THE SCOTTISH Association of Young Farmers' Clubs is not just any youth organisation.
It is part of the very fabric of rural and farming life in many areas, with a proven and laudable role in rural education.
The removal of Scottish Government funding for this venerable and thoroughly decent organisation from Holyrood must make this industry feel that, on top of the current mess regarding the distribution of subsidy payments - which also seems to have little structure or planning to it - that ScotGov has 'got it in for' the farming industry.
While it is easy to assume that and while it's equally hard to take a kicking while you are down, we should live in hope that Cabinet Secretary Richard Lochhead can rescue something from this PR disaster that has, once again, fallen into his lap in a year when we will all vote in a Scottish election.
And while the £66,000 that is given annually to the SAYFC does not seem like a lot of money, it is part of the pump priming for funding which has seen the organisation make serious inroads into connecting young people in new rural areas, in some of the remoter parts of the country, by providing start-up support for the resurrection of old clubs and even the formation of new ones.
This newspaper urges the CabSec to seek a reconsideration from his counterpart in that other part of government which sanctioned the removal of this grant aid and, if not, then to leave no stone unturned in finding some other way to make it up. It is crucial to the long-term well-being of this industry that he does so.
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