Are you a savvy rural entrepreneur?

UK Farmers – straw hat, grass chewing folk who throw a few seeds about, keep a few animals and ride about on a tractor slowing car drivers down? Or highly skilled business men and women who look upon any new technological, social or economic development with wide eyes and the enthusiasm to use it to their benefit? 

Hopefully the answer to that is simple, the highly skilled businessman, right? However the rest of that statement cannot be classed as 100 per cent accurate. There are still many farmers who tend to look towards new developments with a certain sense of caution or fear. Whether this is down to poor understanding, expense or just a general unwillingness to change, I don’t know. However, how would that description fit a farmer/farm manager in 10 years time? 

Along with the ability to communicate with consumers and the public through increasingly popular mediums such as Twitter, Facebook or internet blogs what other skills will they have? I personally think the average farmer will strengthen their skills in environmental management and prove that farmers really do look after the countryside. The current ‘out of date’ image of farmers will be lost as technologies such as GPS and telematics become more widely available and more cost effective to both large and small scale farms alike. The base trend, as I see it, is that as with most other industries, farming will go ‘online’. Not just in accounting, buying and selling, but also in the field, in the tractor cab and perhaps most intriguingly through business development. Agriculture 2.0 anyone?

The harder question to answer is what skills will the top 10 per cent of farmers have in 10 years time? Those who already use Twitter and Facebook, are as efficient as they can be and farm with the environment while continuing to look for new ways of carrying out their operations. Will they be using more commercial advertising to sell their own produce (Yeo Valley – Rapping Farmers)? Or will they be harvesting their land in a different way - selling electricity to the local town generated on their farm using renewable energy technologies.

I think the biggest skill all farmers and farm managers will have to have in 10 years time will be the ability to listen, take note and most importantly ACT accordingly: do something different, try something new! We are undoubtedly going to need to start farming in different ways; using different technologies and we must ensure that what we are growing continues to appeal to what the consumer wants. We must also be prepared to stand up to negative publicity with good arguments that win the public over, rather than point the finger and shifting blame or simply complaining but doing nothing. The story of Nocton dairy and its demise at the hand of public opinion may well be the defining lesson of the next generation of farmers.

These top 10% will, I’m sure, be the leading members of the industry in terms of agricultural education, raising public awareness of farming and diversification just as they are now. But crucially they will do it more effectively through generating a sense of collective agency across all farmers to become an active not a passive ‘Do Nation’ of savvy rural entrepreneurs. 

What do you think?

Matt Redman is the foreman for a 1400 acre arable and dairy farm and is an ex-student of Harper Adams.

Read his blog here.