The Yorkshire Dalesman Magazine (June Issue) - Young Farmers

Photography by George Hutton

Words by Cameron Hill

YOUNG FARMERS 

Yorkshire is defined by agriculture – shaped by six thousand years of people working these dales and moors, carving life into the land. The green chequerboard fields are what ties the county together, the glue between the railways and the pathways, the thrumming background to it all. 

But farming’s future feels fragile. It’s always been a famously tough gig, but now seems all about pressure, precarity, all taxes and fine margins and weathering whichever cocktail of climate breakdown/epidemic/economic turmoil the world chooses to throw at you this time.

So why do young people keep going into it? 

Daily routine: up pre-dawn, milk cows, make sure sheep aren’t dying (one told us ‘they are always trying to die’). Keep at it all until 11ish that night. Tomorrow: rinse, repeat. It’s a relentless grind, year round. There are few complaints though, ‘this is what we do’. 

Picture it: your family’s been farming here for a century, people and place growing together. But things are leaner now. People seem to have forgotten that food is grown and reared, your work less respected, less rewarded. You can’t support extra workers so it’s just you, day in, day out. The farm used to be key to the community, but now feels a million miles from the town and supermarket down the road. This is what we do.

They could sell up, put the old farmhouse and all the land on the market, enjoy the odd sleep in, but they are custodians of this place, this is what we do. 

There are other, deeper satisfactions to it. It is ‘a lot of work, a lot of reward’, especially when the sun is shining down on your day and you are out in the open, fresh air. It is real work, a real life. 

This is what we do.