WHAT A difference a month makes – the last time I wrote in these pages we had just started to see some heat and grass was thinking about growing.

Now we are cutting decent crops of silage after four weeks of tremendous weather. Record May/June temperatures, coupled with decent rain 10 days ago has meant grass growth for grazing and silage has exploded. Mother Nature really does have a way of averaging things out when it comes to our weather.

Even the fields ravaged by leatherjackets have recovered and I have some good news in relation to our experiment with garlic-based spray – it works!

The day or two after spraying a 30-acre field with this novel product the field was absolutely black with crows munching away happily on the grubs forced to the surface presumably by the garlic in the product.

And that was that. Within a week, the grass was growing and it’s now in the silage pit – amazing really. Knowing the impact garlic (in small quantities) has on my digestive system, I can only imagine what the crow population at the top of the Nith Valley smelt like for a few days, after such a garlic infested feast.

Maybe having apparently solved one problem we will have inadvertently caused another. When these creatures tell their cousins in France about this, maybe we will be totally overrun with French crows looking for gourmet garlic leatherjacket!

Anyway, after three years or trouble, thank goodness we have a solution to leatherjackets. Providing, of course, that the zealots that seem to control our lives nowadays don’t find an excuse or reason to ban this novel product.

Maybe we will need to write risk assessments about odour, or maybe we will need to provide the crows with an MSDS (Material Safety Data Sheet) and a ration guide so they don’t overdose on it. Or maybe, for once, common sense will prevail and we will be allowed to get on with running our business!

Meanwhile, the cows and calves finally got out during the last week of May and first week of June. Literally, from virtually no grass (where ewes and twin lambs have been grazing), to loads in a week mean they have settled down outside really quickly.

Everyone is relieved to see them out as this represents the longest winter housing I have ever experienced. Eight months indoors on full winter rations and managing slurry during the worst winter for years has been challenging.

However, when you see the cows and calves outside, they are looking tremendous which is a real feather in the cap for Michael and the team. The cows and calves have all been treated for blackleg, with the youngsters getting a pneumonia vaccine and treatment for coccidiosis. Hopefully, as the sun continues to shine and the grass keeps growing, they should really keep motoring.

Most of the cows were AI’d before they went out so it will be interesting to see how many the bulls actually get to cover other than the later calvers. Our 110 bulling heifers were also synchronised and AI’d and in a couple of weeks, the bulls will be off them then that will be that.

With eight-month winters to contend with and calving everything inside, keeping a tight calving pattern is essential. Not only for managing the cows and calves, but to maximise the financial returns from keeping sucklers and both Michael and Stuart are totally focused on this.

Gone are the days when I used to say 'oh she’s only a calved heifer give her another chance'. Nowadays, every cow is either in calf, running with a calf or in the killing pen. No prisoners, no room for sentiment.

And scale, we need scale. To supply Tesco, Morrison’s, M and S, McDonalds, a merged Sainsbury’s/Asda or whoever, farming needs scale. In our case, that means a relationship with the processors who deal direct with these retailers because obviously we don’t own an abattoir or cutting plant (fortunately, I may add?).

So, we need scale to allow fixed costs to be spread over more heads and be super-efficient. What else is there for a strategy?

Yes, you can diversify – which is great – but only if you don’t take your eye off the 'knitting', or core business while you are faffing about with some idea or other that adds two fags and a balloon to the bottom line.

If a business does diversify, it must be done for the same hard-nosed reasons, with the same controls as operating the core business. Not because it’s a nice or clever thing to do and particularly not simply to chase some public subsidy or other. It must make total economic sense and stand up to financial scrutiny.

That’s why I was a bit disappointed with the recent publication of yet another strategy for Scottish agriculture, as reported last week, written by Fergus Ewing’s 'Champions'.

The main message for farmers seems to be that we need to change our mind set and I quote 'become more progressive, entrepreneurial and resilient'. I get progressive, it’s exactly what I have been writing about in this and dozens of articles like it over the years. But, I have no idea what resilient means in terms of developing or managing a business.

I suspect in the case of livestock farming it means be prepared to survive on even lower incomes for those that are not progressive.

And entrepreneurial is an interesting one. You can’t teach people to be entrepreneurial – it’s either in them or it isn’t. You can train people, give people advice, demonstrate best practice and use all sorts of techniques to help in this regard. You can learn from them maybe, but become an entrepreneur, never.

And please, can someone tell me how do you encourage businesses to become more progressive and presumably grow, then propose to penalise them by capping subsidies when they achieve this?

The number of businesses buying our products in the supply chain for retailers is reducing in number and growing in size each week, but somehow we are supposed to be serious suppliers and participants in that chain by staying small. To underline this, Fergus Ewing recently awarded ABP Perth £4m of public money to upgrade its facilities. Of course, in one sense this is great news for Scottish livestock farmers because it secures the future of a sales/processing outlet for Scotch beef for the foreseeable future. On the other, it is worrying because it will no doubt increase the buying power of an already hugely powerful Irish meat processor.

Larry Goodman, the ultimate owner of this private company, is reported to be worth over £800m. So, despite the fact ABP at Perth is supposedly creating 80 jobs with this £4m injection of public money as part of an overall £18m investment, is this really good use of public money?

If big farms don’t deserve public support, why do big wealthy private businesses? Big farms create employment as well – or does that not figure.

My own view is that companies like ABP should be encouraged to invest and employ people with support from the Government but then so should large productive farms that also invest and employ people.

So the question the 'Champions' maybe should have asked politicians in Scotland is 'do you want to continue to develop a world class food and farming industry or not'.

If the answer is 'Yes', then stop trying to micro manage our businesses, shackle us with ridiculous regulations and a vision of the Scottish countryside taken from a postcard instead of a bank statement!

Of course, we must have the now mandatory 'civil conversation' about what the public want from farming. I get that the folk that ban leatherjacket spray and want to penalise large scale productive farmers want a conversation about farming, but the guys I had a pint with in Cleland the other night frankly couldn’t give a b....r – much like the other 95% of Scottish people.

Like me, many other farmers and indeed ordinary Scots want less Government not more, and are fed up having a nanny instead of a leader preaching at them.