“Get yourself a job with a polished shoe” – that was my grandmother’s career advice to me growing up. The comment was borne from a lifetime of hard work and, unfortunately for her but fortunately for me, I ignored it. My fallback response – “But it’s easier to wash a welly Nana” – raised a laugh, but I never forgot the saying. There’s no doubt she wasn’t the first and won’t be the last farming family member to say or think the same.

Farms have an ability to cloud judgement. To a successor they can be a dream come true or a prison sentence.

If you have a choice between keeping a post office open or implementing a decent rural broadband scheme where do you go to channel your energy? You can fight the tide for so long. There’s only so many times you can vote against your GAA club amalgamating before reality and declining population kicks in.

It’s now possible to pause live television but, no matter how much you’d like to, you can’t do the same with real life.

Sure if you think too much about it, now is in the past. The evolution of farms and rural Ireland is becoming more visible now and was touched on about a month ago in Justin McCarthy’s editorial: “Where are the farmers to lead our industry’s future.”

It put me thinking. I had come through two of the leadership routes, Macra na Feirme and Nuffield Ireland. One showed me reality and the other gave me perspective.

One of the constants of farming is change. A constant companion of change is resistance to it.

One of the leadership challenges I constantly witnessed was how to persuade people a new idea could be good.

In Macra you learned leadership without knowing you were doing it. However, even in a young person’s organisation, new ideas were a hard sell. In fact, you could argue anywhere there are votes involved, it’s difficult to convince people of the virtues of trying something different. It’s easy to get people to follow you if you tell them what they want to hear. If change is involved, it’s an entirely different matter.

It probably comes back to the fact that people are more comfortable with old problems than with new solutions.

What reasons exist that don’t allow time to be spent in leadership roles?

If you are trying to run or build a successful business you need to be a bit selfish. Labour was more available in the past, enabling time to be spent off farm in leadership roles in co-ops and farm organisations.

Time a scarce commodity

Time is a scarce commodity for many potential leaders of the future so they have a choice to make between being more focused on their own businesses or a will for the greater community good.

Perhaps part of the reason fewer people take up board roles is to do with more accessible third-level education? In the past, farm leaders may not have had the same opportunities to attend third-level education that have been available over the last 25 years. The plan may have been to return to the farm after a degree but life can change plans. A certain percentage of potential leaders to drift from farming and roles on the farmer side of co-operatives into management level in secondary and tertiary industries.

In an era of labour shortages and time pressures and the need to drive on their own businesses, how many are going to take up roles at board level in the future?