Opinion: Raucous ag student behaviour needs channelling

I was thrilled to see Harper Adams in The Times and eagerly clicked on the piece as I sat down with my breakfast.

Then nearly choked when I started reading. A student doused in hot curry sauce? People forced to drink vomit from a bucket?

Gratuitous mentions of Princess Anne entirely unrelated to anything in the article? A rugby player sexually assaulted with a wine bottle?

I slid aside my Nutella on toast, my appetite gone.

See also: Opinion – why retire when farming becomes fun at 60

About the author

Matthew Naylor

Farmers Weekly Opinion writer

Matt Naylor is managing director of Naylor Flowers, growing 300ha of cut flowers in Lincolnshire for supermarkets. He is a director of Concordia, a charity that operates the Seasonal Worker Scheme, and was one of the founders of Agrespect, an initiative to drive equality, diversity and inclusion in agriculture.

Read more articles by Matthew Naylor

Unfortunately, everyone in the farming industry knows that raucous student behaviour is neither new nor limited to Harper Adams.

My sister studied agriculture at a northern university three decades ago and the atmosphere there, particularly among the rugby players, at times resembled a cross between a stag weekend and an inmate uprising at a borstal.

And if reports of the Bullingdon Club are half as bad as suggested, such capers aren’t unique to agriculture.

Rather than issuing blanket persecution, we must acknowledge that young men do behave this way and work out how to channel it to better effect.

I remember roisterous young men like this from my own generation, the sort who roared, sang rugby songs with their trousers down and drank yards of ale while the flaming end of a trail of toilet paper moved ever closer to their bottom (into which the other end of the paper had been roughly stuffed).

You would have thought these guys would go fully feral after leaving college. They didn’t. Once the testosterone abated, these men became conventional members of rural society.

I carefully avoided that crowd when I was young, but I recognise that silly student antics foster a sense of loyalty and kinship between the members for the rest of their lives.

There is a theory that modern society emasculates men; it doesn’t give them ways to express their animal instincts.

Household appliances and processed food liberated women from household drudgery but at the same time killed rituals through which men relate to one another; things like lighting fires, hunting for food or chopping logs.

The complexity and computerisation of cars and tractors is even killing off the noble art of putting on a boilersuit and fixing things in a shed.

In wider society we see the rise of faux-macho pursuits – things like playing violent video games, watching Jeremy Clarkson revving V12 cars and blowing up caravans, or drunken behaviour at sports matches.

This reckless oafishness is an expression of frustrated masculinity, the same category into which I would put these college exploits.

Agriculture is one of the remaining jobs where we still desperately need strong male characters.

Rearing and butchering animals or harvesting vegetables in the middle of winter are jobs that require physical strength, endurance, stoicism and a lack of sentimentality. These are not tasks for Oxbridge humanities graduates.

Obviously, agricultural colleges and youth associations need to set rules and to clamp down on bad behaviour.

But, equally importantly, we need to get better at promoting true male role models and to find new ways to channel all the energy and courage that is wasted in these ludicrous initiation ceremonies, so that young men can form friendships and find purpose in a more meaningful way.