Young people keep choosing agricultural training despite fierce debate

Young people are continuing to enrol in agricultural training despite heated debate over farming, protests by farmers and intense political disagreements, DR reports. Dalum Agricultural College in Funen welcomed 89 new students in August, including 16-year-old Inga Hjördis Böckel, who already has a tractor driving licence.

Böckel confidently steers a large red tractor between two slurry tanks at the college’s practical training facilities in Korinth near Faaborg.

“I’ve never driven this one before. It’s very new and very cool,” she says, adding that the tractor’s screen could theoretically be used to watch Netflix.

Böckel obtained her tractor licence while attending a continuation school. She will soon begin working towards a licence for an ordinary car.

She is one of many young people who have continued to apply for agricultural programmes across Denmark, despite the conflict surrounding the sector.

Figures compiled by the Association of Danish Agricultural Colleges over the past 10 years show that applications have increased over the last four to five years and have now stabilised. The association represents 13 of the country’s 16 agricultural colleges and educational institutions, accounting for more than 90 per cent of agricultural students, according to its chairman, Lars Møgelbjerg Andersen.

“The agricultural sector has probably always been criticised to some extent, but there is a great deal of focus on it right now. That has not affected applications yet, and I hope it will not,” says Andersen, who is also principal of Asmildkloster Agricultural College in Viborg.

Böckel is determined to be part of what she sees as a new agricultural world. Her first plan is to become a farmer and eventually own a farm on Lolland, where her family lives.

“If there is one available. I don’t know whether there will be one by then, or whether they will have been forced to close,” she says.

She has followed the debate over the fertiliser law and believes the sector faces a difficult balance between environmental protection and food production.

“The groundwater must of course be protected, but we also need food on the shelves. I believe there is a future in it, but we have to find new ways of doing things,” says Thor Bjerregaard Uggerby, another 16-year-old agricultural student at Dalum.

Uggerby, from Gudme in southern Funen, has worked as a trainee with a pig farmer and hopes to run his own farm. He says he became more interested in agriculture the more he worked there.

“Of course you can become a little worried by the debate, but agriculture has existed for so many years that I don’t think it will just stop,” he says.

Böckel has a backup plan that also builds on her experience with machinery: becoming a mechanic.