What's the future for consultants

According to AgFirst chief executive James Allen, a deep understanding of technologies and databases and the ability to recognise how these can directly benefit the farmer client will be vital.

Allen has just completed his Nuffield Scholarship on defining the role of the next generation agricultural consultants. He says the role of the farm consultant has continued to change over the years and that the pace of change is now quite rapid with such technologies as AI.

He says the role of the consultant will be to unscramble and make sense of data and present the information in such a way that farmers can use it to make better decisions and deal with new requirements to change their operations.

"AI and technology are here to stay, and people should not shy away from it, rather just start experimenting with it and what it can do for their business. We are moving to precision agriculture, whether we like it or not, so that goes down to managing the farm by the square metre and animal by the animal, not by the herd. Our farms are so big these days we don't understand what each sheep and cow is doing but we now have technology to do that. In some ways it's back to the old days, thanks to technology," he says.

Technology in all its forms will likely mean some changes for the rural professional companies that service the farming industry. Allen points out that the days of a farm consultant sitting down with a calculator and working out covers and grass growth is over. Most farmers can work this out for themselves thanks to automation. But he says with new emerging technologies there will be a need for specialists.

He says the larger consultancies may employ specialists while the small firms may retain their own niche.

“I think it will be a bit of both. For example, in Ag First I have a ruminant nutritionist and an HR specialist and LEC mapper, so I can call of any of these specialists for a particular farm. We will continue to see an evolution of that, so you will see people with really specialist skills but equally you still need that people-person with strong business management skills to tie it all together,” he says.

Allen says the traditional role of the farm advisor has been one around tech extension or knowledge transfer. Now we are shifting to a position where knowledge is going to become more commoditised with Chat- GPT or AI search engines used to find what you want to know, quickly.

“As well as having a clear, deep understanding of new and emerging technologies, they must have the soft skills - the interpersonal skills, running businesses, working with families and driving that behaviour change,” he says.