The power of insider - outside collaboration

Hosting a drop in at a Farmer Auction Mart in Wharfedale

We asked Nathan, our young farmer engagement & outreach team member to share with us some insights around working on our recent listening project with farmers and landowners across West Yorkshire. Joining our team for the duration of the project he generously guided our engagement approach, strengthening and connecting opportunities to build relationships across the farming community as well as being a fantastic team member. Read on for his perspective on the whole process:

Tight knit communities are a wonderful thing. They provide their members with a support network, friendships, and a place of belonging. However, they can also be very hard to penetrate from an outsider’s perspective. I know that’s certainly true of my own rural community amongst the farmers of West Yorkshire and the surrounding counties. That’s why, when I heard that Street Space were looking for a member of my community to help them speak to local farmers as part of the consultation on West Yorkshire’s Local Nature Recovery Strategy (LNRS), I was a little hesitant to say the least. It wasn’t that I disagreed with what they were trying to do – I’m a passionate believer that farmer’s voices need to be heard more not less – but I was certainly nervous about introducing strangers to my community. There’s a range of worries that run through your head. “What if they accidentally insult someone? How is anyone going to trust this stranger when they know next to nothing about us and our way of life?” And, chief amongst them: “what if their actions damage my place within a community that means so much to me?”

It was therefore with great trepidation that I arrived to meet Sophie and Phillippa at a local dairy farm on a wet and blustery January night. We were there to join the weekly meeting of Worth Valley and Calderdale Young Farmers Clubs, to speak to the members and their parents about what nature meant to them and how they felt it could be best supported. I’ve been a member of the club since I was ten and so it’s a group that really means a lot to me. Consequently, I was nervous on both sides. On one hand I worried that many people might not even turn up - the relationship between farmers and policy makers has become very strained over recent years and many in my community have simply decided that they’re not worth speaking to. On the other hand, I worried that those who did turn up might just use the evening to vent their frustrations about previous policy decisions rather than engage in a productive conversation. It certainly wouldn’t have been the first time I’d attended a meeting between farmers and those advising policy makers that had descended into conflict rather than collaboration.

We started the meeting with a quick nature quiz which really helped to break the ice. Sophie had wanted to have some form of activity to get people thinking about nature before the main conversation began and, whilst I’d had to temper her earlier ambitions of making a film or having the young farmers write a newspaper article, I was glad that we did. It certainly wouldn't have been my instinct to break the ice like that but it was an excellent way of giving the meeting a different feel to those that had come before and really helped people work up to a more constructive conversation later on. The rest of the meeting went really well. Sophie was able to ask questions that would have felt uncomfortable or odd coming from me, whilst I was able to help Sophie and Philipa avoid accidental offence and to help them understand some of the more complex, farmer specific things people were saying. Many of the comments made that evening had a significant impact in shaping the rest of the project and I don’t think we’d have been able to hear those perspectives if I hadn’t taken a risk and let Sophie run the meeting in a way that probably felt very different from what we as a community are used to. 

In fact, reflecting on that night makes me realise that many of the successes we’ve achieved throughout the project simply wouldn't have been possible if our partnership hadn’t been able to draw on that outsider vs community member dynamic. A key part of my role has been enabling the people we’ve spoken to to feel as though they can trust us with conversations about their lives and livelihoods that would have felt too delicate to explain to a complete stranger. It sounds daft to an outsider but farmers can usually tell if someone else is from a farming background very easily and there is a great sense of togetherness that exists between members of the farming community. Often we all dress, talk, and even think in the same ways and that’s something that an outsider would really struggle to replicate. However, because I’m part of that community there are also conversations that I would have struggled to have without Sophie there to ask the questions I couldn’t. She’s definitely been able to ask questions that I wouldn’t have felt comfortable asking, and often people have been willing to explain things in greater detail because they don’t expect her to have the same baseline of knowledge that comes with being part of the farming community. Conversely, without me, and my young farmer credentials stood next to her, many of the people we’ve spoken to simply wouldn’t have engaged with Sophie in the first place so it’s really been our partnership and that balance between insider knowledge and an outsider’s perspective that’s enabled us to have the meaningful conversations that have made this project such a joy to work on.

Young Farmer Engagement & Outreach: Nathan!