Author: Tapoka Mkandawire
Challenges, opportunities, and starting from scratch
As someone with farming ambitions, this was a session where I hoped to leave feeling inspired and informed about the road ahead. How do you start farming when you don’t have land, money, or inherited infrastructure? The panel of three new-entrant farmers (Amelia Greenway, Bryn Perry, and Jack Scott) never overly romanticised the challenge; they mapped it simply, honestly, and with real passion. I now have a clearer picture of what it takes to get started and what it actually looks like beginning and strategising with limited capital. I was also struck by how nature-friendly farming was not an optional bolt-on in these lived experiences, but practical operating logic. Working with nature served to make farming feasible when resources were tight.
The opening framing acknowledged the very real barriers to entry. Limited access to land, high land prices, constrained finance, short tenancies, and uneven training and support create bottlenecks that keep otherwise capable and motivated people out of farming. That quickly led to a more uncomfortable truth. Land does exist, but access to it is shaped less by availability and more by relationships. Who you know, and establishing rapport and partnership, often matters as much as deciding what you want to grow or rear.
Despite the clear challenges, there were also upsides; and the panellist answers centred on a key theme: “constraint isn’t bad, it creates focus and forces discipline”. Each farmer described their careful make or break choices: investing only in core essentials; aligning ambition to the realities of the landscape and tenancy length; or using the freedom of the blank slate to build novel entrepreneurial routes to market. Starting small wasn’t a compromise, it was the chosen, and even preferred strategy; when asked whether they would have gone bigger from the outset, most said they wouldn’t.
How tenancies, trust, and policy shape the land
A major through-line was that tenancy structures don’t just affect finances; they quite literally shape the land. In Bryn Perry’s experience, short tenancies can drive extractive behaviour, “if you don’t have time to see long term returns, you’re incentivised to strip value quickly”. Poor handover and weak knowledge transfer compound the problem, meaning both mistakes made and ecological learnings are lost between tenants. Long tenancies, however, are not a cure all. Amelia Greenway described how longer agreements can enable long-term ecological investment, but can also create pressure to deliver financial returns in ways that distort decision-making. The key takeaway was to be strategic and nuanced. There is no single ideal tenancy length, and there are many ways to work with landlords. What works will depend on: what you are trying to grow; how you would like to operate; and how communication and risk is managed between stakeholders. The goal is security and evidence, because the reality is finance follows security. Loans, infrastructure investment, and building reputation as a trusted supplier all become harder to access when tenure, and your ability to deliver within it, is uncertain.
Across the panel, and the various challenges they’ve faced, relationships emerged as the real accelerators. Networking, visibility in the local community, trust building, and storytelling were described not as soft skills, but as essential infrastructure to establish. Not because policy and finance don’t matter, but because they can fail without cultural buy-in. That said, policy is clearly a hot topic, and the panel also covered: developments in tax incentives for longer leases, as well as better succession and inheritance planning.
The money numbers people rarely say out loud
One of the most valuable parts of the session was hearing the real starting figures, and strategies for structuring work and family life to stay viable. These were not “how to get rich quick farming” stories, but honest accounts of how to stay in the game, and build longevity and runway. Amelia captured the ethos perfectly: “Do it because you believe in it in the core of your soul, don’t do it chasing funding or a fashion.” The pride in what each panellist had built was palpable, and well earned; it was inspiring to see how wise early decisions helped them navigate thin margins.
The realities were stark though, long hours, low real-term wages (as low as ~£2.15 per hour in one case), and the necessity of off-farm income, particularly in the early years. But a consistent and hopeful pattern emerged; if you prove yourself, the security and growth will come. Trust earned from landlords, financiers, policymakers, and customers enabled expansion; not just in scale and land, but in community. That knowledge shared locally mattered enormously; learning from landowners and previous tenants shortened the mistake curve. As Jack Scott put it: “Go and work in the community… they’ve spent 63 years doing this, you can just jump ahead.”
Emerging with a practical blueprint to get started
This session made the hidden curriculum of farming visible. It’s not just about production, it’s an all encompassing role that tests your patience, adaptability, and judgement. Hands-on experience trumps formal qualifications.
Hearing that there isn’t a book to read, or a way to intellectualise your way out of the risk of just starting, might feel intimidating. However, for me, it made the idea of entering farming feel even more possible. These stories showed that partnerships, community, and knowledge transfer can function as real infrastructure. In each story these were the essential scaffolding that supported the farms long before capital arrived. This was exactly the kind of session I came to ORFC for; idealistic without being naive, practical without being cynical. For now, I’ll keep digesting the conference, and follow Bryn’s advice: “Go off-farm and find the inspiration that’ll get you to the next stage.”
About the author: Tapoka Mkandawire is a Senior Research Scientist, working on microbiome driven innovation in pet health. She previously completed a postdoc at the Francis Crick Institute, developing sequencing methods to improve the study of the human and bovine parasite, Cryptosporidium, in research and applied settings.
Her work sits at the intersection of molecular biology, bioinformatics, and biotech consulting, with a growing focus on interdisciplinary research and science translation. Having grown up around farming, Tapoka is particularly interested in soil health, food system resilience, and how farmers, scientists, industry, and policymakers can collaborate more effectively. She attended ORFC 2026 as a Creative Comms volunteer. You can follow her on instagram @tapokam_photos, or on LinkedIn.
To learn more, check out this session in the ORFC archives.
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