Old farmers just can’t visualise a life off the land
Older farmers need a national voluntary organisation that specifically represents the senior generation of the farming community, according to researchers at NUI Galway.
They examined responses to questionnaires by farmers who attended Transferring the Family Farm clinics delivered by Teagasc in 2014, at 11 locations throughout Ireland.
They also used interviews with 10% of the questionnaire respondents, and results of the 2014 Teagasc Land Mobility Farm Survey, to arrive at their findings.
They found it is almost impossible for the senior generation to visualise what their lives would be like, if they no longer lived on the farm and didn’t work in an agricultural environment.
The farm setting, and its daily and seasonal habitual routines, offer therapeutic-like benefits to farmers, by improving their quality of life in a secure and intimate arena.
Take for example Aoife, a 68-year-old mixed livestock farmer from the Midlands.
She told the NUI Galway team: “Space is the most wonderful thing in the world to have.
“If there was something or another bothering me, I find there is nothing better than to just walk up the fields early in the morning, or late in the evening, and look back across the land, and watch all my lovely cattle grazing and thriving.
“Your head would be a lot clearer after that”.
The farm also provides social connectedness within the farming community.
It is therefore almost impossible to untangle a farmer’s everyday social interactions from their farm.
It represents a mosaic of the farmer’s achievements over their lifetime as well as being a landscape of years of hard work and memories,
The research objective was to analyse the deeply embedded attachment older farmers have to their farms, and how such a bond can stifle the necessary handover of the farm business to the next generation.
The researchers concluded that the emotional issues they discovered have resulted in intractable challenges for farmer succession and retirement policy over the past 40 years.
Their recommendations, designed to reconnect farmers with national and EU farm transfer policies, include a nationwide organisation, with a network of clubs in every county, which would allow older farmers to remain embedded inside their farms and integrate within the social fabric of a local age peer group, while also providing them with opportunities to develop a pattern of farming activities suited to advancing age.
This would contribute to their overall self- worth, despite the gradual diminishment of their physical capacities in later life.
Collaborating with their younger counterparts in Macra na Feirme on various campaigns and activities would also allow the older farmers to retain a sense of purpose and value in old age.
The report on the NUI Galway study of older far-mers attitudes is in the current edition of the TResearch official science publication of Teagasc.
