My husband Nathan and I run a small-scale organic farm in West Wales that specialises in edible horticulture and we are currently looking for an assistant grower. Having lost our last assistant grower after about a year and half of employment, we have been posting the job description pretty much anywhere we can for more than three months now. We had two good applications that went nowhere and a few conversations with less experienced people who didn’t really want a full-time job. In the interim, we have taken on a temporary assistant grower finishing up a postgraduate degree in Sustainable Food and Natural Resources – that’s a road that likely doesn’t lead to the field. And we don’t seem to be the only ones struggling to hire…

There’s been a lot of talk post-Brexit about where farm labour is going to come from. We all know the story – the average age of farmers is around 60 and while there are young people interested in farming and growing, especially on the organic and regenerative end of it, it’s not something that’s seen as either lucrative or easy. And the rush of interest in farming and growing that brought in many young first-generation farmers in the last decade is waning, I fear. The seminal 2014 New York Times piece, Don’t let your children grow-up to be farmers argued for the futility of the endeavour in the face of well-heeled ‘non-profit’ farms sucking up grants, ‘hobby farmers’ taking space in local farmers’ markets and the brutality of carrying heavy student loans while breaking your back in the field. While this is an American context, it is still not so very far from the reality in Britain – that economic playing field is still very uneven.

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