How young farmers are facing property ownership struggle with innovation

Is “owning dirt” a dream that belongs to older generations? Young farmers say the financial hurdles to farming are increasing, but so are the solutions.

Emma Ayliffe and her partner, Craig, grow winter grows and run sheep at Lake Cargelligo in NSW.

The challenge of farm ownership and the increasing financial barriers facing young people who want to farm was one of the headline topics at this year’s youth-focused Grain Growers Ltd conference.

Agronomist and farmer Emma Ayliffe, who spoke at the Grain Growers Ltd Innovation Generation conference in Sydney this week, said her message to young people was that they would need to “think outside of the square to get into farming”.

Ms Ayliffe, who grows winter crops and farms sheep in the NSW Riverina, said regional Australia was increasingly being parcelled up into large farming aggregations, run by managers and contractors rather than families.

To get into farming, young people needed to do away with the myth that “you need to own dirt to be a farmer”, she said.

“One of the biggest limitations is around how do you physically come up with a 20 per cent deposit on something worth millions of dollars?” she said.

And once the cost of land was covered, how would you find the money for machinery if you wanted to grow crops?

“The world is changing … There’s the ability to manage a farm without owning a farm. That can be becoming a manager for a corporate or a large family enterprise.

“We also have a lot of guys that have share farming arrangements … And then there’s all of the support roles within agriculture that allows you to be part of ag without having to be on the farm,” she said.

Cultivate Farms co-founder Sam Marwood. Picture: Zoe Phillips

Cultivate Farms co-founder Sam Marwood, who also spoke at the Grain Growers conference this week, said owning a property was still possible for young people who didn’t inherit land, but the path to get there wasn’t the same as for previous generations.

Mr Marwood said his personal struggle to get into farming had kickstarted the Cultivate Farms social enterprise, which aims to link young farmers to older farmers looking to pass on their properties.

Mr Marwood was 17 when his parents sold the family property, and the experience nearly shut down his farming ambitions.

“I left farming because I couldn’t own a farm,” he said.

“A friend of mine said ‘imagine if there was a business that helped to buy farms for young people’.

“From the second he said it, I was like ‘yes, that’s what we need to do’.”

Cultivate Farms now hosts a website with the profiles of 2500 young farmers who hope to be matched with older farmers looking to transition their businesses to new managers who share their farming vision.

Since it started six years ago, it has successfully matched 25 young people to a farming property, Mr Marwood said.

He urged older farmers to consider partnering “with a next generation farmer who deserves your property, who loves it, and sees your vision”.

“We’re focused on solving the biggest issue for the next generation in regional communities, and that is farm ownership,” he said.