EVENTS over the past year have resulted in significant financial challenges for upland farming businesses all over Scotland, so the formal announcement last week by the Scottish Government that £26 million is to be cut from the LFASS budget over the next two years has been greeted with dismay.

This latest political twist was presented as some kind of victory for LFA businesses, whereas many will see it as a betrayal of the people who contribute so much to rural life in Scotland. The announcement implies a complete lack of political understanding of what it is that LFASS delivers in terms of the economic activity that it generates in the most disadvantaged parts of Scotland, and in terms of communities, landscape, environment and food.

Fergus Ewing, Cabinet Secretary for the Rural Economy, is on record as saying that he believes LFA businesses will be able to ‘absorb’ a cut of 20% in support payments. I believe this to be a gross misrepresentation of the true situation faced by many businesses which are already operating on slim or non-existent margins.

So what are the issues?

Following last year’s adverse weather events NFU Scotland carried out a survey of LFA monitors to establish losses of sheep and cattle between June 2017 and June 2018 and then to provide comparison figures for the average losses over the previous five year period. The results revealed a 120% increase in sheep losses from June 2017 to June 2018 and a 97% increase in cattle losses compared with the average over the previous five years.

We were also asked to project the effects of last year’s adverse weather events alongside the potential loss of a significant percentage of our LFASS payments on the future viability of our businesses. 94.7% of respondents did not believe that their businesses would be viable over the next three years without LFA support.

Farmers generally play down the bad times, but during the late winter and spring of 2018 some harrowing stories emerged. Hill businesses went into last winter from a low point due in part to the long wet summer of 2017 which had made it difficult to sell lambs in the autumn sales. Many finishers of store lambs hadn’t managed to complete the harvest of their crops and couldn’t take lambs, so everyone selling store lambs was affected, my own income from sales down £17,000 compared with the previous year.

This was followed in the early part of 2018 by the impact of the prolonged period of deep snow cover in January and again in late February and March. Some hill places suffered huge losses of sheep in the build up to lambing. Figures provided by the fallen stock companies only told part of the story as it was several weeks before the extent of the loss actually became apparent. As the snow melted we continued for many weeks to find the remains of sheep which had perished, trapped by the snow on the hill.

The heaviest losses were suffered by those who were unable to get to sheep with feed. In my case I spent almost double my usual spend on sheep feed. I still lost around 20% of my Blackface ewes and nearly 10% of my South Country Cheviots. In the end the Cheviots lambed well and had milk, but the blackies performed less well, with only 66% of the scanned lambs surviving. This left me with very few blackface lambs to sell and a reduced number of ewes to breed from in the coming year.

It’s difficult to rebuild numbers in a hefted flock because you cannot easily replace ewes with purchased sheep as these ewes will have no knowledge of the ground you’re introducing them onto, and no natural immunity to local challenges such as ticks. This is a very risky way to rebuild numbers, and survival rates in a high hill environment are often low.

Most hefted flocks are made up of regular-aged sheep one to five-years-old, all bred on the farm. We generally sell the five-year old ewes and keep the best ewe lambs as replacements thus maintaining numbers, but where the lambing percentage has been low there may be insufficient ewe lambs to do this, and keeping older ewes is not always advisable as they are less able to survive the winter conditions. Rebuilding numbers in this way reduces income from sales and it can take up to five years to complete the process, with consequent loss of income over that period.

My experience was replicated across many high hill farms in the Southern Uplands and beyond. In spite of fewer store lambs and draft ewes going through the markets in the autumn of 2018, prices have not returned to the level of two years ago. And for those of us trying to rebuild our flocks, we are doing this against a backdrop of ever increasing input costs. For example, feed blocks are up £30 per ton this year, straw is costing up to £135 per ton, and the prices of vaccines and scab prevention have risen by 8% in the past year. Ewe rolls have increased in price by 32% since 2015, from £195 per tonne in October 2015 to £257 in October 2018. All this threatens the future viability of agricultural businesses in Scotland’s uplands.

In the light of all this, it’s an irony that the Scottish Government has chosen this moment to reduce the rural budget. Yes – there are technical and regulatory difficulties in re-instating full LFASS payment levels, but these are not insurmountable and must not be used as a convenient excuse for doing nothing. Solutions can and must be found if we are to maintain upland farming systems, otherwise the risk of business failure and extensive land abandonment is very real.

What we need is a government that recognises the value of all that LFA funding delivers. It is an investment in upland Scotland, an investment in jobs and communities, and in landscape and tourism. What we don’t need is more time wasted blaming others, more political rhetoric and more excuses.

This is Scotland’s challenge and Scotland must find the solutions.