Editor’s View: Time for young farmers to give it some welly
© Adobe Stock Since Defra’s decision to pull up the drawbridge on the Sustainable Farming Incentive last week, thoughts among some of you have been turning to what this may mean for the future of farm support – and indeed farming in general.
This is only natural since we have very little idea what a future English environmental scheme will look like, what size budget it will have, and when it may or may not be open for business.
Having been to a few events this week and fallen into conversation with folk about it, they are splitting into the same two camps on this topic that have been tugging me in opposite directions for a while now.
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Like the animal spirits of traders that drive the financial markets up and down, I think of them as farming’s bulls and bears.
Bulls give me a firm handshake, a cheery grin and want to focus on the positives of the past few months.
The farmgate price for meat, eggs, potatoes, onions, dairy – all of these and more – are priced in profit-making territory for those with well-run businesses, they say. Let’s crack on.
We also seem to be past the worst of input inflation, and interest rates are on their way south.
And we should have known since Brexit that there would come a point when Defra was going to lose a fight over finite money to another department, so farmers should have planned to cope with nothing and taken everything that was available as a bonus.
So the bulls want Farmers Weekly to talk up our sector for fear that, in an excess of caution, our industry frightens away the talent and shuns the investment that will be needed to carry on turning out world-class food.
What of the bears? Well, some come marching up to me, but normally they prefer to write.
They are looking for even more fervent support in holding Defra to account for reneging on past promises, taking the fight to the Treasury and preaching the importance of domestic food production to the consumer.
Talk of us standing on our own two feet without government cash is honourable in principle, but not in practice, they say – most of the rest of the world get shielded in some capacity from rapacious markets by their governments, so we should too.
And it was right to create a marketplace for environmental goods and services – how else will we hit our legally binding targets, as well as showing climate leadership?
Both of these species are persuasive in their own way and good journalism does not give in to an excess of either emotion. However, I would say I am a fraction more on the side of the bulls.
The farmer who succeeds in the future will surely be one who has a greater appetite for risk than their predecessors.
“When I was young,” a farmer said to me this week, “all I saw were the opportunities. As I got older, all I could see were the problems.”
These turbulent times call for the bullish younger generations of farmers to be given as much responsibility as possible.