Living with the harsh reality of providing farming’s future

FARMERS ARE not alone in looking out on to a barren landscape in the months and years ahead, but for them the spectre may not just be figurative. Will there still be people enough to plough the fields, to harvest the crops; in short, to feed the rest of us?

Taken at face value, this week’s findings from Young Farmers Clubs across the region suggest that there will not.

The figures simply don’t stack up. Nearly all of those who took part in a Government- supported study aspired to live in a rural area during the next five years but two- thirds doubted that they would be able to afford to.

A similar number believed it would be harder in future for new entrants to get a start in farming. And that’s not taking into account the effect that Brexit and the pandemic will have on their livelihoods and prospects.

The problems are twofold. First, a shortage of affordable houses in the countryside lessens the chances of a couple having a place of their own, a prospect most urban families have taken for granted for the last 40 years or so. The scarcity is especially acute in the most desirable parts of the Dales and North York Moors, where building houses willy nilly is not desirable.

But it is the second problem that goes to the root of the issue – just how do prospective farmers get to the farms in the first place, if they weren’t born on one?

Farming, like any skill, has to be taught, and the value the country places on the teaching of it can be gauged by looking at the financial incentives offered to those who train to do so. They fall into three categories – let’s call them tiers one, two and three, so Whitehall can understand them. In the first, large bursaries await those who are willing to pass on their skills in maths, computers, physics or chemistry – the sought- after “STEM” subjects – while biology falls into tier two. Agriculture also relies on scientific expertise, yet it does not appear at all. It isn’t even a subject on the curriculum.

This is despite the fact that bursaries of £ 10,000 are currently being handed to prospective teachers in the Classics.

It would be hard not to put down to elitism this apparent prioritisation of Latin over eating, and harder still not to discern a view among those in Westminster that jobs in farming can be left to take care of themselves.

But they can’t, as a second report this week makes plain. Despite a Government- sponsored campaign to hire home- grown workers to help with this year’s harvest, only around one seasonal worker in 10 was a UK resident. One of the biggest recruiters told the National Farmers Union that of the 30,000 applications they’d received from Britons, only four per cent took up jobs and hardly any stayed past the first six weeks, having discovered that the work was somewhat at odds with the Darling Buds of May idyll they had imagined. That it paid more than the minimum wage was little compensation, apparently.

It bears out the fears among young farmers that the next generation is nowhere to be seen, especially if jobs in farming are not to be incentivised in the same way as those in computing. That, however, wouldn’t fit the current narrative, which holds that computer experts are our future and ignores the fact that even a sedentary workforce marches on its stomach.

It is not just a British problem. Farmers in New Zealand are reportedly so desperate for workers that they are offering free accommodation and unlimited free meat, milk and firewood to anyone willing to come and work for them. It’s an unexpected level of detachment in a country reliant on agriculture and admired around the world for its handling of the pandemic.

Back home, job prospects for young people are bleak in every other walk of life right now. As this newspaper reports today, ambitions have turned to dust as opportunities vanish, offers of work experience evaporate and gap years in which to experience the world disappear into the horizon. Too many people have been left with literally nothing to do, and as a consequence the number of drug offences has risen exponentially. Yet despite the expected relaxation of quarantine having failed to materialise, we have not had sight of an exit strategy.

Farming is ironically the one area in which a way out has been mapped. Unfortunately, it involves those already in the job having to leave because there is nowhere for them to live.

It would be hard not to put down to elitism this apparent prioritisation of Latin over eating.