Alice Littlewood: Allied sectors offer great opportunities to young people

When I tell teachers and friends I want to work in farming, the assumption is automatically that I want to work with cows, sheep, combine harvesters and tractors.

That my career would be based in fields of wheat and barley, with a farmhouse tucked in the middle of an idyllic yard.

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What they rarely picture is a chemist in a lab, a professional in an office, a salesman in a showroom or a data analyst behind a computer. Agriculture doesn’t begin and end with farmers. 

I’ve just started Year 13 in school, which many will recognise as the one that plunges students into the dreaded Ucas application process, the personal statement torture method and, worse, university courses shortlisting.

Many young people now find it impossible to get a viable full-time role in hands-on farming, unless they have the backing of a big multi-generational farming family.

Luckily, as the number of traditional roles has shrunk, there has been a marked growth in the support and facilitating professions that power farming, such as agronomy or machinery.

Recently, I did work experience that I really enjoyed at a local firm of land agents and chartered surveyors.

I saw yet another profession that runs adjacent to – and is deeply rooted in – farming.

What fascinated me was the breadth of knowledge required to operate successfully.

The understanding of intricate figures and practices relating to livestock, arable farming, the value of rural property and planning came up on almost every task and, while it is its own profession, the relationship between those professionals and their farming and rural clients is more than interlinked.

Neither profession could exist without the other.

This realisation has been so encouraging. It has made me realise that there are so many ways that I can still participate in an industry that I am so passionate about in the current political and financial climate.

My generation is feeling the implications of political shifts set in motion long before we were born, but agriculture has always been evolving, so young people have to evolve their outlook in tandem with this.