Farming recruitment challenges in the Highlands

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Transcript

00:00Welcome to Farm Ness, where I investigated the importance of highland agriculture.

00:12In the jungle, the mighty jungle, we are about to feed the alpacas.

00:19Look, they've made him sad. What do you want? I don't think I'm meant to be feeding him

00:34this.

00:35As well as the challenges farmers endure.

00:42In this episode, I look into the challenges farmers face with recruitment and who better

00:46to speak to than Donald Fraser, who owns and runs Farm Ness.

00:52It's a challenge and maybe some kind of structured scheme could help a lot.

00:57It's very few people from outside farming come into it. I always hated, as my dad used

01:02to say, farming is a way of life and I hate that because it's a business and you need

01:05to try and generate a profit. If not, what's the point? I'd be better working somewhere

01:10else.

01:11That phrase is used quite a lot because it's one of those jobs, obviously you do go on

01:17holiday, you do have time with your family and everything else, but I find I'm never

01:24fully switched off because there's always, especially with livestock, there's always

01:29something that will go wrong and it normally happens exactly at the time you don't want

01:34it to happen. But if you're not in it, it's quite a shock to get into it.

01:41I'm not good at this!

01:44And we definitely, as farmers, a certain time of year, we work stupid hours and it's not

01:49good for us and it's definitely not good for attracting people to the industry. But again,

01:56I think if you talk to any farmer, they would want more staff and be able to pay more staff.

02:01But we work on pretty slim margins, so having that extra man in the team that's easy probably

02:09doesn't happen and you just end up at the peak times of years just trying to work a

02:13bit harder.