PRESSURE ON FAMILY FARMS
Grandparents, parents and their sons and daughters working together and living together on intergenerational family farms have generated a livelihood and sometimes prosperity for generations.
In recent years manual work on the farm has become easier, but farming has become more onerous. Now high standards of environmental care, animal welfare, food safety regulation, work place safety rules, the weather some years and interpersonal communication and relationship management place heavy burdens on the farm family. Industrial workers will say that it is an effort to ‘get on’ with co-workers on a continuous basis for the 40 hour working week, even subsequent to teamwork and communications training.
But the intergenerational family farm team have got the work done for many generations, on a 24/7/365 basis, all members making an effort and some members making an extraordinary effort. In some situations this may not be to maximum efficiency due to the confinement of working dynamics
Smoothing out conflict
There are many instances where a wife and mother is forced into smoothing out conflict in the interpersonal relations within the family farm. When she is forced to continuously resolve others’ disagreements, she is placed in a very stressing, invidious and non sustainable position.
KEEPONFARMING.IE aims to spread the load on managing the intrapersonal and interpersonal communications and relationships. This will help to increase teamwork in not only the day to day operation of the farm but also the farm family team.
This team will strategise to continuously renew itself, renew the farming practice for the greatest efficiencies and successfully withstand the external (outside the farm gate) challenges of new global trade agreements, strain on EU budgets and shifting public priorities
Agricultural Industry post 2020
According to the recently Rabobank published book 'Future of Farming', the farming population is aging rapidly. In the United States, for example, the average age of a farmer in 1974 was 45, while today the average age is 58.
In the EU, only 6% of farmers are under the age of 36. This is a critical issue, with the USDA estimating that every twenty years the number of people dependent on a farmer’s output will double.
With most farms in family hands, succession is a crucial part of the solution.
The situation is similar in the Asia-Pacific region, with 52% of Australian farmers aged 55 or older, while over the past 30 years the average age of farmers in Australia increased from 44 to 55. Bart I Jntema, Senior VP F&A Development at Rabobank International, explains: "Overall, the numbers show a clear problem; there is an undeniable trend of aging farmers. At the same time, and this obviously varies per country and is dependent on e.g. the economics of the farm business, the next generation does not always seem keen on taking over the helm.” In Ireland, recent statistics suggest that, there are more farmers over the age of 80 than under 35.
