SIR, – Almost all the discussions of the impact of Brexit on farming have emphasised the importance of subsidy income support. At the recent SAOS meeting, the chief strategy officer of AHDB, said: “Subsidy income support accounted for 80% of farm income in Scotland.”

He did not explain how this figure was calculated, but the most commonly used measure of farm income is the average net farm income (NFI), which is not a reliable indicator of the average income of farmers.

When I discovered the origin of NFI and how it is calculated, I questioned the civil servant for the publication of NFI for Scotland.

He said that NFI should be ‘viewed as an economic measure rather than as a wage and, as such, could be used to observe trends over years and between countries’.

Average NFI is an index of income and is not – as the farming lobbyists and gullible politicians present it – the same as the average real income from farming.

When dealing with Brexit and trying to produce a meaningful forward strategy for farming, policy makers should not use artificial ‘economic measures’ of farm income instead of real incomes.

There are many farmers, in Scotland and the rest of the UK, whose taxable incomes would show that they are not dependent on subsidies and many who rely on subsidies do so because they have chosen to; some others need subsidy income to pay for additional land bought at excessively high prices.

The high price of farmland was seen as a barrier to the entry of young would-be farmers in the report ‘Harvesting the future for Young Farmers’ from RBS, but there was no attempt to explain why farms are so expensive.

Subsidy income is responsible for some of the rise in land prices, but there is also the perverse government fiscal policy which favours investment in landed property with tax breaks and penalises employment and trade with income taxes and VAT.

With complete reform of the tax system, farmers, and everyone else, could look to a prosperous future post-Brexit.

Duncan Pickard,

Straiton Farm,

Balmullo.