Concentrating on the positives!

Well, no matter which sector you look at, it’s a bit of a challenge to find something cheery to say about Scottish agriculture at the moment.

The plight of cattle keepers and the problems they’re facing with straw and fodder shortages were given the headline treatment last week as the report produced for the Scottish Government revealed that the current price of straw means the sector is having to fork out an additional £5m in bedding alone for every extra week cattle are housed.

And, as it’s lambing time, it’s nigh on impossible to find anything to say which would put a smile on the bleary-eyed, stubble-chinned face of a sleep-deprived sheep farmer even in a normal year – so in one like this it’s probably best to not even try.

The fact that last year’s long dreich summer continued on the same vein through one of the most protracted harvests for many years meant it wasn’t easy to find an awful lot of cheer for the cropping sector last back-end either.

Luckily, though, arable farmers tend to have short memories – and come this time of year, there’s usually at least some sign of hope out there in the cropping sector.

And, as the sap begins to rise and seed beds dry out, the springtime burst of blind optimism generally manages to sweep us up in its arms – and carry us along once again in the misplaced belief that this year we’ll nail it.

But this spring seems a bit different – and in machinery sheds and empty grain stores around the country, I’m pretty sure that seeders will have been calibrated, greased, oiled and tweaked, while satellite guidance systems will have been honed to within an inch (or some decimal point of a centimetre) of their lives – while tracks and dual wheels will have been fitted to tractors, removed and then refitted.

But, sadly, as we approach the middle of April, very little grain has actually been sown.

So you’ve kinda got to admire grain growers in this country for their stoicism – the ability to endure these hardships without any of the emotional display of feelings which seem to be so much in fashion these days – and without much in the way of any extravagant or flamboyant display of public complaint over their predicament.

Now don’t get me wrong because, as Bertie Wooster once said of a Scotsman with a grudge, you probably wouldn’t go mistaking many arable farmers for a ray of sunshine at the moment.

But while dark mutterings and 'never known the like' are undoubtedly the order of the day as growers meet and compare rain gauge readings, they have so far steadfastly steered away from sensational headline-seeking.

Just as seed-rates are recalculated to take account of the likelihood of reduced tillering, planned fertiliser rates on spring barley cut back to keep down nitrogen levels in malting crops, spray programmes for winter crops amended and entire cropping plans re-jigged to try to ameliorate the effects of late sowing – the majority of these damage limitation exercises are taking place privately, behind closed doors as growers search for strategies to cope.

But with the economics of grain-growing balanced on a bit of a knife edge even in a good year, you might ask if starting off with the likelihood of a built in yield disadvantage might actually focus the industry’s mind on where cops should be grown.

That's because for many years we have all worked with the underlying assumption that every acre and every last square yard – with the exception of what is needed to meet greening and other requirements – has to be cropped in order to squeeze as much grain out of our land as possible.

Clearly, high rents – especially for cropping leases – have underwritten this assumption and driven such a blanket approach.

But a study produced recently by one of the country’s big agricultural consultancy groups highlighted the fact that, due to variations in the productive capacity of our land, on many of the more marginal parts the cost of actually growing the grain is often higher than the returns from its sale.

Radical thought here: It points out that those areas which repeatedly show lower yields are likely not only to be making a loss, but pulling down the overall performance of the land which is capable of producing good returns.

Indeed, the report suggested that up to 40% of land on farms was regularly producing wheat at an insufficient yield level to cover its growing costs.

Even more worrying for areas such as Scotland, for other crops this figure could be as high as 60% of the land – placing a huge handicap on the areas which are able to wash their faces.

So, the report concluded that with a number of years' worth of yield data and a knowledge of the land, the assumption that all areas should inevitably be cropped should be dumped – and the issue looked at dispassionately.

Armed with the sort of information on yields and productive capacity which we can get with current technology, it would be possible to knowingly commit to using only the parts of the farm which would produce sufficient yield to cover the actual costs of growing the crops.

But while this revolutionary suggestion of a u-turn on the maxim of pushing every acre to it limits might seem quite surprising coming from the wider advisory and consultancy sector which has, after all, probably played a big part in encouraging us down the production maximising route in the past, I’m pretty sure that it’s something most farmers have actually been doing for quite some time.

While we all bemoan the greening regulations, complain about having to leave a couple of metres uncultivated alongside a hedge or burn and in the not too distant past have been highly critical of the need for set-aside, we have probably all been using these tools – perhaps unwittingly – to focus our efforts on the areas of the farm which have been up to providing a return on that investment.

Going back even further, our forefathers did exactly the same. While their calculations probably weren’t based on a years of computerised yield mapping, they were centred on generations of experience of which bits of the farm could be profitably cropped – and which were best put down to grazing or other enterprises.

Of course, it might be possible to address some of the problem areas with some capital expenditure– and drainage might provide a solution in some yield-limited areas and rabbit fencing or tree-felling on others – but again it would be crucial to make sure that any improvements in yield would outweigh the significant costs incurred by such work.

However, part of the challenge for the industry will be to understand yield variation within farms and individual fields and to use this information to set up businesses in a way which can increase profit.

But what might well be a bigger challenge will be changing our mindset and realising that less is sometimes more. For, while it’s easy to listen to the voice of logic as the fields lie sodden, it’s likely to be a different story when the sun does eventually begin to shine and the driller is kicking up dust behind the tractor …