NFU 2009: Next Generation farmers share their views

Junior DEFRA minister Jane Kennedy has urged young people to celebrate all that is good about farming and not to ‘major on the difficulties’.

Addressing a Next Generation workshop (view our picture gallery here) at the NFU Conference in Birmingham on Tuesday (17 Feb), Ms Kennedy said: “There is a fine line in the NFU in articulating the problems that you have – but you have to balance that with celebrating the huge success, progress and investment and development of skills in farming.

“If you major on the difficulties, people won’t want to come into farming and won’t see it as a future”

The workshop was streamed live on the internet so students at Harper Adams and Cirencester could join in.

The session was dominated by discussions about how young farmers could take on more responsibility in a farm business when there was an older generation that did not want to retire.

As the title of the NFU’s conference was the New Agenda for Farming, Farmers Weekly decided to ask some of the delegates what was the one policy change they wanted which would make a real difference to the future of their business or career.

You can view their answers – in picture form – on this dedicated picture gallery. If you’d like to carry out the same exercise yourself. Write your policy on a piece of paper (along with your name), get someone to take a picture of you and then upload it to the gallery.