Agricultural employment down but incomes soar

But while the number of workers has dropped the figures show real agricultural income per worker has soared by 71 per cent.

The UK outperformed most of the rest of Europe where farm employment dropped by 25 per cent and income increased by a relatively meagre 5.3 per cent.

The drop in UK agricultural employment will come as no surprise to the organisers of the Oxford ‘Real’ Farming Conference who last week called for a dramatic increase in countryside workers to ‘fix our broken agriculture’.

The Government’s skills agency Lantra recently warned rural areas would need to attract 60,000 skilled workers into agriculture over the next decade ‘just to stand still’.

But organisers of the alternative Oxford Farming Conference said that figure was ‘nowhere near bold enough’.

Instead Colin Tudge, writer and biologist, said Britain would need a million more farm workers and a new agricultural system to stave off an environmental crisis.

“There are now so few skilled farmers that we must produce our food in monocultures and giant animal factories that depend entirely on chemical inputs – all oil-based.

“Such farming is obviously highly vulnerable – and is also hugely damaging,” he said.

“If we really want to produce good food reliably, we need to follow basic principles of biology.

“That means polyculture rather than monoculture – diverse crops and livestock raised to their mutual benefit.  Such systems are complex and so must be labour-intensive – and that’s why we now need a whole new generation of farmers,” he added.

Graham Harvey, farming writer and farm consultant on The Archers, said the proposal to build an 8,000-cow dairy unit in Lincolnshire was symptomatic of today’s muddled logic.

“It would be far better to spread the cows among 2-300 small herds around the country, raised on pasture.  The milk – fresher and healthier – should then be sold directly to consumers; and hundreds of skilled young people would get the chance to run their own farming businesses,” he said.

But the trend across Europe seems to be towards larger farms, machine intensive agriculture and fewer workers.

Across the 27 European Union member states, agricultural employment has fallen by 25 per cent since 2000 – the equivalent of 3.7 million full time jobs.

The highest job losses were recorded in the new member states – traditionally the most labour intensive – where employment fell by an average of 31 per cent between 2000 and 2009.

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