A rural European gathering is a special moment. A time for those working on the ground in different territories and regions to compare notes on common challenges at local level, and reflect on European solutions. Access to land is increasingly a barrier for aspiring farmers across Europe, even as an ageing generation of farmers often fails to find a successor. At our European gathering in Plessé in 2022, Czech farmer Terezie Daňková realised how pervasive this issue is in other EU member states. Here Terezie shares her insights.
It takes 50 years to pay for a farm. Irrespective of the size of the farm or the country you live in.
Thirty years of farming, but also meeting colleagues from different countries in Europe, has brought me to this realisation. I had one of these meetings in France. The gathering in Plessé, with French farmers and with colleagues from 12 other European countries, helped me to sort out my thoughts and to see that it is possible to generalise problems but also to solve them.
I remember the exact moment when the opening sentence came to me. A colleague from Ireland asked how French farmers saw the future. One of the members of the local farmers’ cooperative replied: All other problems can be solved. The biggest problem is that 50% of our members are retired and have no heirs. Access to land, for young farmers who are starting out, is another issue that came up from every possible angle during the gathering. I have known both of these problems for a long time in the Czech Republic.
In Europe we have a lot of farmers without an heir. A farm is a paradise, but it is also a prison. In other professions today it is not true: born to an actor, born to an actor, born to a doctor. Children have freedom of choice and rightly so. On the other hand, we have people here who would like to become farmers. But farming is a business that has very low returns, by definition. So the upfront investment is terribly expensive relative to the returns. If you buy a car, for example, you have to pay it off a car within a few years, before it becomes a pile of scrap. You have to pay off a house in twenty-five years and then fix it up and so on. Land, if treated well, doesn’t lose its value. So you don’t mind how long it takes to pay it off. The crucial thing is that the payoff of the investment is enough to live on.
I was struck by how similar these figures are across Europe: around 50% of farms have no heirs. Buying a whole farm – buildings, livestock, machinery and land – costs such a sum that you have to spread it over 50 years, or the annual repayments will eat you up.
Farmers cannot be asked to sell their farms below market value. Nor their heirs. To say to yourself, I’m going to sell this place to these nice people, they’re going to farm it, and I’m going to do a good deed. The market price of farms goes up for many reasons: It is a secure investment. The value of the land does not go down if well managed. The potential of using the land for carbon storage only increases the price of farms for non-farmers. So there is a huge amount of non-farm money operating in the market that farms can simply buy up to stock. And these funds cannot compete with loans with 20-year maturities, because the annual repayments cost more than the farms’ agricultural yield.
The conclusion is frighteningly simple: either we create financial instruments to buy farms that are accessible to young people who choose to farm, or global capital buys the farms that are freed up on the market. Good luck, Europe, I am stepping away from the computer to my animals again for a while. I sincerely hope that we can find a way to enable the next generation to farm.
The critical role of generational renewal in advancing Europe’s agroecological transition, and the need for fair and sustainable land access for young farmers and newcomers in the sector, will be the topic of the workshop ‘Intergenerational dialogue in farmers’ lives’ that will be held during this year’s gathering. Weaving Common Ground, a European gathering of sustainable rural initiatives, will take place in Grzybów, Poland from 28 November to 1 December 2024.
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