Nyale’s programme aims to overturn that way of thinking. More than 80% of Kenya’s population is under 35, and in 2018 nearly one in four young people were unemployed. Sustainably growing high-value crops is one route out of unemployment.

Thousands of young people are now learning to grow crops like French beans, mangetouts, kale, tomatoes and cabbages, through the Growing Futures programme. Each participant’s move into farming starts with the Growing Futures demonstration plot. The programme provides each person with seeds and fertiliser, and teaches them how to care for several different crops.

Then the participants choose a crop to focus on, after first receiving training on the market value and economics of growing the different plants. Joseph Kiplagat, of Chemioset village in Trans-Nzoia County and a participant in Growing Futures, grows a few crops, including tomatoes and cabbages. But the big earner is French beans.

“When dealing with French beans, we start with ploughing the land,” says Kiplagat. “We replough the land to make the soil fine. Then we do furrowing to help with irrigation. Then we irrigate. The following day, we plant.”

It is a precise and demanding process, but one that gets results. “I use the money in taking my children to school and buying food. My nutrition is better than it was before,” says Kiplagat. From the proceeds, he has also been able to buy a piece of land to expand his business. “My wife is happy. After doing this project, we have money, we can meet all the requirements in the family.”

As well as learning the practical skills for farming and the business side of the programme, the farmers are introduced to buyers to ensure there is a home for their produce when it is ready to sell.

“The youth need quick money,” says Nyale. “If you don’t show them where they’ll get the money before they plant, then they feel like they’re being misled.”

Since the project began in 2011, more than 4,000 young people have graduated from it. By the end of their time in the programme, many are keen to start up their own plots and start selling into the market.

Fixing agriculture’s image problem is one challenge. But once young people are interested in farming, they still have to get access to the land to do it.

“Young people in Kenya don’t own any assets,” says Nyale. “It’s the older generation, 45-plus, who are capable of buying land and having some kind of capital to invest.”

It would be unusual for an 18-year-old who is getting into the job market to have the finances to make that kind of investment. Only those whose families who can give or cheaply lease them land have a realistic opportunity to start up their own farm.

For the rest, there is ordinarily little hope of starting a profitable business. Here, too, is where Nyale’s programme aims to improve young farmers’ prospects.

“We have to convince the older generation to give the youth some land to farm,” says Nyale.

When established farmers see through the demonstration plot that the younger farmers have aptitude and interest in farming, they are more likely to provide land, Nyale says. The exchange can benefit both sides – as more young farmers enter agriculture, they are creating a market of people who may want to rent land from more established farmers in future. The young farmers, in turn, get access to otherwise expensive land for growing.

The results have been positive. The average income per farmer has increased by 50%, from 22,057 Kenyan shillings (£167;$219) in 2016 to 32,968 Kenyan shillings (£251;$327) in 2018.

With these problems of land rights, succession and the price of land shunting young people away from farming, many forecasts of the future of the agricultural workforce are bleak. But taking a more fine-grained look at the data shows there are several reasons to be hopeful.

“The rhetoric is that we’re not going to have farmers in 15 years because the older generation is gone and no one new is coming in. But I don’t think that’s accurate at all,” says Lee-Ann Sutherland, a researcher at the Social, Economic and Geographical Sciences Group at the James Hutton Institute in Scotland.

There are two main reasons for that. The first is that the headline figures often conceal farms that do have successors clearly marked out. A farmer in their 40s, for example, might have a child who they plan to their farm on to, but who wouldn’t show up as a farm labourer in a survey.

On paper it might look like that farm has no certain future, as Sutherland found in a study of young farmers in Scotland, but in fact there is a likely successor. If, that is, the parent can persuade their child to stay and work the land when they grow up, rather than seeking a life in the big city. So, while there is a problem with ageing in farming, many analyses make it seem worse than it actually is.

A closer look at the statistics reveals another way the nature of the farming workforce is changing. The industry is moving away from a culture that sees only a certain type of person as fit to farm.

“The whole demographic of farming tends to be male dominated,” says Sutherland. “But the new people in farming are more likely to be women.”

Of new entrants to farming – people who don’t have a family background in it and haven’t grown up on a farm – around one third are women. “That’s way above average,” says Sutherland.

This isn’t because there’s been a concerted effort to get young women into farming, but rather they are not being so actively “socialised out” of farming, says Sutherland. Anecdotally, the tendency to farms down the male line is also decreasing, she says, opening up the option to girls in farming families.

“Society is becoming more egalitarian generally, so more people can think farming a really interesting career or lifestyle choice,” says Sutherland. “It’s rebalancing the historic trend.”

Even with an enthusiastic younger generation of farmers, it may not be enough to fill the growing gap left by older farmers. Technological solutions are also likely to have a part to play.

“The average size of farms is going up and they are becoming increasingly mechanised,” says Sutherland. “So, do you need as many farmers?”

In Japan, where there is a pronounced issue with an ageing population, young farmers are particularly few and far between. But in Yamamoto-cho, on the east coast of Japan, Hiroki Iwasa, an IT engineer in his early forties, is pioneering a new way of farming that has more appeal to younger people.

“Yamamoto-cho, famous for its perfect climate for strawberries, was devastated in 2011 by the country’s tsunami and earthquake. The fact that the average age of a farmer in Japan is 67, the highest in the world, only added to the difficulties in recovering from the disaster.

“When the tsunami hit the town in 2011, 12,000 people died and 129 strawberry farms were flooded and destroyed,” says Iwasa. “I decided I wanted to revitalise and reconstruct this area.”

With little farming knowledge, Iwasa put his tech expertise to use instead, creating greenhouses run not by farmhands, but by computers. Automated systems regulate the growing environment to precise optimum conditions, controlling everything down to the humidity, carbon dioxide, nutrients, water and temperature.

The result is that a single strawberry can fetch up to 1,000 yen (£7; $9), sold to high-end shops in the cities, in Japan and abroad. Iwasa employs 100 people, offering them better benefits and work-life balance than many traditional farms, he says.