Beautiful Devon and lunching with landlords

A visit by Michael a Scottish Nuffield scholar has made me realise that I need to speed up this blog writing. Michael has visited Australia and New Zealand trying to mend the farming ladder and because he has not yet found the answers he was looking for, he decided to come to Devon. Now this is obvious to all of those that live in Devon as we all know that there are plenty of exciting new entrants doing amazing things down here. Some are food centred businesses, a lot are based on organic and many include direct selling. After realising that Michael wrote everything down (swotty or what) we made sure that his whistle stop tour didn't give him a chance to pick up his pen. We visited Poultry abattoirs, chicken farmers in temporary houses and chicken farmers that had built mini mansions (although still surrounded by caravans). Lot of figures for adding up but the message which I think we have to deliver in Devon is small can be big. Intensive farming in the form of adding value and being innovative means that you can live of 50 acres. It was a shame we didn't have longer so I could have shown him robot milkers so the farmer could bottle the milk, Fancy chicken breeder selling to smallholders and so many other businesses I admire. These are all genuine new entrants that haven't loads of money to start off. Then of course we have lots of new entrants down here that have had other careers, the ones we think aren't real farmers but bring other skills like marketing and media skills that we can learn from.
Just so Michael could write about somewhere really exotic we also went to a meeting in Cornwall with a group of land agents discussing 'the farming ladder'. Michael got very excited as he finally understood the county council farms system and he has written a great blog on it. As usual the best bit was the lunch and conversation. It seems that feeling was that under 250 acres was not a viable unit and should be taken back in hand. The priority was maintaining the estate value, especially the tidiness and that although the big estates understood that farming tenants needed help to retire and bring new blood in, they just didn't feel that it was for them to help. A tiny glimmer of hope when a National Trust agent admitted that on a Bodmin estate they had made a change and let land to young couple because the other large farmer tenants that had rented bare land used large machinery and farmed too efficiently to fit how the general public expected the land to be farmed.
Maybe one way of mending the ladder would be making some of the landowners realise the benefits of new innovative tenants and opening their minds to something beyond just profit. Could be a big job, but as Michael didn't seem to fancy chicken farming perhaps he's the guy to do it!