Editor’s View: Office can be a place for proper farming too
© FLPA/Shutterstock Truly this is a week for proper farming. No one can now deny that cereal harvest is in full swing, with growers up and down the land on a tractor from morning till night.
The smell of dust and diesel, the happy purr of properly functioning machinery and the sight of fields getting cleared are a combined sensory experience likely to strike joy into even the surliest farmer’s heart.
These are the large fraternity of arable petrolheads within agriculture, who are never happier than when they are operating big kit.
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Many also reside within the livestock sector, although there are plenty of others who would much rather spend their day in the parlour or the handling pens, than be cooped up in a cab.
Petrolheads and stockmen and women. Cheek by jowl, these two tribes have lived for many a year, managing their particular passions, reliant on each other to do the jobs the other doesn’t want.
And of course there are some farmers who straddle both – the talented types who can turn their hand to anything, while the rest of us mere mortals marvel at how they can seemingly do it all.
And then there is the third tribe, one that undeservedly gets the least recognition: the office warrior.
The smell of a fresh pot of coffee, the hum of a printer that has finally connected to the laptop, and the sight of a notification email confirming that your form has been successfully submitted on time.
What stamina and mental fortitude it takes when the weather is fine to sit and catch up on the invoices or immerse yourself in the boring detail of this week’s updates to England’s Sustainable Farming Incentive.
The tension between the business of doing the farming and running the enterprise is nothing new, of course.
Yet the rising tide of form-filling that needs to be completed means the office warrior has an ever-increasing number of battles to fight.
The ones who relish that aspect of business, as well as food production itself, have as big an advantage as a livestock farmer who is as comfortable in the cab as they are under a cow’s tail.
But there are only 24 hours in a day. For those of you who are battling to do everything indoors yourself, alongside everything outdoors, I would ask: Are you certain that’s still the best option?
In certain corners of farming, it seems that we are more reluctant to hand over money to a farm secretary or other rural professional to assist with paperwork, than we would be to enlist a tractor-driving contractor.
Yet as the article on managing finances in this week’s Business section notes, with banks getting twitchy about the widening variation in farm performance, it is more important than ever that cashflow and borrowings are well looked after.
So thanks for keeping the show on the road, office warriors. Being a whizz with a spreadsheet is proper farming too.