FARMERS have been encouraged to leave their fields and spend some time shopping.

David Bolton, chairman of Andersons Farm Business Consultants, said they could find it very worthwhile.

"Shopping is very educational for farmers because they can see what people are doing with the materials they produce," he said.

Farmers must be prepared to change, said Mr Bolton. Lack of change could be fatal.

They must work together, with other industry partners and know their customers - two main customers today were the public and the Government, in the shape of Defra.

Agriculture was having "tricky relations" with Margaret Beckett, Defra Secretary of State. She should be recognised as a very demanding customer who was very intelligent and very powerful.

Mr Bolton was addressing last week's annual ARC/HGCA Arable Outlook conference at the Ramside Hall Hotel, Durham.

"The concept of communications between farmers and industry partners is more and more important," he said.

Mr Bolton said that, in 1995-96, total farm income was £6bn; today it was £2bn. He believed, however, that agriculture had always been under pressure.

In 1871 it employed 1.32m people; by 1931 that had dropped to 840,000 and in 2001 it was down to 357,000. At the same time, yields had risen dramatically. In 1975, wheat yields averaged five tonnes a hectare but last year that had doubled to 10.75t/ha.

"And we wonder why prices have gone down, farmer numbers have been reduced and pressure to change increased," he said.

Change was happening very rapidly which caused a lot of the difficulty: "So I suggest you need to be significantly smarter in the way you perform to be sustainable."

Tomorrow's arable farmers would need to be more co-operative and he put forward 11 ideas to be considered.

These included an interchange of labour and machinery; a genuine joint venture for a specific period or task. He cited his own example where two farms pooled their combines and harvested each other's crops together to make the operation speedier and more efficient.

Other ideas for consideration included share farming; machinery rings; marketing groups; agronomy groups, and training groups.

"I believe today's arable farmers do have opportunities, but please recognise change and please recognise the custome," said Mr Bolton.

He appealed to them to drive away any sacred cows which could hamper that change.