Opinion: Farming needs bold renegades

I went on a speed awareness course recently. Sitting in a strip-lit, municipal building on a grey Friday afternoon with 19 other speeders reminded me why I left school at 15.

When the bell went, I ran to my car and hurried home at 29mph all the way. In between pictures of flattened motorcyclists, we learned the enlightening fact that the human brain doesn’t fully learn to process risk until one is 25.

This explains many things previously mysterious to me, such as skateboards, parkour and rag week at the RAU. 

See also: My name is Matthew and I’m an addict

The prefrontal cortex, the bit of the brain responsible for planning, logic and impulse control, keeps developing into one’s mid-30s. For some men, it can take until their 40s to mature. I guess those are the ones who play rugby.

Young farmers more productive

Matthew Naylor is the managing director of Naylor Flowers.

Progress has always required a degree of risk-taking so it is interesting that the Farm Business Survey (FBS) recently revealed that young farmers are significantly more productive than their older counterparts.

Productivity, in this case, is being measured as financial output in relation to the amount of capital invested. Farmers aged between 35 and 45 were found to be 5% more productive than farmers in their 60s.

I like the Farm Business Survey. I have contributed since my early 20s and always benchmarked against it.

Almost every decision I made in my 20s and 30s was based on increasing our output and profit margin. 

Not all of my decisions were good, obviously. My prefrontal cortex was still green then: unlike the dense, grey matter throbbing in the Naylor forehead these days. 

Evolving priorities

Nonetheless, adventurous thought married with attention to profit and turnover were what helped my business to grow. According to the FBS figures, I am now supposedly in my most productive years and I notice my priorities are evolving. 

I still focus on productivity – in 2016 the gross output of our farm averaged almost £10,000 per hectare – but now I sometimes invest for personal satisfaction at the expense of profit.

I initially wondered if this explained the FBS figures. Were they masking the fact that some great 60-year-old farmers have higher costs because they are concreting their yards, doing more for the environment, maintaining better soil structure or driving a Range Rover Autobiography as their company vehicle?

Looking around the countryside, however, this doesn’t appear to be the case. It actually looks more like there are loads of rubbish, older farmers whose poor productivity is being supported by taxpayers’ money. What would some wild, risk-taking young brains make of their farms if given the chance of them?

Adventurous thought

I hope that the chancellor of the exchequer, Philip Hammond, is asking the same question. British agriculture faces unprecedented change. Old answers will not be suitable for new questions, we need bold and adventurous thinking from the fleshy prefrontal cortices of young people. 

And when I say young people, I’m not talking about the boring, young fogies in Schoffels that agricultural colleges churn out these days, who only want to produce more wheat or lamb. I mean proper, bold renegades with challenging ideas, new products, radical production techniques and sales skills.

We need a British farming policy that gives these young people an advantage over older, bed-blocking farmers. British agriculture has chosen to drive on the global motorway and so let’s put the right people behind the wheel and hope that they stay under the speed limit.