This year’s NFU annual conference is now fully subscribed, with almost a thousand NFU members and guests set to join farming leaders for what will be the centrepiece of the NFU’s centenary year.

Although the two-day conference will inevitably be a celebration of everything the NFU has achieved in its 100 years, the overall theme for the event - Growing for Another Century - is forward-looking, as farming enters what is arguably a new and brighter era.

Featured among a star-studded line up of speakers will be Defra secretary of state Hilary Benn MP, leader of the Conservative Party David Cameron MP and Sir Terry Leahy, chief executive of Tesco. From across the pond, professor Robert Thompson of the University of Illinois and Bob Stallman, of the American Farm Bureau Federation, will be joined by founder director of Forum for the Future Jonathon Porritt, Sir Stuart Rose, chief executive of Marks and Spencer and Iain Ferguson CBE, chief executive of Tate and Lyle Plc. Also speaking at the two-day conference are Professor John Beddington, the new chief science officer, and Malcolm Wicks, minister of state for energy.

NFU president Peter Kendall will open the conference, on February 18 at the Hilton London Metropole. He said: “This is the opportunity to put the calamities of 2007 behind us, remind ourselves of what the NFU has achieved over the past century, but above all to look forward to what I am determined will be an even brighter future.

“Of all of Britain’s great ‘old’ industries, none has come through the 20th century in better shape than farming. The industry is still hugely productive and hugely important. Much of the credit for that belongs to the farming families who make up the industry and who have shown quite remarkable resilience and adaptability in the face of huge change and sometimes great difficulties.

“But the NFU deserves enormous credit as well, for uniting thousands of small, disparate businesses into a single strong lobby to achieve the outcomes that farming needed.”

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