Farming is a lifestyle choice

IT’S easy to get bogged down, and thoroughly downhearted at the moment in agriculture. Uncertainty of post Brexit trade deals and how that is going to affect prices – is agriculture going to become the metaphoric sacrificial lamb to ensure banking, finance and other businesses sectors get a good deal?

Sometimes it seems like if it’s not machinery breakdowns or a ewe lying on the lamb you’ve tubed for three days, then it’s the resident flock of ‘wild’ geese stubbornly grazing your vulnerable emerging crops.

However, with it being so easy to get downright depressed, my brother, Andrew, often makes a very good point; farming is a lifestyle choice. I work on the family mixed farm on The Black Isle with my parents, Brian and Caroline, though I also work two days a week as a physiotherapist.

My brother Andrew, a Doctor of Physics at Edinburgh University, can imagine nothing worse than being involved with the farm, I mean why would you want to work 100 hours a week without the guarantee of actually making money? He points out that no one is holding us ransom at the farm and making us work, so we all need to shut up and get on with it.

One of his recent suggestions to our parents was for them to sell the lot, get day jobs and enjoy every weekend off! And you know what, he’s totally right.

Yes, it’s extremely unfair when prices don’t match cost of production. It’s unfair that you want to own your own farm but can’t because the cost of land is now completely uncorrelated to what that land can actually produce.

But, there are lots of people out there who’s dream job is as a footballer, or an artist, who can’t make it pay, and you know what, they just have to get on with it and work in Tesco to pay the bills, so why are we any different? If we’ve decided that farming is what we love, and want to do, then we have to suck it up and find ways to make it pay.

So, if we are all certain that we want to continue being farmers in a cruel, constantly fluctuating economy, where no one seems to have our backs, then we all have room for improvement.

I was fortunate enough to get to visit New Zealand, in November 2016, on the SAYFC Rural and Agri Affairs study tour, and this was a real eye opener.

New Zealand has been without subsidies since the 1970s, and it seems to have made them efficient, aggressive business people, whose business happens to be farming – be that lamb, beef, dairy, kiwi fruit or wine. It doesn’t seem uncommon over there that they would find one sector becoming unprofitable, such as lamb, and just get rid of all the sheep and start dairying instead.

Here in the UK that just doesn’t seem to happen. We are certainly much more emotionally attached to our land, our animals and heritage than they are, and maybe this is due to it being a fairly ‘new world’ over there.

Kiwi farmers also seem very clued up on the use of technology, be that religious use of EBVs, the used of advanced computer based management programmes, or the use of advanced GPS which, for example, won’t let your baler start up if you happen to be in the wrong field.

Maybe the difference is that farms over there typically seemed to be larger than the average Scottish farm, so overall, investing in a piece of new technology costs less per head of livestock, or per hectare.

One thing all the farms that we visited were doing though, regardless of size, was benchmarking. Benchmarking, by definition, is the evaluation of something by comparison with a standard average, or with peers.

Last year saw us come to the end of our three years as an AHDB Arable Monitor Farm. This was a fantastic opportunity for all involved in the business group to get really stuck into benchmarking. As we had never previously done any benchmarking this was a little daunting in terms of the data inputting, trying to actually work out what data we needed, and how we were going to interpret it.

The use of an online benchmarking system was also quite daunting, as for someone of only 24 I am fairly computer illiterate, with both my parents being even worse – questionable if Brian can actually open an email...

We’ve found the use of benchmarking so useful though, and it has helped us to improve yields and reduce costs, which is surely what everyone is after?

Though our time as a Monitor Farm is over, we plan to continue benchmarking for the foreseeable future, and with the AHDB FarmBench Programme being released in the very near future, now is the time for all farmers to get involved with something so beneficial, and actually, not that difficult to do.

Another phrase learnt in New Zealand was ‘I’m here for a mad one, not a sad one’, and I think that’s a pretty good life motto.

Let’s hope the good weather continues so we can keep enjoying our lifestyle choices!