By Jim Walker

AFTER A long overdue fabulous two or three days at the end of last week, it appears that’s summer over – if you can call the last three months summer!

At least Michael managed to tidy up second-cut silage and the last of the reseeding for this year. To be honest, I’m amazed at how well we’ve got on in the circumstances and I know not far from us many have not been that lucky, with poached fields and silage still to make.

Travelling around East Lothian at the weekend it was clear to see the stop, start harvest of 2017 is far from over. All the costs associated with drying, or in some cases 'double drying' of grain, will continue to make this a memorable year but for all the wrong reasons.

I was also down in Lincolnshire on business a couple of weeks ago and saw some oilseed rape fields that had been completely decimated by a hail storm the day before. I have never seen anything like it in my life with fields (one of them 50 acres) with the pods split and seeds lying on the deck.

The thunder and hailstones had only lasted 10 minutes, but was enough to destroy a year’s work in the affected fields.

As well as flattened wheat – which at least had some salvage value – it turned out this guy had lost around 200 tonnes of rapeseed. The loss, of course, was made worse by the sunk cost of growing it, so it was a six figure hit.

It’s hard to imagine how he was feeling as he described the helplessness of watching this disaster unfold in front of his eyes. Maybe not as bad as 50 inches of rain in four days in Houston, Texas last week but hellish none the less.

It also seems from talking to folk on my travels that all is not well in the world of potatoes right now, with prices on the floor. It was suggested to me at the weekend that for some growers selling off the field today (I guess non-contracted) these spuds are only covering about half the growing costs.

Growing tatties has been a boom or bust business for years, but I actually thought things had settled down a bit with more robust contracts and supplier/customer relationships.

For some, at least, that appears not to be the case and there can only be one outcome of such a dire situation, which is a mirror of the dairy sector. Farmers forced out of the sector leading to lower production, meaning higher prices for those that have been able to stand the losses in the bad times.

Then, oversupply again when higher prices tempt producers back into the space with increased production crashing prices all over again. It really is a hopeless way to run any industry and simply can’t go on.

The magnitude of those types of changes that are affecting Scottish agriculture have been evident over the last couple of weeks in my own experience when we have seen selling breeding ewe lambs.

The trade for Scotch Mules was excellent, but the numbers that are being presented clearly demonstrate the changes to which I am referring.

Castle Douglas sold less than 8500 ewe lambs last week, although we had a great day. Dumfries sold just over 1000, so between the two centres less than 10,000 ewe lambs. Around 20 years ago, these same sales marketed more than 30,000 lambs, with Castle Douglas a two-day sale.

The fortunes of the Blackie ewe lamb sale this week at Castle Douglas was just as dramatic, with fewer than 3000 lambs sold. I can remember 10,000 Blackie lambs forward at CD in the 1990s and thousands of wedders on the same day. This year not one.

So, the question for sectors like dairying, potatoes, sheep or actually all of us, is where will all this end up? Particularly so with the excitement of Brexit on the horizon and the EU now publicly threatening the UK Government that they will teach the British people a lesson for daring to leave their failing club. What will the future hold for farming?

In the short term, our immediate protection in the UK may well be sterling heading to parity with the euro, thus boosting support payment values and exports.

Low interest rates are now predicted to remain all but unchanged until at least the spring of 2019. That will also help. Imported food will become more expensive and nudging up inflation can do us nothing but good as well.

However, these positive factors may well be short-lived over the next couple of years, so we need to take advantage of them.

I would suggest would could do that in two ways. Firstly, for individuals it needs to be the chance to make businesses ‘fit for purpose’ for the post-Brexit era.

Just like the sheep and now dairy sectors, which are still undergoing fundamental changes in their shape and structure, so every primary producer involved in any part of the food industry has to re-evaluate how it fits with what the future may hold, good, bad or ugly.

In other words, we must all take control of our own destiny, whatever the world throws at you.

Secondly, our politicians must actually face up to the fact that paying for the birds and the bees in the future will not be enough. If the example of falling sheep numbers in the South-west over the last 20 years is repeated in the next 20 years, mint producers might not be needed either – at least not for sauce!

Vladimir Putin has just been quoted as saying the North Koreans would eat grass rather than give up their nuclear programme. If the post-Brexit political strategy for agriculture in the UK remains as incoherent and confused as it appears just now, they may not be the only ones!