Tonight I'm heading across the country to Bedfordshire to talk to the UK & Ireland Agriculture Manager for McDonalds, Pete Garbutt.

We talk about his background growing up on the family dairy farm in North Yorkshire, his time studying agriculture at Harper Adams University, and how foot and mouth tragically struck their farm in 2001. 

We discuss his first job as a consultant for Andersons Farm Business Consultants in Thirsk, and what he learnt there, especially his role as a co-ordinator for the York Fresh Start Academy, helping providing farm management training for young people.

We go into his time at young farmers, where he chaired the national agriculture committee, and served as the YFC rep on the NFU national council. We also discuss hoe he took a staff role at NFU in 2008, eventually ending up as Chief Livestock Advisor, and the wide range of skills that required.

We then discuss at length his role at McDonalds, where he started in 2014. McD's operate 1300 restaurants across the UK, serving over 3.5 MILLION people a day, and are supplied by over 23,000 farmers across the UK and Ireland, and we discuss the wide range of support that they give to agriculture, including the Progressive Young Farmers Programme, their Beef Carbon Report, and their involvement with the Oxford Farming Conference.

Finally we talk into their fantastic new TV advert, featuring clips of farmers all across the country producing food for their restaurants.

All this and much, much more.

Pete's a great guy, and a huge supporter of British farming, and it was a pleasure to catch up with him tonight.

Check it out folks.. 

 

 

Episode Sponsor: 

NFU Cymru - for more information please visit www.nfu-cymru.org.uk

 

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