By Jim Walker

All the cattle have been in for well over a month now and despite some very warm, muggy weather when the first batches were housed in September, they have been settled down very well. 

Calves have been treated for worms, lice, vaccinated for pneumonia and cows have been treated for fluke and worms and vaccinated for BVD.

Throw in a TB test, clipping every calf and the foot trimmers appearing to trim every foot of every cow and bull on the place, this has meant that there are not many days that something isn’t being put through a handling system on one of our units. 

As every calf was clipped it was weighed and despite the poor summer weather growth rates have been pretty good. Even since housing, the Charolais bullocks are putting on more than 1.5kg per day, including being weaned in the meantime.

The last of the pregnancy scanning has also been completed with excellent conception rates, particularly amongst the batches that Stuart and Michael synchronised and AI’d before turnout. So a really busy time.

It’s quite scary to think that next spring’s calf crop will probably be sold after we leave the EU in the spring of 2019. I say ‘probably’ because quite honestly every time I read a Brexit update in a farming magazine, or listen to the news, the timing and terms of leaving the EU becoming more confusing by the day. 

I have said many times ‘don’t worry about things you can’t control’ and that is certainly true in this case. But realising that our next crop of suckled calves may or may not eventually find their way to dinner plates in Italy or France, depending on the Brexit deal, certainly has made me sit up and think.

It’s a pity our politicians don’t seem to have any real comprehension of the challenge this is creating for us as they stumble from one shambolic meeting in Brussels to another. They don’t seem to get the fact that in the real world we are having to take decisions right now that their dithering about could completely undermine. 

So these calves may or may not carry the Scotch Beef PGI logo in a butcher’s shop in Milan; they may or may not be subject to some kind of tariff if exported; they may or may not be delayed for hours trying to exit the UK in a fridge box as customs arrangements wait to be finalised; and who knows what a euro or a pound may be worth by then?

Good isn’t it? We have already taken the decision to put these cows in calf and invest in the infrastructure to support all this, yet we are none the wiser as to the terms under which their offspring may or may not leave the UK as a sought after quality product in a couple of years’ time?

And politicians preach to us all the time about planning!

There is now equal uncertainty, it seems, regarding the future of agriculture support payments in Scotland. Who will be administering them – Holyrood or Westminster, what they will be paid for, and of course how much they will be worth? Oh and the small matter of will they really continue through a two-year transition period until 2021 as announced by the Prime Minister. 

Or, as was recently reported in The SF, someone called Lord Ian Duncan reckoned that in the spring of 2019 ScotGov will need to find a chair when the music stops on this political merry go round, as they will be responsible for these as yet undefined payments. And, of course, the EU won’t have any say in this at all because Michael Gove won’t let them! 

The fact that we still need to trade with the EU and surely some kind of transitional arrangements are inevitable to allow this to happen seems to be nothing more than detail to be sorted out later. Apparently, along with the tens of thousands of other details they don’t have a handle on yet, but are actually what matters to businesses in whatever sector we/they happen to trade.

An extraordinary situation really and those that voted for Brexit believing bureaucracy and red tape would reduce, allowing more freedom to farm, aren’t going to get their wish any time soon either as we witness this sorry mess continue to unfold. The Brexit train has certainly left the station, but the more you read about it the more you wonder who is actually driving the damned thing!

Anyway, like most EU negotiations on CAP reform I have experienced, some of them up close and personal, we are still very much in the ‘positioning’ phase of these particular Brexit negotiations. The real poker players don’t really get involved until very close to the death, with deadline after deadline broken to keep the pressure on for a result. 

Then, if you have a tough, skilled leader/player at the 11th hour 59-minute, he or maybe in our case she plays the killer hand and wins the game. I’m just not all that confident that the recent performance of Theresa May would suggest she has ever been in a game of poker let alone won one! Boris Johnson playing the joker doesn’t seem to have got us very far to date.

However, without influence or control there is no point in worrying. And as I look out of the window at the beautiful blue sky and clear winter sunshine at fields full of ewes in season, Brexit certainly doesn’t seem to be worrying the Texel or Bluefaced Leicester tups who look very pleased with themselves!

The circle of life will continue, whatever happens with Brexit, so given we will have to make the best of what finally gets agreed anyway –even if it is likely to be a train wreck. I’m sure we’ll find a way to survive ... we always have.