Country life is changing

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Country life is changing

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Behemoth

Joined: 01 Dec 2004
Posts: 19023
Location: Leeds

Posted: Thu Sep 22, 05 9:11 am Post subject: Country life is changing

The changing face of country life
Anthony Bartram
BBC News East Midlands

Country life is changing.

Farmers who are leaving in their droves say it is barely recognisable - and is now more to do with form-filling and less to do with growing crops and looking after livestock. There are fears small family farms could be lost forever in an industry based on cheap food and economies of scale. With the average farmer now pushing 60 there is a big question mark over where the next generation of farmers will come from.

Derby College mirrors what is happening on the farms their students are training for. Twenty years ago the Broomfield Hall site had more than 90 agriculture students - today the numbers have dropped to just nine.

The answer was to diversify, selling the costly dairy herd and pigs in favour of courses like animal care, land management, floristry and equestrian studies which have boosted the college's roll to around 380.

Jeremy Carter, Derby College's operations manager for animal sciences, said farmers are being urged to follow their lead. "We've had meetings here with farmers, with the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and the East Midlands Development Agency to try to explain to farmers how they can diversify," he said. Maybe get an outside job to keep the farm going and maybe look at farming as something to do and the outside job as your main income stream."

On a positive note they are getting record numbers on the so-called leisure learning part-time courses, which teach traditional countryside crafts such as dry stone walling, hedge laying and small holding. And as for the nine agriculture students themselves, they all have jobs and plenty of optimism.

Electrician's son Daniel Rogers is the first in his family to go into farming. "It's the love of the job really and every farmer feels the same - life's not all about finances," he said. As a bank manager's son, Dave Ransom knows enough about farming and money to know he simply cannot afford his boyhood dream of owning his own farm. Instead he manages Highfield's Happy Hens in Derbyshire for Roger Hosking. "I have a great opportunity here and a rare freedom to run a farm," said Mr Ransom. "To buy a relatively small farm you would need about �1m - there are big figures involved. "Then you would have to stock it, get the machinery in and find the money to get started on it."

For existing farmers, pressures are growing every year. Even with 2,200 acres in Lincolnshire, Tim Radford said he is losing money. "when I was younger, at agricultural college we used to reckon you could make a good living on 500 to 700 acres as a family unit," he said. "Now I reckon that's about 2,500 to 3,000 acres. There are a lot of forces against farmers at the moment the costs are going up,." He added despite supermarkets offering ever cheaper food, it would be a mistake to think the country could get by without farmers.
Uncertain future

"It would only take an event like a war to recognise how important it is to be self sufficient," he said. "The thing is with the pressure from increasingly powerful supermarkets, I don't think consumers appreciate where the food comes from or for that matter care, they're more concerned with getting it cheap and who can blame them."

The future for farmers, however, remains uncertain. About 60% of farmers in the East Midlands already have at least one outside job to pay the bills, while many are leaving altogether. Rural leisure and tourism now outstrips farm incomes by four to one. But the farmers argue producing food makes the countryside what it is and plays a vital part in attracting the businesses and tourists which are keeping rural Britain alive.

wildfoodie

Joined: 05 Apr 2005
Posts: 2169

Posted: Sat Oct 01, 05 5:06 pm Post subject:

Quote:

With the average farmer now pushing 60 there is a big question mark over where the next generation of farmers will come from.

There are record numbers of loaded city types buying up former farms and the land that goes with them. A sprinkling seem to have ideas of wanting to continue managing the land , more are content to lease it out to other farmers, probably still more are contemplating how to maximise the return on their land investments... cause for concern I think. I have long believed that the UK will eventually become a playground for the very rich ( land prices already show this ) unless the new landowners can be drawin into looking at their fields and meadows in a wider scope as a community resource.
jacky

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