SIR, – It's show time – but I see the bad moon arising, I see trouble on the way.

Highland Show again. We gather and greet and rejoice at our successes, marvel at the fantastic specimens presented by exhibitors, wonder at how much effort and feed it has taken to get them there, then question the judge’s logic – it’s in the eye of the beholder remember.

We try to get around the stands to secure a bargain show deal on some fancy equipment or machinery! Grab a free sarnie, or even better a cooked meal from your local auction house or machinery dealer and hopefully a dram or two or three. Don’t worry they always get the better of the bargain!

Congregate with like-minded around the breed society tent, then show barbecue and that’s just the first day!

Its great fun isn’t it.

Great fun and often expensive but two years ago, rightly or wrongly the nation voted to leave the comfortable and mainly secure EU club. Today, we’re still in the club (I think, or are we leaving today?).

Can any grown-up, QMS, NFU, Scottish Government, politician, really tell me what is going on? Truthfully, the agri grown-ups don’t know either. So, inevitably, the EU grown-ups will push the rowdy youngster (that’s us) out of the herd and into the big bad world and go your own way, but they like our money, so who knows?

It’s a big bad mad world out there full of predators ready to munch on a juicy bite. In their eyes, our market is a juicy morsel.

To keep the government’s cash flowing it’ll be cheap agri-food products in and manufactured and financial products out. As Jim Brown recently stated, we will have little or no protection.

Who are the predators, what are we up against? On the beef front, its Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, lamb its New Zealand. These countries it’s about scale, cheap to keep efficient cows and ewes, unassisted births, feet on the ground. It’s all about numbers.

We can’t compete on volume or price. Do we compete on quality, not using the beef EUROP system we won’t. It’s taken us down a dead end which we may just extricate ourselves by the skin of our teeth ... if we're lucky.

Easy care livestock just think as a calf or lamb producer, every time you pull a calf out sideways or have to pull out a lamb by hand, that is a cost in either vet’s time or your man hours. Didn’t these animals give birth and survive themselves before we got involved? Nature perfected these animals over millions of years, but after our meddling they need virtually 24-hour attention? One to ponder I think in our pursuit of efficient red meat production.

In Scotland we’ve got the world’s best easy-care breeds, Blackies, Cheviots, Hebrideans, Galloways and Highlanders, love them or loathe, them you just got to admire them, their day will come again.

Have a look at Linier’s cattle market in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on YouTube. Finished Angus and Herefords at 500kg remember them? Not a few, but thousands of them.

Scotch PGI, Farm assurance and traceability, that’ll save us. Farm assurance to the rescue. We’re all farm assured, err no, I’m not. After 10 years, it never added a penny to my bottom line, so I ditched it.

Neither are many sheep producers. It didn’t make any difference to their finished lamb prices and this year they were making a cracking trade with or without a blue thistle.

You could see the supermarket buyers looking uncomfortable just being in an auction mart! I just love auction marts, the only real way to sell livestock, store or finished.

So better think of something else. How about eating quality and accurate labelling like grass or feedlot fed? Strangely, Australia and the USA do this and they eat a lot more meat per person than we do. A labelling opportunity there?

Talking of the competition, I recently ordered Uruguayan ribeye from a Smithfield wholesaler just to compare it with my own. It was excellent. In comparison to my home-produced beef, from hairy cattle, slow maturing renowned for eating quality ... it was a difficult one to call.

Fancy technology? Uruguay has been using electronic tags in cattle since 2006 – Scotland are still thinking about it?

How does all this foreign beef and lamb get here? By containership in reefer containers. The biggest containerships are now carrying more than 10,000 20-foot containers, usually about 10% reefers. You do the math – that’s a lot of beef and lamb.

Let’s do some joined up thinking for once. In Aberdeenshire, two reputable companies are considering building a new abattoir. Also, in Aberdeen a new harbour is under construction.

Why not build a top end multi-species abattoir which includes sheep and export our fantastic lamb direct to our new trade partners in USA and Canada from a container port at Aberdeen, rather than sending them south live then be exported via Southampton or Felixstowe container ports.

Our red meat industry has really got to start thinking 'big picture'.

Once the meet and greet of show time is over our industry needs some strong leadership as to what direction we are going to take post-2019. Drifting aimlessly in the wind is not an option. The circling predators will soon pick us off and take our place.

Once the rock an’ roll of show time is past prepare for the blues.

Someone told me long ago, there’s a calm before the storm. I know, it’s been coming for some time!

Disgruntled Drover