On Thursday, UK citizens will vote on the country’s future in the European Union. Opinion polls suggest the vote will be an extremely close one.

The farming vote has been especially difficult to call, with findings between polls showing a significant degree of variation.  

Since February, Farming Online has run a series of online polls, each open for around one week, to gauge farmers’ feelings ahead of the vote. These showed the ‘Leave’ vote consistently leading, but suggested gains for the ‘Remain’ camp as the ‘Undecided’ vote decreased up until June, when there was a large shift towards ‘Leave’.

However, whilst most online polls in the farming press have shown majority support for Brexit, the results of a telephone poll of 3,000 farmers by the National Farm Research Unit, released during the Cereals event last week, showed 34% in favour of leaving the EU, 38% wanting to remain and 28% undecided

On 15th June, with around 450 responses, Farming Online’s June Poll results showed 64% of respondents backing Leave, 33% wanting to remain and only 3% undecided. The poll remained open, and respondents had the opportunity to change their responses up until Wednesday (22nd June).

Wednesday’s results show that, of over 700 respondents, 63% were for Leave, 34% for Remain and 3% undecided. 80% of respondents said their views on the referendum had not changed in the past 12 months. The graph below gives a detailed look at the shift in responses over June. Period 1 represents 6th - 13th June, and Period 2 14th-22nd June:

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