Skills and labour shortages remain major issues for farming, says Corrienne Peasgood, principal of Easton College and chairman of the New Anglia Local Enterprise Partnership's (LEP's) agri-food sector council.

There’s no doubt that these are challenging times for our farmers. The agri-food sector is under pressure from several different directions including labour shortages, rising input and energy costs and broader economic uncertainty.

Alongside all this, there are real concerns about creating the skilled workforce that the sector needs to secure its future and to feed the country.

This is where the partnership between the industry, the New Anglia LEP and the education sector, which comes together in the Agri-Food Industry Council, is vital for the future of our farmers, our rural economy, and our environment.

We’ve seen headlines about labour shortages across the sector, in all areas of the food chain – primary agriculture, especially seasonal picking roles, meat and poultry processing, and across the logistics sector.

The LEP is lobbying hard on issues such as an enhanced Seasonal Workers Pilot scheme which gives foreign workers a guaranteed offer of sustained work.

Against this background of challenge and change, the role of further and higher education has never been more important.

At Easton College, Norfolk’s home for land-based learning, we are responding with a new approach to the skills needs of the agri-business sector. We’ve taken big strides in the quality of our teaching and learning over the past 18 months and we’re updating our curriculum to address cutting-edge developments like controlled environment farming, automation, and robotics.

We are in constant dialogue with farmers through bodies such as the New Anglia Agri-food Skills Group, Norfolk NFU, and the Royal Norfolk Agricultural Association to make sure that we can deliver the workforce we’ll need for the future.

We’ve got a long way to go, but I’m confident we’re heading in the direction that our industry partners need.

Meanwhile, more than one in seven of the workforce across Norfolk and Suffolk are employed in the agri-food sector so it’s vital that we work together to find the right solutions.

We need a skilled workforce and we’re working hard to deliver that with the sector.

But without effective policy and support from across government, we will not be able to deliver the needs of the UK nor capitalise on the vision for "global Britain".

The challenges are clear – we’re playing our part and I hope the government can respond too.