Out going chairman Richard Scott gave a report of the club’s activities throughout the past year, citing the summer tour to Scotland and the Annual farm walk hosted by Boxford Suffolk Farms last May as particularly enjoyable and interesting events. The winter programme had been successful, with good attendance at the meetings, and a broad demographic of members attending reflecting an interesting set of speakers. A presentation was made to Nick Hunt, the club’s retiring treasurer who had been in post since 2008 and was warmly thanked for his contribution to the club. After the election of club officers in coming chairman Oli Pipe thanked Richard for his work over the last two years before introducing the first of the evenings speakers – John Hunt, who spoke about his experiences at the Oxford Farming Conference in January for which the Deben Farm Club had sponsored him. Attending a diverse selection of talks, debates and dinners it had proved an interesting and thought provoking experience.
Our second speaker of the evening was Tom Martin, aka Farmer Tom, founder of FarmerTime. After a spell in the film industry Tom returned to the family farm for a more fulfilling career full of problems to solve. Asking the audience what makes a good farmer, his key point is that we’re curious, why did that die, why did that work, why didn’t that work, … reminding us that we are all scientists constantly experimenting. JFDI, just f@*#ing do it, and see if it works because with the number of variables we work with waiting for a proven solution would never happen. Does a falling tree in a forest make noise if no one hears it? Tom likened this to us as farmers, with many of us doing wonderful things for nature and the environment but silently and the need for us to start telling our story, since the public have never been so detached from the countryside and their food production. But importantly they’ve never been more interested. His charity Farmer Time, links teachers with farmers for short video calls to the class every few weeks, from humble beginnings in 2017 it is now linking over 25,000 children with over 1,000 farmers. But with growing demand, there is always a shortage of farmers, so please have a look and give it a try. Tom’s top tip of the evening was to embrace AI (in the IT sense!) and use it to help write your content, making sure to mark the homework before publishing.