Opinion: Bring on the four-day week for agriculture
© Dvoevnore/ Adobe Stock It’s been ages since anyone wrote to the letters pages disagreeing with one of my opinion pieces. I pretend that I don’t care, but we columnists thrive on mischief.
It’s fine if readers don’t agree; the real misery is when people don’t react at all.
See also: Opinion – regen farming only works for those who own land
About the author
My boyfriend loves telling people about an eight-page thread on an internet farming forum titled “It must be very difficult to be as stupid as Matt Naylor.”
I’m proud of it, too, but recently I fear I may have gone soft.
So here’s an opinion for you. What about the four-day working week everyone’s talking about? It’s a good idea, right?
Work your hours in four days not five, a three-day weekend for “Netflix and chill”. I heartily agree – so get writing in.
Research says such work patterns lead to happier workers and better productivity.
Belgium already grants workers the right to work their weekly hours in four days, and in Germany, where the average working week is just 34 hours, there are calls from trade unions to reduce them further.
In 2019, Microsoft offered employees a three-day weekend for one month and found that work rates improved by 40%. Sounds good? Case closed?
Like a lot of farmers, I grew up working long hours. I did my share of 100-hour weeks.
I understand that some farming enterprises require high levels of commitment particularly, although not exclusively, those which involve livestock.
Last week, James, our whizzkid operator who does most of the precision work, worked until 10pm on Sunday night cultivating land for sunflowers ahead of a rainy forecast.
I was massively appreciative of his dedication. I understand that this is part and parcel of our job, but celebrate that we can offer James equal flexibility in exchange.
Nowadays, retaining great staff is about accommodating their lifestyle more than wage rates. The pandemic normalised remote working for managerial and clerical tasks.
Even in a business like ours, the office team all work at least one day each week from home.
Our operations director Chris and I use cameras, live data and telemetrics to see what’s going on, and, from any location, we can see more farm activities on our phones in five minutes than we would have done from a whole day driving around.
Chris can even drop his children at school while still effectively managing a complex workload.
The downside to being wired into live activities every waking minute is that it can quickly lead to burn-out.
I look wistfully at the black-and-white photos of my forebears sitting on haystacks, pitchforks laid down, drinking ale and eating cheese and pickles, and wonder how the hell we got here.
But, as I find myself saying more and more, “we are where we are.”
A world in which we all share our workloads through shift patterns could actually be positive for the countryside.
Farmers can make more money and deliver more joy by providing leisure activities than they can from growing cheap calories for a frazzled, time-poor population.
A nation with more free time might even prioritise eating simple, healthy food. Surely no one disagrees with that.