Column: Peter Fairs can understand why farming holds such appeal. However, based on his lifetime of experience, he says it is now a lifestyle choice with plenty of challenges.

WHAT do golf club members and farmers have in common? Their average age is about 60.

The difference is that the golfers will have already retired or hope to do so soon whereas the farmer hasn’t and quite possibly never intends to!

Many people dream of becoming a farmer.

It may just be the lure of countryside, the desire to work more closely with nature or that mirage of total independence.

Those things may seem achievable but, like all dreams, they can end suddenly or even dissolve into nightmares.

The latest Government policy appears to follow the edict “out with the old, in with the new”, with some of the old subsidies being replaced by an early retirement scheme for older farmers.

There are plenty of opportunities for keen, dedicated younger people to become involved in the farming industry.

However, there is no doubt British Agriculture has relied for a very long time on sons and daughters to carry on running the family farming business and it is not easy to break that pattern.

Land prices are around £10,000, so lenders require the collateral of other land already owned.

Even with historically low interest rates around three per cent, that is a fixed cost of £300/acre.

The few landowners that offer tenancies often prefer to lease to established farmers rather than newcomers or youngsters with unknown business acumen.

All these things will need to be addressed if we are going to see farming revitalised.

Red tape - while its a very appealing lifestyle, farming is a challenging career

Red tape - while it's a very appealing lifestyle, farming is a challenging career

The problem is sometimes worse when sons or daughters resent having to get up early and milk the cows because dad’s got too old to do it.

I was recently chatting to a new farming entrant in the Cotswolds.

He and his partner had worked hard in another industry but had always wanted a farm.

They had now earned enough to follow their dream and buy about 50 acres of grassland with a cottage.

During our conversation, it became obvious they were already encountering a very different world from the urban life they had just left.

One comment was: “We wanted to put up a hay barn but we’ve had 90 letters of objection and fallen out with our neighbours."

Others were “we got into trouble because we trimmed our hedge in August”, “we bought 30 sheep but someone’s dog killed four of them" and "there’s no public footpath but people walk everywhere”.

He said he was phoning me because he wants to plough up the grass and plant borage.

I warned him that wireworm will eat and destroy the crop for the first year and there is now no chemical approved to control them.

Anyway, I suggested they will need to contact Defra as it is illegal to plough up established grassland without a full environmental impact assessment and they could well be banned from doing it.

His final comment was: "I can't believe the hoops and red tape involved in becoming a simple farmer.

"We’ve put 30 years of savings into this and now everyone else is telling us what to do”.

As Jim Reeves once sang, “welcome to my world…"

READ MORE: