Sometimes when I have an idle moment, which isn’t often on a dairy farm, I ponder on what welds the family to the farm and the farm to the family. It seems the harder it gets to survive financially, the more committed family farmers become. It’s almost like a game of golf – the more difficult it is, the harder you try to overcome the obstacles.

To start at the beginning, you tumble from the cradle onto the farm and by the time you are in your teens, Dad has bought you a new tractor and you are committed. You become multi-skilled, being able to plumb, weld, brick-lay, organise and construct buildings, handle labour, but you are basically unemployable because if you changed employment streams, you couldn’t work for anyone else but yourself.

But it is very rare for a farmer to breakaway through choice, sometimes it is forced by financial failure or occasionally there is a planned progression to a better life, but more often that not, when times get hard, the family farm battens down the hatches with a determination to struggle through.

Emotional attachment

The family farm also carries the emotional burden through inheritance of previous generations’ hard work and commitment. It must be easier to change streams or give up if you started with nothing and achieved a farm. However, if you inherited several generations of hard work, there is the unspoken emotional burden best surmised as ‘They got through the bad times and handed it to me, if I can’t hand it to the next generation, I have surely failed.’

This is perhaps what creates some of the grit determination to survive no matter what, when any sensible business-minded person would have thrown in the towel long ago.

Unquantifiable benefits

On the plus side, as long as you observe health and safety issues, it is a wonderful environment to bring up children and grandchildren.

Just think of the comparison of the freedom and stimulation of a child growing up on a farm, with all the opportunities to exploit their natural skills and talents, to a child growing up on a sink estate.

Children may be able to build a house on the farm when they’re grown up; farmhouses can be split and extended to care for aged grandparents to allow them to enjoy seeing the future generations coming into the farm that they’ve worked so hard to maintain.

These are not figures that appear on the balance sheet at the end of the year, but they’re unquantifiable benefits which go towards building the character of the farmer.

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