Brian Henderson: Just point us in the right direction please

'On soil testing, the decision to align the claim period within the calendar year of January 1 to December 31 – albeit with another two months to file the supporting documentation – means that there’s going to be a hell of a pressure on labs in the next few weeks

I suspect the news that we’ll still have a few years to wait before the full rollout of the new agricultural policy which the Scottish Government is drawing together, probably didn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone witnessing the 'watching paint dry' speed of development since the starting gun was fired back in 2018.

Despite hopes that we might get a clear steer as to what was being planned, the recent Holyrood statement on the issue leaves it looking like there’s not going to be much more than a few tweaks to the interim 'Stability and Simplicity' document – which was in itself little more than a minor revision of the CAP rule book when it was launched at the Royal Highland Show more than four years ago now – before 2026.

So, with the kick-off already running a bit late and confirmation that the existing powers are set to be used at least until the 2025 single application form year, there’s plenty of room left for further delays. Who was it that said: “The sooner we fall behind, the more time we’ll have to catch up”?

'Enhanced conditionality' – yes, your guess is as good as mine – is, however, going to be served up a bit sooner to fulfil the administration’s promise to the greens. So it looks like we’ll see half of our future payments tied to us undertaking additional environmental measures from 2025 onwards.

Another hint given in the Holyrood statement by the Cabinet Secretary Mairi Gougeon was that the present payment regions will also be kept as they are in the early part of the transition – although a promise was also given that the commitment given to reviewing the existing three region model would be fulfilled to ensure that it is fit for purpose for setting future base payments.

While I’m writing in advance of Wednesday’s AgriScot – where we can only but hope that some more details might be revealed to keep the crowds happy – given the story so far, it would probably be fair to say that as far as knowing what the future holds, we’re not really all that much further forward than we were four years ago, despite the publication of so many reports by so many committees over the intervening period.

While it might not be an exact parallel, the work over recent years to draw up a new set of parameters for farm rent negotiations also swallowed up a hack of a lot of time, effort, and presumably paper in the production of reports and modelling exercises for a new way of doing the job.

However, despite all the work which went into producing a new rent assessment methodology – based on the productive capacity of the land, with black patching to account for tenants’ improvements, etc – the notion was quietly dropped last year.

While I don’t think any real hard and fast conclusion has been drawn, it looks a bit like any new mechanism will probably be based on the old system, with one or two tweaks here and there to level the playing field up a bit, after most parties seemed to decide it was probably a case of 'better the devil you know. Let’s hope this approach isn’t extended.

Back to the wider policy reforms, a brief look at the minutes of the ARIOB meetings which are available online, also shows that amongst discussions on 'Whole Farm Plans', involving succession issues and health and safety audits, and queries on what regenerative farming actually means, grassroots farmers aren’t the only ones getting more than a little frustrated at the glacial pace of change.

If you read between the lines in these carefully worded records – of what I suspect might well have been from some heated meetings – it comes out pretty loud and clear that the farming interests have been doing a pretty good job of making their views on the speed of progress clear.

The demands for the setting of priority areas to be hastened and the publication of a timeline for the introduction of actual measures to be drawn up, and made available to the sector, were certainly issued by the industry’s voices – but it was also plain that the officials involved in the procedure highlighted what they saw as the ‘resource and legal constraints’ to such an injection of alacrity.

But even the package announced last autumn under the Track 1 proposals of the National Test Programme, part of ‘Preparing for sustainable farming’ (PSF) hasn’t been the easiest to sign up to.

When it comes to actually accessing the widely discussed measures for helping to set a national baseline on farm carbon audits and soil health, a fair bit of digging over and above that is carried out when collecting soil samples in the field is required.

Now we all knew that some sort of support for carbon audits and for soil testing was to be made available, but the actual procedures and the eligibility requirements to join the scheme were less well publicised and promoted.

This point was also recorded in the ARIOB minutes a few meetings ago. But, while it has to be admitted that there is now some information available unless you’ve managed to nab a consultant to work for you, it takes a bit of tracking down and you don’t seem to be able to access it once you’ve logged into the normal SGRPID portal which we use for all the other claims.

Most soil sampling tends to be done over the back end and the winter period when there’s no crop in the ground, and when plans for the next year’s nutrient budget and fertiliser purchases are being drawn up, so I would imagine that most people will only really be looking in to see what hoops they have to jump through to track down Track 1 payments.

Having looked into the PSF, my take is that while many of us thought that the carbon audits which we carried out for the Beef Efficiency Scheme would have seen us qualify for the soil sampling support, it might not be as simple as that.

First off, the audits have to be less than three years old and align with the PAS 2050 standard. So far, I haven’t managed to confirm if self-audits carried out through AgRECalc, or other certified calculators, will qualify – but there’s also an additional requirement to have the audit reviewed and a set of recommendations drawn up for actions to be taken by the business to reduce carbon emissions. This has to be done by a ‘Farm Business Adviser Accreditation Scheme for Scotland’ (FBAASS) qualified adviser/associate.

The proposal to cover only a fifth of qualifying land might be one of the easier proposals to understand from a budgetary point of view and I guess that the tests which are supported seem to be reasonably sensible to give a broad-brush approach for a national database, and for helping to draw up fertiliser and cropping plans.

However, the decision to align the claim period within the calendar year of January 1 to December 31 – albeit with another two months to file the supporting documentation – means that there’s going to be a hell of a pressure on labs in the next few weeks from producers wanting to make a claim for 2022.

Feeling that I might have been a bit behind the curve in not being prepared to submit a claim, I contacted the Scottish Government to try to get an idea of just how much uptake there had been of the Track 1 proposals – and got this reply: “The window has only recently opened for soil analysis claims and the rules require the work to be completed within the calendar year with claims submitted by the end of February.

“A full statistical breakdown will be published in due course and in the meantime, farmers, crofters, and land managers are encouraged to take advantage of the programme.”

Just point us in the right direction, please …