A proud parents’ moment for Jayne and I this month. We have travelled to Hamilton as a family for our middle son, James, to compete in the Junior Young Farmer of the Year Competition with his teammate Jack Foster.

The boys have competed together at a national level for three years and came second in their final attempt.

It is an incredibly tough competition, where the young people compete at near-adult levels.

The contest has been a wonderful journey for us, with the boys having the opportunity to interact with a lot of skilled farmers and professionals and able to visit many farms and businesses as they studied.

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About the author

David Clark

Farmer Focus writer

David Clark runs a 463ha fully irrigated mixed farm with his wife Jayne at Valetta, on the Canterbury Plains of New Zealand’s south island. He grows 400ha of cereals, pulses, forage and vegetable seed crops, runs 1,000 Romney breeding ewes and finishes 8,000 lambs annually.

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Many folk have been extremely generous with their time and our boys have grown tremendously as a result.

I had cause for reflection listening to a speech by one of the contestants in the senior Young Farmer Contest, who had chosen a topic discussing the technology we might be using on farm in 10 years.

He had a good grasp of technologies that are emerging out of labs and how they might be put to use, along with a few fantastical ideas.

Drones, artificial intelligence, satellite analysis and blockchain seemed all very plausible from an on-farm application viewpoint. Ten years ago, such ideas would have been the stuff of sc-fi comics.

So, I got to thinking about what would have featured in the same speech 10 or even 30 years ago.

The far-off technology being dreamed of then is already in each of our tractor cabs along with so many of the other technological advances we all use today.

The futuristic ideas of 30 years ago are our old technologies, long surpassed.

We, as farmers and food producers, are incredibly quick at embracing and utilising new technology.

I reckon we should be very proud of how technologically adept our current generation of farmers are and we should stand in awe of the bright future we have in our next generation of young farmers.