There is an old saying in my part of the world that “nothing much grows in the shade of a big tree.” People say it when talking about how the sons and daughters of some big-shot farmer are “no good.” The meaning is that the father was so dominant and held on to everything for so long that the next generation didn’t grow as big as it might have.

Any such comment is cruel, but that does not make it untrue.

I know a little about this saying because I grew up in the shadow of such a man, my granddad.

My granddad ruled our farm and our lives like some biblical patriarch. He was an impressive and charming character whom people liked and respected. And he was one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met. He called me his squire. He taught me how to buy and sell sheep and cattle, how to do business with other farmers, and how to manage our reputation so folk trusted and liked us, because such things matter in a small farming community. And he took me with him around the fields as the blue-eyed prince who would inherit his kingdom. I did end up farming his land and I definitely inherited some pride from him as well. His grandfather (my great-great-grandfather) had been a man who had made a lot of money and was respected locally.

I knew I wasn’t the best soccer player at school, or even the most book smart in my class, but I could imagine being this kind of smart, field smart. So, I modeled myself on him.

A few years ago I called nearly all the shots on the farm. I was tougher, harder, and more industrious than almost everyone else I knew, and I dragged my family along with me to get things done. And it worked, because being hard often does work – we got the farm, we created our flock and our herd of cattle, and I worked through the nights to write two bestselling books.

But something changed in me in the past decade: I lost interest in being that kind of patriarch. In fact, I began to actively dislike such men when I met them.

Part of this was because after my grandfather’s death, thirty years ago, I had watched my father become the farmer and head of our family, and I came to admire him for becoming much more than his father had allowed him to be. Just as an oak tree crowds out its own saplings from the light, making them stunted dwarf trees, so too can humans shrink their children’s spirits if they overshadow them and deny them experiences that allow them to grow.

As you get older you realize that your heroes have feet of clay. I came to see that my grandfather wasn’t much of a husband, and not the best of fathers. My wife and children deserved better than that.

We have four children. They all help on the farm, but our second daughter, Bea, is the keenest young farmer at the moment. She has grown up helping me with chores on the farm, starting when she was three or four years old. She’s a smart, loyal, and hard-working kid who wants to work on the farm among the cattle and sheep, and who cares about our land. I’ve tried to teach her everything I know. I’ve not met many youngsters who know so much already or are as capable. And because I’ve been learning a heap about soil and ecology in the past decade, she’s learned a lot of that too, alongside me.

There have been two effects of this learning for me. The first is the realization that many of the old men I looked up to didn’t know a damn thing about soil health, photosynthesis, or ecology.

Farmers retiring now have spent their whole working life in the conventional farming model that emerged after World War II, a model that relied on chemicals, drugs, and mechanical solutions. We know why they did those things, and can sympathize. But many of us aren’t going to do them anymore now that we know their ill effects.

Some farmers were smart enough to see the flaws in those systems, but many still hold on tight to the notion that farming intelligence ended in about 1995, and that there’s nothing worth knowing after that. I have great respect for the elderly, but I’ve heard enough terrible arguments from old men to cure me of any illusions about all of them being wise. If anything, they are getting in the way of the youngsters on many farms, keeping them from applying new science and implementing change. The older you get the more you have invested in the status quo – your whole identity is often wrapped up in the way you farm. Who’s big enough to admit they were wrong their whole life?

I’ve had to learn a heap of painful lessons about the limits of my knowledge in the past few years and face up to how many things I was simply wrong about. I saw an old photo the other day of our farm with the sheep grazing, and it was an image of truly terrible overgrazing, every blade nibbled to the soil, unpalatable weeds breaking through everywhere, and the fields looking yellow and the sheep sick.

But there is something else. That girl of mine is going to start her farming life knowing more good stuff than I knew when I was forty years old.

That’s exciting to me. I’ve taken her with me to see some of the best farmers in the world. And because I happen to write books, we get a procession of smart people from around the world coming to see our farm. My kids have grown up listening to them talking about soil biology, adaptive multi-paddock grazing, and breeding strategies for functional cattle and sheep. Sometimes now I just listen as the kids swap notes with people at our kitchen table about these things. Recently Dr. Allen Williams, an early pioneer of regenerative grazing, visited, and the whole family got to asking him questions about grazing strategies and cell shapes and other technicalities.

Somewhere along the way I’ve stopped thinking this farm is about me. I’ve realized that’s limiting and small-minded. I’m not in competition with my children for power – I want to help them get started, help them become smart learners, and let them start making the life and business decisions that you learn from, because nothing teaches you like making mistakes. We are now learning together, and it’s the coolest thing I’ve ever experienced.

A few weeks ago, my daughter joined the payroll. Technically she is an apprentice. She has left school and goes one day a week to college to study agriculture.

On the good days we work as a team, I teach her the things I know as we work, and she soaks it up. Occasionally we fall out and have frank exchanges of views and butt heads a little. On one particularly bad day I told her she was fired, and later had to apologize for losing my temper – regular father-daughter stuff.

We spent the summer and autumn working on our first crop of bulls to sell. A few years ago, we moved into keeping a new breed, Belted Galloways. We invested in quality female genetics from some of the top herds, but it has taken a while to breed anything good enough for the society sales, not least the main sale at Castle Douglas. I’m a little lacking in cow prep skills, after years of being only a sheep man. My daughter perhaps sensed this and went last year to spend some time with Helen Ryman, a top cattlewoman with a wonderful old herd on the west coast of Scotland.

Helen was incredibly generous in taking Bea under her wing and being a mentor. Bea stayed in her home and worked with her for a week before they took cattle to the Highland Show.

Since then, Bea has taken the lead in our cattle work. Her knowledge of halter knots, combing, washing, drying, and walking is better than mine, and I tend to do what she says. Several times a week we get the bulls in, tie them up, and spend time grooming and washing them, getting them to trust us so they walk quietly on their halters. We went to the Highland Show with three of our own cattle last summer and Bea learned a lot from watching the other exhibitors, many of whom also shared their knowledge. But the show ended without much success. It was a little dispiriting, despite receiving some compliments for our cattle. We learned a lot, though, about the condition needed for showing and the timing of the different stages of preparation. We told ourselves we would raise our game for the autumn bull sales.

This past October we took our first bull with some nervousness. The Highland Show had done us a favor by humbling us a little and making us work harder, so our expectations were quite modest. Once we had him tied in his pen, though, washed and blow-dried, I went for a walk down the lines to see everyone else’s cattle and got a pleasant surprise. We were not only competitive, but we actually seemed to have turned him out looking like one of the better bulls in the sale. When the established breeders said we had done our job well, they clearly meant it.

The next morning was the presale show and after an hour or two of combing and making him sparkle, we took him to the showing shed. Bea led him in, a not very big eighteen-year-old kid gliding in with a one-ton bull alongside her shoulder. When I got to the gate, she told me to stand back, she had it covered. The stewards closed the gate and the crowd swelled behind it. I had to stand on tiptoes to see what was happening.

Somewhere in my head I had assumed I was still needed here, at the very least to follow behind with the show stick and give the bull little prods and pats to keep him moving. But I could see Bea neither needed nor wanted any of that. For the first time since I was a child, I wasn’t at the heart of the action.

Bea walked the bull like a pro, stood him when the judge wanted him in a certain place, and then walked him away to demonstrate his locomotion. After a minute or two the judge gestured to Bea to pull the bull into the first-place area, and then his second pick below her, and on down the line. After a minute or two of final checks, he handed Bea a first-prize rosette, and the crowd clapped. She beamed with the widest teenage smile I’ve ever seen. The other competitors, some of whom were also young, leaned out while holding their bulls to shake her hand. And I was leaping around behind the crowds feeling ecstatic, taking a congratulatory handshake or two from other farmers.

After the show the buyers flooded to our pen, and it felt like we had a hot piece of bovine property. Later in the day it was our turn in the auction to sell him. Bea walked him steadily around the ring and the bids kept coming. He flew to $32,000, matching the breed record. Again, I was more or less a passenger, standing by the rostrum. Our wildest dreams had been exceeded, and we had laid down a marker in the breed, one we will have to live up to in the coming years.

But there was something magic about the sale beyond the high prices and the pride. Several of the leading prices were secured by family farms like ours, with teenaged or twenty-something stockmen and women. There is a narrative that farmers are aging, and maybe that’s what the statistics show, but it’s not true in any meaningful sense. All my children are invested in the farm, and they have many friends and peers doing the same.

I no longer want to be the kind of patriarch my grandfather was. I don’t need, or want, to rule my world like that. I have finally come to see such authority as limiting and more than a little selfish. It is retained only by being clutched tight and denied to others, and it makes everyone around the patriarch smaller and less fulfilled.

A little late I’ve learned that the wise empower those around them, giving away their knowledge and authority to make the next generation more effective.

Watching Bea lead that bull around the sale ring, I knew that something had changed. She still loves her dad, and can still learn more tricks from me, but I now know that if I were to pass away, she would be just fine, and so would my other kids. They know how to work hard, how to deal with other people, and how to advance toward goals of their choosing. They know how to be classy and kind.

I hope I live for decades more, but I already have a certain peace of mind knowing this. I imagine my own father, dying of cancer, felt something similar when he saw that his children all had jobs, partners, and children and could navigate the world. I hope he did.

The day after the sale my daughter posted some proud pictures of the bull and its very classy handler in their moment of glory.

Who could blame her? That day was a dream for a farm kid seeking to show the world she was serious about being a farmer.

Among those social media posts was a selfie of her and me leaning over the bull, and she had written that the best thing about the day was doing it all with her best friend – and she meant me.

You can rule a family, or even a country, with fear, but to me that seems a pitiful kind of authority. When we lift up the people around us, below us, and younger than us, we build a whole that is greater than what was there previously. We are growing true wealth: happier and healthier humans and a community around us that is full of love. What other wealth is there that means anything?