New apprenticeships in agriculture mooted by UUP MLA Robbie Butler citing ‘resurgence of young people in farming’

Addressing the meeting Roberta Simmons, membership development manager at YFCU said: “As young farmers, we’re very concerned about the absence of the young farmer payment within the agricultural support structures, as without this, there won’t be as much generational renewal within the industry.”

She added that young farmers “would like to see something established going forward” to “encourage generational renewal and provide confidence for young farmers to invest and build viable businesses”.

“We represent over 3000 members, and I suppose the majority of them would either be full time farmers or part time farmers. So there is that interest in the industry, and we need to ensure that there is that support there for the future, and to keep them coming forward,” she added.

James McCluggage from the Ulster Farmers’ Union added: “We punch well above our weight here in the Northern Ireland agri food industry, and if we're going to sustain that, we need to get youth and we need to get young blood coming through.

“If you take the average age of farmers in Northern Ireland sitting around 59, we do have an issue.

“We need to come up with solutions in terms of this whole young farmer payment.”

He added: “Let’s try and get something up and running, something which is meaningful.”

Addressing the meeting Sinn Fein MLA Declan McAleer said: “On checking back to my notes from last year this was raised with us originally at the end of January last year, and certainly I know that I and other members currently shared the concern about the closure of the regional reserve, and it's something that myself and others have been banging on about ever since.

“And if I my memory serves me correctly, whenever this was brought back to us as a statutory rule, it was rolled in with the entire single farm payment regime.

“But this has had an impact, and I've been contacted by a lot of farmers ever since.

“There’s an email that I received from a young woman who works on two dairy farms. Her alarms are set at three o'clock in the morning. She said she was delighted to secure some land and start farming on a very small scale, in her own right.

“And then she says that there was nothing in this world would make her happier than her own farm.”

He added that she voiced her disappointment as “there’s young people like me that will carry the torch of rural communities long into the future”.

“She’s got an agricultural degree. She has had the opportunity of land of her own now, and now there are no new entitlements available and this will cripple the industry going forward, and it's not encouraging young people.

“It’s actually putting young people off, because they don’t have that opportunity to get their own entitlements in their own right.”

Later in the meeting, chairman UUP MLA Robbie Butler said he saw a “resurgence of young people in farming” where “the colleges are full and the courses are full”.

“Does that hide a wider issue in terms of young people wanting to get into farming, because how do they get into it?” he added.

“Just because you grow up on a farm doesn’t necessarily dictate that you're going to want to work on a farm for the rest of your life,” he said.

“I think there’s a piece of work which could be done with an apprenticeship programme where a young person with maybe no access to land, can go into an agricultural apprenticeship program to get fully skilled up and then partner with a farmer, older farmers.

“Older farmers become more endangered, working with cattle or trying to do jobs that two men should be doing.”