Grey nomads of a different kind: Is Australian agriculture doing enough to keep the next generation?

The useful part

Trent Thorne, Hamilton Locke 29/09/2026 THERE is a joke doing the rounds in farming circles that the average shed meeting looks less like a business planning session and more like a pension fund AGM. Depending on which numbers you look at, close to 30 percent of the agricultural workforce is now aged 60 or over. Livestock enterprises skew even older, with the average sheep farmer pushing 62 and the average beef farmer closer to 64.

How it works

• The average age of an Australian farmer has crept up about a decade over the past twenty years, to 59, roughly twenty years older than the average worker in most other industries.
• Young people, defined generously as those between fifteen and thirty-four, make up around a quarter of the agricultural workforce, well short of the roughly one third share they hold across the broader...
• Δ Comments I think Australian agriculture needs a total recalibration of how we look at succession.
• Bonus rates varied, but as an example, many young farmers worked under a system of 10% after costs.
• Add to that the capital required to get a start in ownership, the physical toll of the work, and a persistent perception problem, that agriculture is short on career progression and long on manual labour,...

What to take from it

We wonder, how does this stop the constant leakage of promising young staff, if they 'go on their own after only 4-5 years?' Perhaps some form of compounding % could work, where the longer the promising employee stayed, the larger their share of the pie? None of this is new information to anyone who has spent five minutes at a saleyard, a field day or an annual general meeting. Around half of Australia's farmers are expected to retire within the next fifteen years.

Example or evidence

• Trent Thorne is an agribusiness lawyer with Hamilton Locke HAVE YOUR SAY Cancel Reply Your email address will not be published.
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• Poultry and horticulture attract more of them than broadacre and livestock, for reasons that are not hard to guess.
• There are worse places to start a career than a shed full of chickens with reliable hours and a bitumen road out front.

Details worth keeping

Are we doing enough to retain the next generation?. What is new, or at least newly urgent, is the arithmetic. So why the reluctance to buy into beef, wool and grain?

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