Opinion: Future farmers must be able to wear many hats
© Jakub Rutkiewicz/Adobe Stock Like a witch on a broomstick, Halloween has whooshed in for its eighth year at The Pop Up Farm.
The Pop Up Farm was our response to the Brexit vote of 2016.
The concept was to build an enterprise to host seasonal farming festivals that would replace the loss of Basic Payment Scheme income.
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We set about finding a suitable site and building a business plan.
Halloween is big business. In the US it accounts for $12bn of GDP – a figure that has doubled in a decade.
A staggering 156 million Americans will pick a pumpkin this year. In the UK, it is forecast that we will top £1bn of spending on Halloween in 2023.
Unsurprisingly, the number of pumpkin patches popping up in the UK in the past two years have followed that same hockey stick trajectory.
With no barriers to entry, am I worried that the market will get saturated? Of course.
When we started, there were fewer than 10 patches in the whole of the UK. This year there may be more than 500 sites. But, as with all farm diversifications, the public won’t suffer mediocrity.
Our challenge is to improve year on year and keep the visitor experience fresh.
One never knows if Halloween will bring a trick or a treat. Over the past decade the weather witch has conjured up balmy Octobers worthy of T-shirts and shorts.
But she has also brought storm Ian, storm Alex and this year storm Babet. A wet pumpkin season makes a wet cereal harvest seem like child’s play.
While diversification may be a necessity for most family farms, many of those born before 1990 are struggling with the transition to working on a farm with multiple enterprises.
A life where you have to go from serving coffee to visitors to planting trees in the middle of a winter snowstorm to harvesting pumpkins when you want to be drilling wheat is not for everyone.
I worry that our further education and higher education colleges haven’t grasped that the skills required to be work-ready for family farming businesses in 2023 are very different to those required just five years ago.
Few jobs offer the comfort of a tractor cab 12 months of the year.
The opportunity to engage and employ enthusiastic people who have never previously had anything to do with farming has been one of the highlights of our farm diversification, even though many may only be with us for a couple of weeks.
It’s definitely not a job for the faint-hearted. Picking pumpkins in a gale isn’t like serving pints of beer in a pub.
But, over the years, many have used it as a springboard into agriculture, recognising the breadth of skills required and range of opportunities in farming careers beyond cows and wellies.
It used to be said that one shouldn’t work with children or animals.
If I had a choice, I wouldn’t have opted for an enterprise that is at the whim of the UK weather and the mercy of fickle social media opinions.
But for our family farming business to survive and, hopefully, flourish, we need to play to our strengths.
Ours lie in our location and love of change. Not mediocre cereal crops or economies of scale.
Happy Halloween.