Chris Biddle welcomes Mark Earles of Makita UK, the President of the Agricultural Engineers Association (AEA), to Inside Agri-Turf, where they delve deep into the intricacies of the agricultural engineering sector. The conversation begins with a reflection on how the industry has evolved over the years, particularly in light of recent challenges and opportunities, such as the ongoing sustainability discourse.

Mark shares insights from his early career, emphasizing the importance of adaptability in engineering roles. He recounts his pathway from aircraft engineering to the outdoor power equipment market, illustrating how diverse experiences shape one's professional journey.

The discussion opens with the critical role of agricultural engineers in ensuring food security and the necessity for a renewed appreciation for farmers and engineers alike.

LINKS

Agricultural Engineers Association

We Are Landbased Engineering campaign

European Garden Machinery industry Federation

Hello, I'm Chris Biddle and welcome to Inside Agrita, featuring those lovely folk who are engaged at the heart of the farm and grass machinery industry known collectively as land based engineering.

And thank you for joining me.

Now, before I introduce today's guest, I'd like to touch on topical issue which is gaining considerable media coverage.

Now, I don't mean the US election in the re emerg of Mr.

Donald J.

Trump, although I will make a brief reference to him at the end.

But first let me go back to the previous episode before this, talking to Dr.

Mark Moore, during which I asked him what role do agricultural engineers play in that whole process of feeding a growing population.

And here's what he said.

I think farming in general, which obviously agricultural engineering is linked to, is underrated, undervalued.

I've never had a time where I've not walked into a shop and there's been never been food on the shelf.

So every time I've walked into a shop and not only the food, but a wide choice of food as well.

And I think expectations are there.

So consumers, right when they walk into a shop they expect food to be there.

My parents grew up in the second World War and they experienced rationing.

So they've I think a bit more appreciative of farming than perhaps we are today, my generation, because of that.

So they experienced rationing, food shortages and things like that.

I'm not saying they went hungry, but they haven't got the sort of the stability or the free choice that we enjoy today.

So I think we need to try and get back to the point where we appreciate farmers more and more.

And I think agricultural engineering can play an important part particularly around this sustainability challenge.

Now I expect you know where I'm coming from on this.

That interview was recorded before Rachel Reeves recent budget which included swinging changes to inheritance tax on farmland that would impact many family owned farms who are indeed the backbone of food production in this country.

The Ferrari amongst the farming community is palpable.

This move would likely spell the end of generational farming as we know it.

The NFU has already said that it is not in favor of mass protests a la France.

But here's the thing.

In WarGaming disaster scenarios, MI5 no less predict that we are only ever four meals away from anarchy.

And given how fragile the supply chain is and the reliance on just in time logistics, no wonder a group of about a dozen farming influencers with many millions of followers on YouTube and TikTok are talking about disrupting supplies and it doesn't take long for panic to set in.

So remember that MI5 forecast that we are only four meals a day away from anarchy.

Well, they do do it before Christmas.

Well, only time will tell.

But it could remind the government to never, ever take farming and food production in this country for granted.

Now, I know I promised not to mention the Donald, but it strikes me that we might adopt and adapt his MAGA slogan and instead of make America great again, make agriculture great again.

And so now continuing my theme of interviewing industry leaders and following episodes featuring Jeff Webb, the CEO of Grounds Management association, and Dr.

Mark Moore, the president of IAGRI, the institution of Agricultural Engineers.

This week I'm delighted to welcome Mark Earls, the current president of the aea, the Agricultural Engineers association, the trade association representing land based engine engineering manufacturers and suppliers, which will celebrate a very important anniversary next year.

Mark, a very warm welcome to Inside Agri Turf and congratulations somewhat belatedly on your appointment as president of the aea.

How are you enjoying the role?

Oh, full on.

It's been a really good year.

A lot of work is our 150th anniversary next year so there's a lot of work going into that.

It's going to be quite a special year next year, I think.

Absolutely.

And has it been a real eye opener for you?

I've been on the board for quite a while.

I know what to expect and it is, they're a great bunch of people.

Everybody there, the board, the people on the committees.

It's.

Yeah, it's a, it's a good organization.

Look, if we could go right back and start at the beginning if you like.

Almost the beginning.

Your early days, Mark, schooling.

Did you enjoy school?

Was it, was it something that you look forward to?

Oh God, I'll give you a potted history, shall I was born in Warwickshire.

Most of my upbringing bringing was in a small village called Stratmond and there's more between Coventry and Rugby.

Fantastic time to be growing up in there.

So yeah, there's no, no worries about safety in a little village like that and you just go out in the summer holidays at 8:00 in the morning and you're only coming back at half past eight because somebody was shouting you back.

Some is great time to be growing up.

Great place to be growing up in with all the farmers.

It's a very rural sort of little village, the farm right in the middle of the village.

So we used to get up to all sorts of mischief and yeah, so it's great place to, to be growing up, schooling Went school in Rugby and I never really took to school at the time.

Too many of the distractions and other bits and pieces.

I think I only really got what schooling was about, about the last year I think so.

But I pulled it out the bag.

I got some reasonable grades and, and things like that.

But coming from an engineering background.

So my granddad was an engineer, he worked on Concorde.

My dad was an engineer.

He worked in several factories around in the Coventry area.

And so the early days I was destined to be an engineer.

And the granddad was desperate for me to be an aircraft engineer.

The same as him.

He helped me with getting an apprenticeship with an aircraft engineering company in Coventry.

And that was really good times, give you good grounding.

But it's that apprenticeship where I took off really because really did well there.

I was top of the class, getting distinctions in engineering, drawing and all the different techniques, everything.

And that's where education I think really kicked in with me a bit late, but that's where it happened.

Was this specifically aircraft engineering or general engineering course?

Oh, this was aircraft engineering and quite a lot of it was military based.

We did a lot of.

We walked on tornadoes and jet Provost trainers at the time.

We even made the toilets for the Queen's flight.

But it was good.

We even did some work on a Spitfire that had belly flopped somewhere.

Yeah, it was, it was a good time.

And of course it was the 80s as well.

Computers were just coming to the forefront.

I think I got a ZX Spectrum at the time computer.

Oh, bless them.

And yeah, just going back a bit.

So I learned how to program it.

I learned DOS and things like that, which then set me up in the company where I was working because they started to get these terminals coming in.

And in them days, if you remember, there were a black screen with green writing on and the keyboard was an integral part of the machine.

I think they were made by Sharp at the time, the ones we were using.

So I used to work out the guy's salary.

I wrote a program to work out the guy's salary on the shop floor.

So on a Wednesday evening just before we knocked up, all these people would be queuing up telling me how many hours overtime they'd done and their tax code.

And I put it all into this little program I've written and I get it right within about two or three pence it was.

Was quite good.

Again, that was in the days when you used to get a little envelope with a corner missing.

You have to count your notes before you opened it for your Wage packet.

It brings back some good memories when.

You look back and did you see your future lying in the aircraft or the aviation sector or what happened in terms of when you joined Makita?

How did that come about?

Computers happened.

That's what, that's what happened.

And I got noticed by another company, a design company and they wanted, they poached me basically from the aircraft side to go into car design on camera and looking back you'd think, is it a good decision?

I worked on the XJ220 for Jaguar.

They, the car that was with Tom Walkinshaw racing TWR because he had the contract to build them.

The story with that is they came to us and said, we've shown this model at the motor show and we didn't really want anything from it, but a couple of really noticeable people, musicians, have placed orders for the flipping thing.

So we've got to build it.

Yeah, okay then.

So they came to us.

We then turned that into a full size, full size thing.

But just before the tooling was going to be made, they came back and said, is too big, it's too long, we got to make it shorter.

You can't just chop out a foot out the middle of a car and say.

So the whole thing had to be redesigned again and they wanted to put a smaller engine in it.

They wanted to put actually the Metro 6R4 engine in it that they were using for rallying.

So they, we had to shorten the car.

We did that.

That led.

So that gives you an idea of the year.

Then there was jcb.

There was.

We did work for Ford on Transits and Fiestas and we did the.

Was it the Rover 220?

They did.

The code name for that project was Sports.

One was called the Dragon.

I remember that.

Anyway, that, that was that.

So I then thought, yeah, maybe my career is in car design, but this is quite good.

And then the market took a downturn.

I was the last one in, first one out.

And yeah, you think to yourself, okay, that's a pretty tough time.

Went to sign on and the government went, or the office went, no, you can't, you're too well qualified.

We're going to send you to university.

So what, you know, just got married and we're going to send you to university.

So choose a university course.

So I went home with this book that they gave me and I thought, what have I got strengths in engineering?

So I thought Computer Agent Engineering, Wolverhampton University I'll go and do a degree in that.

So that's what I did.

Shut off to.

And I could do that from home.

Buy a train from Leamington Spa, nice and easy.

Did that for two and a half years or two years.

And then the summer placement, I went to Potterton Meissen.

The boiler people, the central heating systems, they had a big factory opposite where I lived.

So I did a summer placement there.

And at the end of the summer placement, a guy there called Ken Percival said to me, we don't want you to leave.

We've been in touch with the university.

You've done everything you need to get your degree.

I'm offering you a job.

So okay then.

I knew though that my future wasn't going to be in boilers and things like that.

A bit of a change for Rolls Royce, Connie.

Just a little bit of a change.

You're quite right.

I left there as I didn't leave there, I converted some of the production lines into from air to cordless.

And that's where I got in contact with Makita and this rep came in.

But while I was off with.

When I was doing my university stuff, I had a friend who worked for a counselor at Claverton Parish council.

They had 40 acres of woodlands, so a little bit of pin money and things like that to keep things tidying over.

I was managing their 40 acres of woodland for them and I had my own chainsaws and things like that.

So I asked Makita because I saw in the back of the catalog your chainsaws like.

And this guy said, oh yeah, I'll bring one in, you can have a go with it.

Said, oh, brilliant.

Kept pestering him and eventually this guy turns up called Mike Baldwin.

He used to be in charge of construction and the outdoor power side for Makita and I took him for a walk around the factory and bearing in mind that I've got no experience in sales at the time, I got no experience expecting anything from.

From him.

And we walked around and he was saying things to me like, did you get a meal allowance?

No, I've never had a meal allowance, no, just bring me own sandwiches.

A bit later on he'd say something like that, do you get like a company credit card so the department has one?

He said, all right, okay then I don't suppose you get a company car, do you?

Live over the road and water work and anyway got to the end of this walk around the factory says, well, if I offered you 2,000 pound more than what you run a company car Company credit card, health scheme, daily meal allowance.

Would you come and work for me?

I went, yeah, probably would.

And he went, okay, then shook my hand and as I looked at him, he said, the letter will be in the post.

And off he went.

Anyway, Wednesday, the following week, this letter arrived and I showed it to my wife and my wife went with sales and went, I'm just fed up with engineering a little bit, because every year you've got this threat of redundancies over your head.

It seems to be coming up all the time and as soon as somebody says, oh, we're going to go for the pay rise, then all of a sudden the management would go, things are going a bit tough and.

And it's just usually like a tool to knock down the pay rises all the time, so.

So I just said, why not just give some a different.

Give it a go, give it a go.

And while I was at Potterton's, they put me through a degree in management and then subsequently a postgraduate diploma in management and also another apprenticeship.

I had to go and do a technician's apprenticeship in production engineering.

So I got all these qualifications, building up behind my name sort of thing.

So I thought, I'll carry on.

Crack on.

And up again.

So anyway, I went to.

I joined Makita in early 95.

What was your first role then, Mark?

Area sales manager.

I looked after a third of the country for outdoor power and that was Midlands, Mid and South Wales and the Southwest.

Yeah.

And two months into the job, I rang Mike Baldwin up and I went, mike, I said, sorry, but this isn't working.

I said, in two months I've sold eight chainsaws.

I said, that cannot be justifiable.

And he went, did I give you a target?

So I said, no.

He said.

He said, you're here for the long term, not for the short term.

Don't worry about it.

Just go out there, do what you're doing, it'll come.

And I thought, flipping that right, okay, then.

That's taking a bit of faith in somebody in this.

Yeah.

And I was the first dedicated person they took on because the people before me were a cross between construction and outdoor power.

They were given a bit of the outdoor power.

I was the first dedicated one that Makita took on.

That then led onto me becoming assistant national sales Manager, then national sales manager for Outdoor power Equipment.

I then started picking up some of these other roles then, so.

Like the AEA and the egmf, another bits and pieces.

So I.

Then they said to me, you're good at this.

And we want to give you the time to do that.

So I said, yeah, okay then.

And it was a.

This aside, I really enjoyed, to be fair.

So I stepped back from the national sales manager's role on outdoor Power and they give me the role of business development manager as a title.

But that's not really anything what I do, I do business development, but a lot of what I do is the associations, working with the likes of Bali, the apl, egmf.

Yeah.

Aa.

Yeah.

And so, Mark, this would have been a time when cordless was becoming much stronger.

And it always seems to me that cordless on paratools, paratool market was much stronger and the uptake on outdoor power equipment seemed to be slower.

Was that very much the case?

I think so, yeah.

If you look at, say, take a job in builder, then I think that most of the tools that he would use would be being used for short periods of time.

Yeah.

Putting in screws, putting.

Drilling a hole through a wall a few seconds and then that job's done.

I think cordless tools initially would have been with the battery technology at the time.

It blends itself to that sort of application.

But as an outdoor power, are you running a brush cutter, you're running a motor for a long period of time, you're running a chainsaw again, you're running it for minutes, not seconds at a time.

So the drain on the batteries would have been a lot higher.

So I think in the early days, the battery technology probably wasn't quite there for the outdoor power side of things.

I think it was also a question of affordability.

Obviously they were a lot more expensive.

And also fears about runtime for potential purchases.

Wasn't it, oh, runtime, how, when to charge, how to charge.

If you're out in the field, then you need somewhere.

It's sometimes impractical to carry 20 batteries with you to get a day's work done.

So, yeah, there was all sorts of things coming in there and, yeah, cost was a bit prohibitive as well.

And of course, in the early days you had the batteries which had battery memory, so you had to be very careful how you managed your batteries.

Where do you think?

So, coming right up to date, Mark, where do you think we are now?

Is cordless the very much accepted form of power for the outdoor power equipment market?

Are we there yet?

If you look at now then, you're looking at 58% of the market being cordless.

So over half the market being cordless and I think it's about 26% being petrol.

Yeah, I think it's.

The figures certainly indicate that cordless has come an awful long way and that's because battery technology has come an awful long way.

And also motor technology is coming up along.

People will always say, oh, it's battery.

It's not just battery, battery is one part of it.

You look at the number of brushless motors now that are out there, brushless made a big difference, 40% increase in efficiency with the brushless motor.

So, yeah, it's big changes.

You referenced the egmf, which, for listeners who don't know what that stands for.

It's the European Garden Machinery Federation, am I right?

Yeah, that's correct, yeah.

And I'm old enough to remember the British Lawnmower Manufacturers Federation, which has got very few members now, if any.

But the EGMF is based in Europe.

What.

What's the role of it?

Is it really standards, it's liaison with government departments and so on.

It's.

It's two roles, basically.

A technical.

So you have the technical side of things and then you have the statistics side.

All manufacturers, all the major manufacturers are members of the EGMF and they're in it for two things.

One is obviously you get your data, you put data in, you get data out.

They.

They won't get involved at all with forecasting.

It's nothing to do with forecasting, but they will give you history.

And then if you want to take that history and do your own forecasting, that's up to you.

We tend to do what say we, because I pay quite a large part in the egmf, we tend to give five years figures, so you can work back.

And that's quite interesting because obviously we have the COVID years as well.

We could probably come to that a little bit later.

But when we look at the.

When we look at the figures, it gives you a fairly good idea of trends, of what's happened and a lot of manufacturers are interested in that.

But also there's the technical side.

And the technical side is just as important because people come out with.

The European Union comes out with wonderful ideas of what it wants to see in the future, and then it's the job of the technical people on the egmf, which are all made up from the manufacturers people.

So they will then go and they will Lobby the European Parliament, tell them what is possible, what isn't possible and hopefully get a good outcome for the industry that moving forward.

So it does play a vital part.

Is it all driven, Mark, now by environmental and sustainable issues?

Yeah, yeah.

Well that's the European Union's driving that way and they are pushing the manufacturers that way.

Manufacturers will go along with it.

If you've got to be environmentally, you've got to be sustainable, there are benefits for doing it.

Yeah, it's very much so driven that way.

You mentioned the COVID years.

I think I saw a graph on the EGMF site which looked extraordinary.

Surge in one year followed by a dip the other.

What happened to the market during those years because it almost defied belief.

What happened was everybody was stuck at home.

And while everybody was stuck at home, we had a brilliant spring and summer, didn't we?

We did and everybody was.

The only time you're allowed out the house was to go and clap the nurses on a Thursday afternoon, whatever it was.

So the rest of the time you were stuck in, stuck at home.

And one of the best places to be was in your garden.

So there you were and you needed your guard machinery to maintain it.

A lot of guard machinery companies that had websites and a lot of companies that did online sales did very well and you can see that by that huge lump in the sales.

Then we were hit with the following year we were hit with component shortages and then, oh, that ship tried to do a three point turn in the Suez Canal.

I think that things have leveled off now we're back to where we should be.

If you look on the graphs on, it's where you'd expect.

So that that's ironed out.

What challenges are there for the power equipment, outdoor power equipment market particularly?

There's a lot of legislation coming through in the states that states are trying to impose.

Do you look across the Atlantic and see what's happening over there and see whether or not it might well happen over here or what we get when.

We do the EGMF meetings in Brussels, we always have opei which is the American equivalent to EGMF and they report on what's happening over there.

Things over there will eventually come over here.

And there's been a seismic change in the industry with Cordless over the time.

So I think yeah, there's going to be tightening of legislation on emissions.

There's going to be lots of other things coming through.

I can see in the future and I think looking from a guard machinery dealers perspective and from where I Sit.

This is not an industry thing.

From where I sit, the dealers, when we go and visit them are saying, oh, we're going to lose out this thing about losing on service.

And because they're not doing the work on petrol engines anymore, cordless still needs work doing to it.

I think people have got to look at taking the opportunity with our batteries.

The company I work for, then you can do health checks on them.

Dealers can do these health checks.

We sell a device to the dealer.

If he's a service agent, he can clip the battery onto this.

It will give him all sorts of information.

He can then pass that on to the customer.

The customer then can make the decision whether he wants to renew his batteries or whatever and also take the opportunity.

When these machines come in, they do need a clean, guides need repairing.

They all have something like a chain or a nylon head or a blaze.

If it's a hedge trimmer, then the blades need sharpening.

Just take the opportunity to do this.

Might not take the same amount of time as a, as a petrol engine machine, but there is the opportunity there for people to do a cordless health check.

And that gives them an opportunity to make their machines go out into tip top condition for the end user for the start of the season.

Mark if it could come now back to home in the aea, the Agricultural Engineers Association.

Why trade associations?

Why do companies join a trade association?

It's strength in numbers.

If you're going to be lobbying the government and you've got a trade association behind you, then you will have specific people in that organization who specialize in certain things.

There's about four or five people now in the AEA that have different specialities and they have the contact with the government, they have the contact with the lobbyists in government as well.

And that's vital because you got to get to the right people.

That's one thing that I've learned is getting to the right person.

One big thing at the moment that we're working on is this Rural Crime Prevention Bill.

We all want to stop crime in whatever it is.

And you hear of the number of ATVs and tractors and chainsaws and everything that's being stolen at the moment.

The government's come out with the Rural Crime Prevention Bill and they've come up with some ideas.

And basically it only affects England and Wales, it doesn't affect Scotland and Northern Ireland.

It's nothing to do with the rest of Europe.

And you've got to tread a very fine line because if we do what they want us to do, it's going to increase the price of all the products that we sell.

But what we need to do.

Well, obviously if you increase the price of the products, then people outside of England and Wales will have a field day in our market.

It's trading that fine line.

It's trying to work with the government to find a way to make this happen which isn't going to impact too much on cost.

Mark.

I suppose the strength of trade association was best illustrated during COVID and when AEA and Bagma almost combined forces unofficially then to lobby government to allow agricultural dealers and many outdoor power equipment dealers to remain open and remain trading.

And I think no individual companies would been able to achieve that, would they?

No.

That's another good example of what they can achieve.

Yeah.

So now it's.

And that brings us onto Bagma as well.

Bagma now a part of the aea and I think that's a good fit.

I think a few little teething problems to start with, but I think now it's all settled down, I think Nick's doing a good job there.

And again, I think if we're looking at successes, that recently there was increased funding, wasn't there, for land based engineering apprentices, courtesy of some excellent work done by David Kirchner, which I think raised levels by something like 48%, which is extraordinary.

And perhaps the straits, the value perhaps that land based engineers are starting to be regarded in.

Yeah.

I chair the Education and Training committee for the NEA as well.

Yeah.

And David's done an absolutely fantastic job there.

And we started off with the level two apprenticeship and then that quickly became working on the level three as well.

And you're right, and the big thing is we're allowed to ladder up now as well.

So you're allowed to go from one to the other.

Which means that the training bodies that provide the apprenticeships get an awful lot of money for training these people.

But what we had to do is we had to prove that our apprenticeships were different to that of an automotive.

If you think of construction, you've got hydraulic, you've got electric, now you've got gasoline.

But what we could do was we could prove because of sprayers and milking equipment and other things like that, that there was a lot more in our apprenticeship than what there is in others.

And we had an excellent guy by the name of Dean Jones from Ifate who walked us through the process and we sat down with him, with people from TH White do the manufacturers, other dealers.

We had some big meetings and Dean From Ifait said he'd never had meetings like this where so many people were engaged and wanted to be part of it.

And.

Yeah, so it was taken up.

That apprenticeship is brilliant.

And if you looked at an automotive apprenticeship, then we're over double the amount of money for the same sort of period of time.

Just going back to the.

I call it the merger of AEA and Bagma.

It wasn't quite a merger.

AEA actually bought Bagma and of course the AEA represents its members, its manufacturers and suppliers and Bagma represents the dealers.

You referent teething problems.

But if.

What happens if Bagma, on behalf of its members, as a policy issue with a supplier who happens to be a member of the aea, are there conflicts of interest or do you tackle it internally and try and sort it out or what happens?

It's treated as two separate organizations.

Bagma isn't in on the AEA meetings.

They're treated very much as a separate part of the aea.

Bit like the milk marketing side of it as well.

There's no dealing through the aea.

The dealing of the manufacturers is done direct with the dealer, not through the aa.

So I can't see what come up.

Yeah, yeah.

And I only reference that because a number of dealers were very unhappy with a policy decision by a manufacturer recently and who would have been a member of aea.

And I just wonder whether or not there are any conflicts of interests or whether the thing just takes its natural course in a way.

No, I don't think that's an individual level.

It's not at a level where I think it's.

Yeah.

And it's also very noticeable, Mark, from recent missives I've seen from Bagma, that they are ramping up the number of benefits being offered to Bagma members, which is always something people ask, why should I join a trade association?

And of course, the more benefits you can provide to them.

And there certainly has been a very obvious ramping up of an availability of benefits in recent months.

Are those benefits automatically available to AEA members or is there a certain amount of cherry picking going on?

No, the benefits that are coming to Bankma are from the likes of Troy, because obviously Bankma were owned by Bira before and they used to get Bira bank and things like that.

So there were.

There was all sorts of offerings they used to get and when they came over to the aea, they wouldn't have been getting that.

So they had to look at other things to do.

Yeah, the AEA went out and helped with Some of the experiences that they had with the likes of Bagma generally.

Within the association with AEA and Bagma and of course I agree through Litech, which I can't remember what it all stands for but we know that it is the sort of promotion body for the industry that with the we are engineering.

How's that going internally?

Are you pleased with the progress?

We are Land based is brilliant.

Gareth Ford at the AA is doing another fantastic job and that's getting we are Land Based into schools.

This is trying to.

The whole idea of this is to try and get everything to link up.

You go to a lot of schools and they don't realize where the food on their plate comes from half the time.

So we are Land based is a good vehicle for getting this in front of schools.

And we've gone out to most schools in the country with this now and we've offered them, all of them presentations and the people to go and be there.

And we've been very successful with it.

And this is basically, it's a good tool to get somebody interested and even the staff of the schools to say, look, there's this career path that maybe you're not thinking about and it's great.

And yeah, I, I think the whole thing is in the education thing is fantastic because it's like everywhere you go there's a shortage of engineers and our industry, whether it's a guard machinery dealer or an agricultural dealer, they're all screaming out for engineers.

And the more people we can get into this then the better.

And I think land based is land based engineering or we are land based is the way to start sowing the seed in people.

And are you seeing practical results from that already?

It's examples of where pupils heads have been turned towards land based engineering.

Yeah.

On the AEA website you can go on there and you can click on and there's a link to take you through to explain everything.

We've been into some of the colleges and we've had students already coming up and saying where can I go to be trained in this?

What can I do?

And I do know a couple of dealers that have taken people on and going to be putting them through their apprenticeships.

And this is important, isn't it, Mark?

Because traditionally, particularly in agriculture, the source of new staff, new blood often came through the farming community and that has gradually disappeared or dissipated over the years.

And so we need.

Or the industry needs to get to new audiences.

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

This is making a big difference on that.

I think I'm really Optimistic on it.

I think it's a cracking way forward.

Good, excellent.

And what would you.

You've got a year term, haven't you, as president and what would you like to achieve during your term of office?

It's.

I understand that it's a team effort.

It's a team effort and nothing happens really quickly.

The apprenticeship thing has been going on for four or five years.

The 150th anniversary is probably into its third year now.

So we are land based is probably four or five years since the initial concept.

So these things are always rolling along and doing that.

So yeah, I'd love to stand up at the conference and say this year I've achieved.

Yeah.

But like I say, it's a team effort and being president is really good because it's a great team of people on the board.

Yeah.

From, from the likes of David Withers that I see key David Hart at Kubota and then you've got John at Kuhn and yeah, there's Chris Mecocke at John Deere.

It's a great bunch of people all giving their time up to.

For the industry to try and make the industry better.

And yeah, it's, it's a good, good place to be.

Look, Mark, I find this absolutely fascinating and, and it proves once again there is often no defined route into outdoor power equipment or the land based engineering.

And most people I speak to have come in through very unusual routes and long may that be the case.

And finally, away from the presidency of the AEA and Makita and so on.

Marco, goals.

What when you're not working and.

And so on.

What sort of pastimes or hobbies have you got?

I am a trustee of Warwickshire Scout association and we just.

I've just built a 4.2 million pound Scout facility in Kenilworth and I say I haven't.

I've no good with the trowel but I've been the chairman of the committee that has been responsible for that.

Hobbies, I do a bit of shooting and I've fly a few drones.

I've got a few bits of that.

So a bit of photography as well.

So never a dull moment then for you?

Never a dull moment.

And if you're going out to eat or eating at home, what sort of food do you tend to go for?

I'm trying to be healthy, so I should say salad.

But I do Chinese and Japanese food.

Yeah.

And that's good.

Oh, that's a nod to your employer, presumably.

Yeah.

Probably 30 years ago.

Backwards and forwards to China.

And Japan.

But.

Yeah.

And do you get a chance to go to films or listen to music?

Any interests there?

I like a good action film music.

I'm quite eclectic on.

I've got.

If you were to look at.

I do have a.

An iPad and I've got a.

Yeah.

A list on there and it can be anything from Bruce Springsteen to the Killers to Rag and Bone man to it's if I like it and that's it.

It's.

Yeah.

Nothing wrong with all those.

When you get away.

Able to get away holidays and that sort of thing.

Is there a favorite destination?

I love Italy.

I do like Italy and I do spend a lot of time in the uk.

So I do Northumberland and we go up there.

I love the wildlife up there and I do Cornwall and I spend an awful lot of time in the North Cornish coast.

So that's an easy getaway.

Yeah, yeah.

And.

And lastly, is there any sort of motto that you jump out of bed each morning and.

And say this will help get me through the day?

I had one person say to me once, try and make a difference.

And if you can make a difference to somebody's life in a positive way then you're doing a good thing.

Indeed.

And I suppose that that comes partly through your scouting involvement.

Yeah.

But partly through.

That was an engineering.

Is an engineer that actually told me and actually speaking to him and he said as an engineer he said if you can make somebody's life better from your actions then you can go to bed happy at night.

That's a lovely place to stop.

I think.

Mark, I found this absolutely intriguing and fascinating and thank you so much.

It really is a pleasure for me to hear all these stories from different people because it's such a diverse industry and such interesting and inspirational people.

Thank you very much for your time today.

Best of luck in your rest of your term as president of the aa.

Thank you.

You know, I really don't know how you can pigeonhole the characters and the community that makes the land based engineering industry tick.

If these series of interviews prove anything is that so many go on to make a real impact in an industry that may not have been on their radar initially.

And in the next issue, I'll be delighted to be talking to David Kirchner who Mark referenced about his long career in the industry and his valuable contribution to the enhancement and reputation and indeed future for apprenticeships.

I'm Chris Biddle.

Thank.

Thank you for joining me.

And this is Inside Agriturf.