Changes Must Be Made to Create Opportunities

Summary

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The good news I can offer you is that land-based colleges across the region and beyond are reporting bigger intakes of students taking farmingrelated courses than for many years. The bad news is that the opportunities for those young people actually to make a start in farming are scarcer than ever, as county council small- holdings estates are dispersed, and Farm Business Tenancy (FBT) rents rise to stratospheric levels. To an extent, this is a problem of success. The reason why rents are so high is that farming has rarely been more profitable (unless you happen to be a pig and poultry farmer, or horticulturist, that is), and many established farmers seem prepared to bid what sometimes looks like silly money to take on extra land.

But it is a problem, nonetheless, and it is as much of a problem for the farming industry as a whole as it is for the would-be new entrants themselves. Right now, farming needs new blood as rarely before, if it is to achieve the apparently impossible target of producing more food, at less cost to the environment. This is a challenge which demands innovation, dynamism and imagination, and those are all qualities which, while not exclusively the preserve of the young, are certainly more commonly encountered among the under 50s.

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Extract

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Changes Must Be Made to Create Opportunities

There is an irony here, as well. The advent of the Single Farm Payment has given very many older farmers, with no family su...

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