OPINION: The barriers to attracting new entrants into farming
There must be cultural change to attract new entrants into farming, a recent report says.
There is certainly widespread concern about attracting good people to work in agriculture. However, I’m not sure that “the industry” is much bothered about encouraging new people to farm in their own right. There is limited supply and excess demand as it is.
It has never been easy to get into farming, unless you were born into it or could buy your way in. As has widely been observed, agricultural land is not something they are making any more of and the consolidation of farms in recent years into bigger, more viable units has reduced the number of holdings further.
For most people, buying a farm would be a non-starter. When we looked into it 20 years ago, the maximum agricultural mortgage was around 50%. Even with banks prepared to lend more, anyone would have to have hundreds of thousands of pounds available to buy anything bigger than a football pitch, particularly with a hut attached. How do you rate the average farm worker’s chances of saving for that?
In Northumberland, the traditional way in has been through obtaining a tenancy – there are many large estates with tenanted farms. However, to succeed you need to be patient and lucky. As an applicant, you have to pay a fee to even get the particulars.
You walk the place, work up a business plan and projections (possibly paying a land agent to advise on this), have to get financial references (possibly involving paying for a bank facility), and then put in an offer. What happens next depends from estate to estate.
In one case, we put in an offer only to find that the whole thing was a market-testing exercise to establish the rent which the estate’s favoured candidate should pay.
We heard that the same bank had charged for three sets of arrangement fees for overdrafts on that same farm and none of those applicants were successful. This type of pseudo open-letting exercise happens more often than it should and is a shabby trick.
More often you may find that an estate is simply looking to get as high a rent as possible. This encourages people to put in offers that mean that the place would only be viable if everything goes right. This sort of thing is unsustainable for the new tenant and is bad for existing tenants because land agents tend to use the new rent as a basis to force other rents up.
Yet, just occasionally, an opportunity does come along where the landlord is taking a longer-term view. That happened for us when this MOD farm came up and we managed to get the tenancy in competition with over 100 other people.
Interestingly, all four of those people invited for interview went on to get their own farm in one way or another. Three of them were shepherds and one was a man from a small family farm who needed to branch out on his own.
So it is hard to get into farming as a new entrant but it is possible. Perhaps one of the hardest things is that you never know when the next opportunity will arise, and it could be years ahead. However, the best advice to any bright young thing who wants to be a farmer probably remains for them to get into investment banking or trading and then buy a nice farm with their bonus.
Elizabeth Elder and her husband Jake run sheep and cattle on 235ha of hill ground on the Otterburn Firing Range in Northumberland.
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