The underlying message in a lot of the current commentary and advice about agriculture seems to be along the lines of “farmers should be better at farming”.

We are told that if you are more efficient, then the prices processors pay you would be more than enough and it would help your carbon footprint too.

There is some element of truth in that. Nobody is running their farm perfectly. Improvements can always be made, no matter how good a farmer you are. But the constant message of “be more efficient” gets hard to listen to after a while, especially when it comes from people with little or no experience of running a farm.

It is easy to be an efficient farmer in the meeting room of a hotel. It’s a lot harder when you are back home and battling everything from wet weather to bovine TB.

Similarly, at farming events, it can be interesting to hear about the experiences of farmers in other countries, but their messages are not always applicable to a local context.

There is a big difference from farming 100 acres in NI, to farming 1,000 acres in England or 10,000 acres in America.

Knowledge transfer

Whilst it is important that farmers hear from people with specialist knowledge in specific areas, like scientists and policy experts, the most useful knowledge transfer often comes from other farmers.

In particular, if a meeting takes place on a real life, working farm, it lets you see that the things being discussed are actually happening. They are not something confined to a textbook or a research paper.

This gives visiting farmers encouragement that they can potentially apply some of the things that they have seen to their own farms.

Farm walk hosts are also usually happy to point out that everything is not working perfectly and show the downsides to what they are doing on their farm.

Farmers can learn a lot from other farmers. There are plenty of other people with opinions about agriculture who could learn from them too.