Editor’s View: Time mulling time is well spent
© nat2851terry/Adobe Stock How many hours should you spend farming in a typical week? I can already feel the hackles rising at this seemingly innocent question. “Until the job is done” is the first correct answer.
For those with animals, the care of livestock comes before all other considerations.
Meanwhile, many arable farmers will be grateful that this has not been a typical week as they exhaustedly read this after a marathon drilling session to beat the next belt of rain.
See also: 7 training and development ideas to retain good dairy staff
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Of course, the pressure of diminishing profit margins intrudes into many folk’s considerations.
We all know those who feel they can only keep farming by scaling up to add revenue and (hopefully) profit to the bottom line in return for ever more extreme hours on the job.
And if we are honest, there are those who simply equate spending more hours labouring than their peers with success, as they are proud of their capacity to graft.
This isn’t unique to farming: it is also being seen in white-collar jobs, particularly those with high graduate intakes and extreme competition to progress up the career ladder.
Yet there is more to life than work, and other ways to make ends meet while still retaining a foothold in farming, as Michael Blanche cheerfully explains in this week’s Livestock section.
He is focused on minimising the routine work on his home farm to make things easier as he gets older, as well as allowing maximum time for other off-farm opportunities that may potentially be more lucrative.
This feels like a thought process that every business operator should challenge themselves with, rather than simply accepting that they have to work harder as well as smarter.
The broader point is this: Scaling up and sacrificing yourself in the process to build a viable business works for some people some of the time, but for others it’s a treadmill with no happy ending.
We naturally talk a lot in Farmers Weekly about how to optimise agricultural enterprises for profitability and when to diversify farming businesses with new income strands.
We talk less about diversified people, who do a variety of roles inside and outside of farming to earn a crust – what posh people call a portfolio career.
Some of that is clearly beyond our remit – you shouldn’t expect much advice here on how to be a part-time plumber.
But that doesn’t mean this route should not be scrutinised by those of you who are mulling how to survive as subsidy dwindles, searching for a role with a better hourly rate, or trying to grasp that elusive work-life balance.
What I liked the most about the article on Mr Blanche is that he has found a way to look after himself and his family as well as the farm.
If my friendship group of folk mostly in their 30s and 40s is anything to go by, how to do that is something many others are grappling with as well.
And for those of you who are employers, solving this is also one way to a happier workforce and better staff retention, as can be seen in further articles this week in Business and Livestock on employee management.
As mowers, balers and forage harvesters get greased and checked this week with grass season poised to get under way, it’s a timely reminder that farmers will never keep ordinary hours.
But that doesn’t mean the pursuit of healthy hours should be seen as inescapably out of reach.