By Jim Brown

IF YOU live and farm in Scotland, there is one aspect that seems to dominate our farming lives – the weather.

When we farmers meet, whether it is person to person or on the phone, we always seem to start the conversation by talking about the weather.

So, briefly this month, I am going to tell my East coast friends that June was not the wettest in history at 4.75” of rain. In the past 30 plus years, our wettest June was in 2012 at 6.5”. 

However, I am not surprised about this fact that since the start of June we have been having this continual broken weather and sadly I am expecting it to continue because we left behind the driest winter on record. So, it has to average out sometime as it has in the past, with very few exceptions.

It is history now, but I cannot fail to mention our very successful Highland Show, which was really very lucky with the weather, with a slight hiccup when Saturday was a bit cold and windy. From a cattle aspect, there were a few highlights. One was the substantial increase in dairy cattle numbers and the enhanced ringside that watched the judging, which must be due in some part to the improved financial aspect of producing milk. 

I am well aware it is not yet wonderful by any means, but hopefully it has turned the corner for a more sustainable future. Having said that, I am afraid the number of milk producers will continue to decline and in a relatively short time Scotland will have less than 900 farms milking cows.

The reason is simple. The profitability of the sector has to improve significantly before it is attractive enough for a turn-around in the number of dairy herds. 

Those that are going to stay in the game will get larger. They then face a new challenge after the EU divorce. I am told that at this point in time, if all the non-Scottish born people currently milking cows went back home, 65% of the cows would not be milked the next day. Now realistically that is not going to happen, but we have to accept that the dairy sector is as vulnerable as are many others, such as fruit and vegetable growers for example who rely on European labour to get the work done. 

The Aberdeen Angus Forum brought many enthusiasts from all over the world, and large numbers of cattle, with another highlight being an excellent supreme heifer. What a pity we could not see more like her, with length of top and a big enough rear end! From a commercial aspect I, as a feeder find it very difficult to find enough of the right kind. Steers are easier to come by. 

Back to Ingliston – I believe there were a few empty stand spaces, particularly in the machinery lines. Was that due to the high cost of exhibiting at the Highland, especially when margins are so tight in almost every sector of our industry? Having said that, virtually every fellow farmer I spoke to remarked how different a shape our industry was in compared to 12 months ago, for which the currency change is really responsible. 

As this column has said many times, currency, for a long time, has played a large part in whether we have margins or not, followed closely by supply and demand. As always, the Highland is a great annual meeting place for like-minded people. We work and socialise from the length and breadth of our country. Most of us know someone in every corner who is farming in Scotland and are often brought together at the Highland.

Last weekend, July 7 and 8, saw the Fellows and Associates of the Royal Agricultural societies meet for their summer outing in Northumberland for which the highlight was a visit to Lilburn Estate, near Wooler, where some 50 of us were captivated by the enthusiasm, knowledge and frankness of the estate manager, Dominic Naylor, who is a real ambassador for our industry, farming 12,000 acres, plus 6000 moorland for grouse, carrying 9000 breeding ewes, 2000 Stabilizer cows and 2500 acres of arable crops. 

An extended Saturday morning that stretched until 2pm was not long enough to see and hear all that was going on with this immaculately kept and managed, very large farming enterprise. 
This column has mentioned before about the place I feel the Stabilizer has to play in the future of beef production in this country. Lilburn Estate clearly demonstrated that value again last week – uniformity, docility, fertility, calving ease. 

Dominic kept all bulls entire and finished them off the farm, with the heifers either kept as replacements or sold on for breeding, with only a few going into the finishing unit for slaughter. Thanks to the gift of Dominic Naylor, ‘outstanding’ was the only word to describe our visit.
Farm visits have been part of my farming life, not only to see others, which helped me to learn a lot from this very open industry when I first started farming, but also here at home where we have hosted visits from the mid 1960’s, having installed one of the early self-feed silage set-ups, cubicles and herring-bone milking parlours.

Grassland experiments with three great West of Scotland College experts in Dr John Frame, Dr Malcolm Castle, and IV Hunt led to Grassland Society visits. 

The introduction of Holsteins in 1972 and Simmentals from Germany in the same year brought Canadian and Holstein parties. Involvement in agri-politics for over 20 years, our change in policy to a beef finishing unit and this column, obviously encouraged people to want to see if what I wrote was true. Over that 50 plus years we reckon we must have hosted around 20,000 visitors, so I hope some of them either learned to do, or not to do, something.

One way and another over the recent past I have covered a fair area of Scotland and I have to admit I am somewhat puzzled at the large acreages of land that do not seem to be in production, or at best, badly farmed. Is it because of the area based support system or is it because there is no margin to be found by farming it? 

We are told that our country is only 60% self-sufficient in food. I do accept that there are some foods we consume that we cannot grow in Scotland. If it is the case that we cannot grow crops or grass on these acres to turn into food, is there a case then, for planting trees? 

It seems to me that we are cutting down more timber than we are re-planting which means that, with all the various uses that timber has today, we are going to run out of wood in the not too distant future. This begs the question, is there a place in the new reformed CAP, when we exit the EU, for some form of encouragement to support tree planting?

That leads me on to the airy-fairy suggestions about future support for food production, or the alternative of no support. If you read David Gray’s article in The SF of July 15, you will know that David and his daughter Heather make it abundantly clear what would happen to a vast acreage of Scotland if there was no food production support. This begs the question, is this current support on an area-based system the wrong way to support food production?

My view is crystal clear. If we are to have some kind of support then it should go back to a production-led system, instead of throwing money at vast tracts of land for either doing very little or absolutely nothing.