ravenex, there is very little crop spraying in the UK, it died off in the Eighties with the advent of dedicated slim wheeled (to flatten less crops) spayers. What there is doesn't keep all the ag experienced chaps flying.
I'm based at a former ag strip and have met some of the pilots who were based there. Some of them still do some ag flying but it's also interspersed with CAA air tests, ferrying, air-taxiing etc. A couple fly corporate jets and one is a 74 captain. As these chaps are around my age (45) and have shelves full of log books, I'm not going to spend thousands of pounds to become an inexperienced ATPL and slide into the bottom of a deep experience pool when it's taken me until now to get closer to the surface of my current pond! After all, if I did get an ATPL within 2 years I would only have 13 years to offer a potential airline employer or I'd have to go contracting in an industry that I am very unfamiliar with.
However, I did seriously think about it until quite recently and received a lot of positive encouragement from fellow Ppruners. At the moment though I'm quite happy poodling around in my Auster and servicing my mortgage. Boring I know and probably quite negative but that's the way it is at the moment.
