Editor’s view: Volatility will breed a new type of farmer
© AdobeStock/Masson It strikes me that farmers are being just as selectively bred for the conditions imposed on them as the livestock and crops they select traits for.
How different are you to the person who farmed the land you’re on before you – and how different is the business?
Whether that was a family member, another tenant or someone else entirely, if a few years have elapsed then it may be that you are doing things quite differently.
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This could be large-scale changes like an enterprise switch from beef and sheep to dairy, or producing the same output but in a different way, such as employing different establishment techniques or by switching from using your own machinery to collaboration with a neighbour.
The latter point is a topic referred to again in this week’s News section with a fresh analysis piece looking at the myriad benefits of working more closely together with other farmers and the supply chain – whether it be through sharing machinery, labour or genetics.
What it is really about, of course, is sharing risk. A large chunk of capital outlay is a risk to your business, particularly if it is borrowed money.
This is often essential to make a business fit for the future.
Not investing is a risk to the future of your business if the status quo is set to change, but so is investing if that bet on the future turns out to be incorrect – perhaps an assumption about what interest rates will do or how highly the market will value what you produce.
Most farms now extend across what was once many holdings. Something made those holdings fail.
You and the farmers in your parish are winners by virtue of still being in business despite the selection pressures imposed in previous months, years and decades.
A myriad farms went out of business even during the boom times of production-based subsidies because those that were best at responding to those signals were able to outcompete weaker businesses for land and access to finance.
Since the arrival of area-based payments the largest landowners have been in receipt of the biggest payments, one of many reasons that it is difficult for new entrants into farming to get established – a selection pressure in favour of big farms getting bigger at the fastest rate.
Collaboration benefitting businesses
As we contemplate the future of farming it is easy to become fixated on those who will fail, by thinking about which businesses in their current format will be the least well-equipped to cope without area payments.
But what happens when that is flipped on its head? What will the businesses that flourish look like in 20 years’ time?
The anecdotal evidence is that larger businesses – often the current winners – are the ones that are moving the quickest to change for the future as well.
Yet it is encouraging to read of improved collaboration benefiting businesses of all sizes, be it the Agriscop group in the aforementioned News article, or the Rushmer brothers doing a large-scale straw-for-muck exchange, which we report on in a piece in this week’s Livestock section.
One characteristic of businesses that succeed where others fail must surely be that they find improved ways to work with one another.
Yes, there must be better collaboration with government as well, but this is less within our control and there are frequent disappointments, as we see with the latest delays to the Sustainable Farming Incentive.
Relying on the government is how businesses of the past succeeded. It may not be a lesson for the future.