Opinon: Innovation is about people as well as technology
© Amy Hughes A company that farms insect larvae for animal feed just became the flagship example of agricultural innovation. Good for them; and I mean that sincerely.
But when Defra opened a £5m Farming Innovation Investor Partnerships competition this month with that as the showpiece, something stuck in my throat.
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About the author
Ask anyone in the industry what counts as agricultural innovation and they’ll describe something you can photograph.
A robot. A sensor. An app. Precision technology. Something with a screen, or an arm, or a price tag that makes your eyes water.
These things are genuinely brilliant, and I’m not here to argue against them. What I’m arguing is that we have quietly decided that innovation in agriculture is always and only physical, scalable and tech-based.
That might be great news if you’re running large-scale horticulture, pig, poultry or dairy, but it’s not much use to a hill beef and sheep farm being gently cajoled into becoming lower input and lower output, with fewer options and less support than ever before.
So here’s what I want to put on the table.
There is another form of innovation in agriculture that we are almost completely ignoring, one that is universally relevant to every single business in this industry, regardless of size, system or sector.
That’s the people side of farming. The tools for having difficult conversations. Conflict management. Change management. Business and personal vision setting.
The kind of work that helps farmers figure out what they actually want, rather than what they’ve always done or what someone else has told them to do.
There has never been so much opportunity in agriculture. And yet so many of the people I speak to are scared to seize it.
They don’t know how to do things their own way.
For possibly the first time, they have the chance to think about what they genuinely want their lives and businesses to look like, without being dictated to by government policy or market pressure, and they don’t have the tools to do it.
That’s not a technology problem. That’s a human one.
By definition, innovation has three core elements: novelty, execution and value. I will argue until I’m blue in the face that the areas I’ve just described are an absolute novelty in agriculture.
We are miles behind other industries when it comes to investing in the so-called soft skills, though anyone who’s tried to have a succession conversation with their parents over the kitchen table knows there is nothing soft about them.
The execution piece? We need investment to make those skills a working reality for farming businesses across the UK and, right now, that investment simply isn’t there.
As for value, I know from personal experience what being able to navigate the messy human side of life and business is worth, and so does every farmer who has had the courage to try.
Everything starts with the people in a farming business, even if all we ever want to talk about is the shiny kit.
When we pour money into technology without addressing the communication breakdowns, the buried conflicts, and the lack of shared vision sitting beneath them, we are putting a sticking plaster over the root cause of most problems in this industry.
And that’s got to stop.