One of the most inspiring farm visits made by the recent Farmers Weekly study tour of the USA was to a twenty acre unit in Iowa. The small block of land had been sold by established friends of mine a year or so ago to a Dutch couple who looked as if they might be teenagers but in fact were in their mid twenty's and had a baby. On it they had built a milking parlour and cubicle shed housing 150 cows and were doing all the work themselves. They were living in a modest mobile home on the same site.
My friends were growing maize silage and soya beans on other land they own and supplying the unit with feed. The slurry and muck made by the cows was, in turn, spread back on the rest of my friends farm. There were plans afoot to increase the number of cows to 350 in the relatively near future.
Virtually the entire investment was funded from borrowing and the young man joked that they were "negative dollar millionaires". But my goodness they were both workers, despite the baby. They had gone to the US from Zwolle in Holland following in the recent footsteps of three other Dutch farming families copying the kind of immigration across the Atlantic that was common a hundred years ago.
They were brave, enterprising young people and we wished them luck. Like their American hosts, they were not afraid to think big and we were confident they would succeed.