TWO recent articles in The Scottish Farmer stimulated the memory buds. Morris Pottinger’s superb piece about the changes in farming in Caithness over his lifetime exactly mirror my own experience.  
Long after arable farmers moved to combines, we persisted with a binder, stooks and a threshing mill on our hill farm in the Lammermuirs.
We handled the grain 13 times from when it was cut to when it was fed to the sheep and cows. Without doubt, wildlife benefitted from this unintentional largesse.
As a teenager, no doubt hoping to be ‘at the cutting edge’, I pestered my father to bring in a combine like everyone else. He couldn’t as we had no way of storing the corn as we had no drier.  
He did eventually relent and we grew four acres of a variety of barley called Mari which ripened in 90 days even in ‘The Arctic Circle’.
It didn’t yield much and we bagged it in hundredweight plastic bags, tied them with wire ties then sealed the top with a hot iron.
Before harvest, my father sent the grieve and me to see a demonstration of the bagging process on a farm near Kelso. Soon after, I met my uncle George, who farmed Roxburgh Mains, where I was, decades later, to farm myself.  
I told him about the visit and asked him if he knew the farmer. “Fine,” he replied, “he’s aye got a dreep on the end of his nose”.  
The man’s son became a well-known businessman. Every time I met him I could never resist glancing at his nose.
After a few years of this labour intensive process, we moved to storing our moist grain in a silo consisting of a corrugated iron shell which contained a large bag made of Esso Butyl, a rubberised fabric. This held about 30 tonnes.  
The big breakthrough came with the advent of Propcorn. We used this successfully for some years until grain growing on a hill farm became uneconomic when we stopped growing it.
At that time, we also grew turnips for the sheep. Almost every task associated with the turnip – singling, shawing, setting wire nets on the break or graiping them out to the ewes was mind numbing and back breaking, so it was a relief when we replaced the turnips with big bale silage.  
Haymaking, too, which started around Highland Show time and in a year like this one, often lasted into the lamb sales in August, was transformed by the big bale and eventually the wrapper.
The other memory tickler was Jim Brown’s account of his visit to the American Mid-West. Due to our long term involvement with Aberdeen-Angus from that area, the excellent and thought-provoking article was of above normal interest.
One of the farms visited by Jim’s group was Nicholls Farms. I first met Dave Nicholls in 1982 when studying beef cattle genetics on a Nuffield Scholarship.  
When in the USA and Canada, I visited 51 herds, most of them Angus.  On my return home, I was asked whose herd impressed me the most.  To general surprise, as they weren’t well known then, I replied ‘Nicholls Farms’.  
At that time, their bull, Nicholls Landmark, was ranked second out of 34,000 bulls tested in the US Angus Performance Programme.  
This was the first of its kind in the world and had been in operation for only five years. We used Landmark through a son. He was a completely different type of animal from those winning shows at the time, which resembled black Holsteins.  
Both my son and I have visited Nicholls Farms since then and have used and continue to use their genetics.  
Over the 34 years since our first meeting, through many different breed fashions, the phenotype of the Nicholls cattle remains exactly the same.  
Their performance, as it was then, continues at the highest level anywhere in the world. Last year, Dave had his portrait hung in The Saddle and Sirloin Club, in Louisville, Kentucky. This is the greatest honour the American beef industry can bestow.
We have never been to Herbster Angus. This is a very different kind of operation from Nicholls, however we are using one of their stock bulls in our embryo transfer programme.  
Although we have never seen him, he has met the approval of his recent Scottish visitors. Another bull bred on the same ranch in North Dakota interests us enormously.
His figures are in every way outstanding. Unlike almost every other bull we know about, after huge growth to market weight, it levelled out and he and his progeny are of below average size at maturity.  
In the eyes of a pig or poultry breeder this is absolutely what we should be breeding. Our reticence in using him is the result of the ‘wee, growthless’ stigma the Angus breed still bears, even after 40 years of trying to increase performance and with cattle twice the weight they were in my youth.
Jim Brown’s comments about the eating quality of their beef compared to our own are, to our shame, absolutely correct. A steak served in a roadside diner in USA or Canada will eclipse most served in top restaurants in Scotland.  
The show lobby and the EUROP grading system have a lot to answer for. So often I see a sign outside local butchers saying where their beef was bred.  
Knowing the farm, I recognise that the beast will certainly have yielded well. Fair chance that when the housewife re-enters the shop she will ask for chicken!

By John Elliot