to 40 years a food revolution had resulted in a longer food chain and longer storage.
Tesco had adopted its just-in-time system from Toyota. At any one time under this just-in-time system there were just three to five days of food supplies in the UK.
