It’s hard not to be enthusiastic around Sarah Pettitt. At 37, this woman seems to have it all and she’s ready- no, absolutely determined, to get more. With a career fuelled by a mission not to let down the underdog, Pettitt has that rare ability to be both transparent and real. She is truly a Lincolnshire lass who has, through sheer determination, focus and guts, made a career out of a deep-rooted family passion: horticulture.

We meet at a hotel in her home town of Boston. She rushes in having just sorted out some polythene removal on her family farm, of which she is partner with her father Richard and brother of the same name. I have her for a good couple of hours before she whizzes off to facilitate a meeting between growers to get together a new distribution hub in the area. From only a snippet of her life, you can see that manic is the theme, and that personal and professional, private and public is very much in the same vein. And not only that, it’s her life blood. “My core strength is the morals and attitude that underline everything and anything I do and the belief that anything I put my hands to can be done,” she tells me. “It’s pure bloody mindedness.”

She is quick, however, to nod towards the people who nurtured her, confessing that she doesn’t get it right all the time and she values and respects the people who have experience in areas she may not.

Not that there’s much out there that will fall under this category. Head of numerous boards in the past and present, policy adviser and agricultural technical manger for frozen food company Christian Salvesen Foods, she single-handedly brought purple sprouting broccoli to the leading restaurants in London and then on to the multiples and introduced organic frozen petit pois to the UK market, to mention a few career highlights.

However, although the eldest of two children who would make the fourth generation of farmers in the family business, she started at grass roots level. After her father told her that farming was “too tough for girls” and she was better off looking for a different career to the family line, Pettitt took to the field after completing her A Levels at 18, cutting cauliflower as part of a team of five men and working long hours in various conditions with dogged determination. “I think my father secretly liked it because I was so sure I was going to do it,” she says. “My mother was not so happy, especially when she’d see my friends’ mothers who were proudly talking about their sons or daughters going off to Cambridge or the sorts.” She allows herself a little smile; this obviously isn’t a problem for her family now.

Against the backdrop of the fact that half the workforce in the UK is female but 52 per cent of the country’s largest companies have no women in the boardroom, Pettitt is in the minority as a woman. “Being in a male-led environment made me more determined to succeed and to be taken seriously,” she says carefully. “It’s no secret that I have had to fight my way into this industry and there are many stories that could be told, but once I proved myself there has been a core group of people in the industry -the salt of the earth - that have stuck by me and spur me on.”

After 18 months of manual labour on the farm and a particularly gruelling white cabbage harvest, Pettitt decided it was time to move on to a quality assurance post with the Old Leake Growers Association. She went from strength to strength, trouble shooting and getting herself head hunted twice in succession by vegetable packing companies before taking on the frozen veg market, at which point she joined the NFU.

“I certainly ‘broke my back’ in the cauliflower fields and I won’t ask anyone to do anything that I won’t do myself,” she says. “You have to have that attitude in a male-dominated profession as a young blonde bit that no one’s going to listen to. You gain respect by proving yourself.

“I was and am always looking for the next challenge. I enjoy setting up new systems and strategy, but I’m not an auditor. When I get to that role I tend to move on, as it becomes dull. My job at DG Produce was a turning point and a challenging time. I was only 23 when I left, fighting fit, and the people there gave me great scope to make my mark. Although it was pressurised, here was a woman who had core vegetable production knowledge, having worked from the bottom up, with a level of professionalism and energy. I was recognised and encouraged.”

It was those nurturing people in the industry who Pettitt almost collected through her career - some of the “Lincolnshire farming mafia” as she affectionately terms them - that were behind her, leading her towards the NFU. She had very little knowledge of the organisation and even less notion of politics as a whole, but this didn’t stop Pettitt and in 2003 she became not only the first woman, but the youngest person to be invited to join the NFU board.

Witnessing Pettitt get up on the stand at various conferences or industry events throughout her now eight-year stint at the NFU, her brand of straight talking and courage is without doubt what the fresh produce industry needs. And what drives that and gives her the edge over her politics-based colleagues are her firsthand experience and her personal commitment to making the industry a better place to be.

She describes her rise in the NFU to chair as a “sharp learning curve”. “Watch a father struggle to keep a business he has put his whole life into through no fault of his own and you’ll feel passion,” she says. “It was wrong. How many other people have gone through this: gone from direct service to the customer to having the entire marketplace removed and a glass window put in place between them and the customer, when really those in control of this new wave were only just finding their feet and made major mistakes that shocked a happy, healthy industry. When Margaret Beckett announced that we’d always have imports in the early 2000s, you may as well have doused me with petrol. I was ready to ignite.”

But as anyone who shares even a fraction of this passion will understand, it’s a tough pedestal to put yourself on, both from the point of view of your peers and workforce around you and your own perception of success and failure. Enough is never enough, especially when you are your own worst critic.

After various personal family problems, the last year has taken its toll, with Pettitt’s seemingly tireless work ethic taking over both her down or “at home” time just as she had seen her mother and father experience as she was growing up.

But she applies the same determination at work as she does to her personal life, making sure that her “better half” is mentioned during the interview, with her favourite situation remaining a good old chat while cooking and slurping red wine in the kitchen with him.

“In the past I lived to work, but you have to put your own happiness first,” she says. “I’ve enjoyed my work with the NFU and if I’ve helped just one grower from going bankrupt then all the sleepless nights, the extra calls, the tears and the pressure have been worth it. Individuals within the public sector can be guarded and distant, as well as reluctant to take on responsibility. If a private business was run like that, it wouldn’t last a week. People think that I’m aggressive and assertive, but I’m the opposite as well. Sometimes my passion ignites in front of me and I feel like I’m the only one [getting involved]. I know this isn’t the case; it’s just the need to get people in the industry ahead. At times it can feel very isolating.”

And there’s strength in admitting defeat, Pettitt realises. Next year will see a re-election for NFU Horticulture and Potato Board chair and chances are she won’t be a contender. In the same way as she came away from her family business - which she returned to for 18 months full time, incurring drastic personal changes and a financial cut - she’s ready for the next challenge, despite industry murmurs that the presidency would be more than within her grasp. “I have spent my life proving myself to my father and others,” she says, while hinting that she’s ready to jump back into the commercial fray. “I work harder, think harder and this is where it comes from. It is a constant need to impress my peers and bosses through time. I didn’t used to be conscious of it and it felt better when I reached 30, but it’s still very much my working ethic: to be the best.”