Mexican stand-off on fertiliser purchases – and future policy!

Given a slightly longer stride, you could possibly have managed the same trick across the Earn Valley on the roofs of tractors a couple of weeks ago – when the weather dried up enough to see the long-delayed preparations for spring cropping finally get under way.

The sight of so many machines grafting away to make up for lost time probably put paid to any notion that the ongoing ‘cost of farming crisis’ was going to result in any major reduction in spring sowing in the area.

Whether or not the fertiliser has been bought to spread on all these acres, however, remains a mystery, given that the Mexican stand-off between growers and the manufacturers probably continues on many farms as breaths are held and orders delayed to see who blinks first.

I suppose manufacturers have at least winked a bit in recent weeks, with a fairly substantial drop in price – but it still has to be argued that this was from a very high starting point. Of course, merchants are now upping the ante by throwing the old ‘availability of lorries to deliver the product in time for sowing’ chestnut into the mix.

But, on the topic of upping the ante, just as The Scottish Farmer hits the newsagents’ shelves today as someone from the Scottish Government – maybe even Mairi Gougeon – will be taking to the stage at NFU Scotland’s agm, in Glasgow.

Expectations will be running high that the cabinet secretary, will be able to pull a fairly major rabbit out of the hat on the policy development front to placate what is becoming an increasingly angry sector.

It won’t be the first time that expectations have run high on this front – but on previous occasions, not only did the CabSec fail to pull a rabbit out of the hat, but she also appeared to have forgotten to even bring the hat along with her.

I’m aware that I’m writing a day or two in advance of the event, though and, certainly back in the day, a common trick of the incumbent politician was to take the wind out of the sails of any major deceleration of dissatisfaction by revealing some placatory beads for the natives a day, or so in advance of the event.

So speculation on the issue might be a waste of time – but, with England now on Version 2 of its policy, it seems almost unbelievable that we’re still so far behind when it comes to having any details on the mechanics of what the future will hold.

While we’re on the topic of policy, last week’s news that there had been a pretty thin uptake of the National Test Programme’s Preparing for Sustainable Farming scheme couldn’t really have come as much of a surprise to anyone.

On the surface, you’d have to ask what wasn’t to like about the prospect of getting some support towards assessing the carbon emissions of our individual businesses and also for testing the nutrient and organic matter status of our soils.

Not only would this offer benefits to us as growers, giving us the information we need to help optimise the use of our increasingly expensive inputs, but it would also allow a national benchmark to be set against which future levels of carbon sequestration could be adjudged.

From the start, though, the thing could have been better handled and while it always annoys me that everything comes down to marketing and brand image these days, who ever thought that launching the scheme under the name of National Test Programme was a good idea?

In an industry which is beset and beleaguered by inspectors demanding to poke their noses into and oversee every detail of our production methods, who thought that the answer to the call to become involved in a scheme running under that name would evoke the response:

“More tests? Yup, that’s the one for me – where do I sign up?”

Naming it something like the ‘Get some cash for doing what you’re probably already doing’ scheme might have seen more volunteers taking that all-important step forward.

But even for those who could see beyond the off-putting name and realised what was on offer, the latter part of the sentence – the ‘where do I sign up?’ part – was probably still relevant.

That’s because, while the obvious place to have put access to the scheme would have been on the same on-line portal as we use for all our other applications and communications with SGRPID central control, someone obviously decided that this would be way too simple.

The time-pressed souls who had the tenacity and determination not to be fall at this hurdle found they still had to undergo the challenge of tracking down the application page to the corner of the internet in which it had been hidden away.

The next challenge was to work out if the carbon audits carried out for the Beef Efficiency Scheme would suffice to trigger the payments for soil testing – and I admit that by the time I’d struggled with that and then finally got round to contacting the advisory services to see if they could solve the puzzle, they seemed to be booked out for the current round.

Enough of my gripes, I hear you say – but I suspect we might not have been alone in thinking that the thing was going to be simple enough to do on our own.

However, while not getting in on the ground floor of the scheme might be annoying, there’s a real danger that the policy makers might be tempted to put the low level of uptake down to the fact that the industry simply couldn’t be bothered – either because we weren’t interested in doing our bit to help on the climate change front or, just as bad, that we simply didn’t need the cash.

Either way, as the scheme was supposed to be demand led, in a time of already tight budgets and huge demands from other sectors, any interpretation of a lack of interest from the industry would certainly not be to our benefit.

So, while we wait with baited breaths to hear if the NFUS conference casts enough light into the murky depths of policy development to provide some clarity on the nuts and bolts of future direction, we’ll have to hope that when the road map taking us to future policy is finally laid out for us that it has plenty of signposts to point us in the right direction – and that the journey to get there won’t take too long.