Flindt on Friday: Joking aside, farming’s next gen looks good

My after-dinner speech was going well. I had been worried that doing it before dinner – as my kind and generous hosts had insisted – would be a handicap.

My material is so poor that it needs all the help it can get, and a room full of farming types is far easier to entertain if they’re four sheets to the wind.

Luckily, pre-dinner drinks proved to be long and lively, the volume level went up and up, and the cheerful insults started flying – which is always a good sign.

See also: 5 things you need to know about regenerative agriculture

About the author

Charlie Flindt
Charlie Flindt is a National Trust tenant in Hampshire, now farming 40ha of recently “de-arabled” land with his wife Hazel – who still runs a livestock enterprise. He also writes books and plays in a local band.
Read more articles by Charlie Flindt

I mingled with as many as possible, and they were all young, smart, and keen as mustard. While they weren’t fresh out of college, they weren’t pondering retirement plans either.

By the time we adjourned to the historic oak-panelled dining room and I’d been formally introduced, they’d all reached two sheets to the wind. I stood up and kicked off my 3,500 carefully crafted words.

There were chuckles and guffaws at most of the right places, but one or two key moments in my speech were greeted with odd silences.

Moments that in my notes are marked “pause for gales of laughter” weren’t quite ”tumbleweed” moments, but they raised scarcely a titter. Not to worry – press on to the next side-splitter.

Laughter lines

At the end of the home straight is a joke. This usually comes as great relief to the assembled throng, as 20 minutes from me is as long as anyone can endure, but I approached it with a certain amount of trepidation. How would my Big Finish go down?

The answer: not very well. Luckily, I have an alternative punchline. Same again.

The fact that no one appeared to have got my signature joke (and both punchlines) turned out to be a lot funnier than the bloomin’ joke was in the first place, and I sat down to far more generous applause than I’d expected – and with a strange feeling about farming’s future that I’d never experienced before.

This strange feeling grew as the post-speech Q&A session went on, and everything fell into place.

Many of my stories are getting old: tales of Dad and his wartime life surrounded by Land Girls and Wrens, for instance, and my memories of early IACS.

And my Big Finish involves ’60s transport, a ’70s band and a ’90s farming crisis. Most of my audience that night were too young to know what the hell I was on about. It all made sense.

But it also became apparent that despite their relative youth, they were clever, positive, optimistic and laced through with very healthy cynicism.

We argued amicably about regen, Brexit, tenancies, net zero, the NFU and salsa dancing (yes, really) – and my “grumpy old farmer” views were far better supported than you might think.

And all before we could finally get stuck into the George of Stamford’s legendary bit of beef.

Rising stars

The next morning, as I drove back through the world’s biggest building site (once known as Northamptonshire), I pondered the previous evening.

Those lads and lasses are the future of farming. I hadn’t heard a whinge or a whine all evening. They were on a mission to farm, and they were going to get on with the job, come what may.

They could, unlike some of their elders, debate big issues in a civilised way – even whether Minette would do her salsa New York or Cuban style. Funnily enough, I’ve forgotten what the verdict was. It was that sort of evening.

My Quarter Pounder at A34 Winchester Services was unnecessary, delicious and – like my trip to Stamford – nicely reassuring. That’s my excuse, anyway.