Beef I’d rather not eat!

SIR, – While John Gilmour makes some excellent points regarding all the wrongs that he feels were conveniently omitted by ‘the friends of the American beef industry’, it doesn’t make the current direction of travel by our beef industry right.
When Mr Gilmour asks: “Do we want to copy America and cram cattle into feed lots that produce tasteless, bland beef or follow the traditional route..... grass fed and allowed to grow naturally”.
I’d suggest we’ve already gone down the American route. Perhaps not on the same vast scale, but are the finishers’ sheds with their intensive cereal diets, really so different from the US feed lots? 
To be clear, this isn’t a criticism of the finishers, more an observation on the commercial reality of beef production in our small country. We don’t have the scale to profitably finish beef on grass or forage alone under the current market conditions, namely a land price based on its investment value, cheap cereals, the EUROP grid and the supermarkets pushing farmers for ever younger carcasses. 
Indeed, it’s not rocket science that the obvious way to finish beef is to limit grazing on expensive land, buy in cheap feed to finish your continental calves as quickly as you can, reaping the rewards of the EUROP system. 
Personally, I can’t think on beef I’d rather not eat than beef produced in that system but that’s what the market leads us to. Mr Gilmour will be able to confirm or refute this, but I’d risk a shilling to bet that not many of the cattle his father bought in Edinburgh Meat Mart were finished on that kind system.
We need a change in direction before our hard won reputation is eroded. The one place we have a degree of scale is in our hills, but hill beef is at a severe disadvantage under the current system. 
With EUROP rewarding quantity over quality, there’s no price incentive to extensively finish hill beef. Added to that, we still have compulsory de-boning of cattle over 30 months, making it utterly impractical to hang effectively. Thirty months is an arbitrary number without any basis in science and is hampering our industry, and I’d call on Fergus Ewing to start the process of revoking this legislation. 
A bit more support from QMS wouldn’t go amiss either, promoting extensively finished beef - we should not accept younger is necessarily better. 
As Laurent Vernet, their dead of marketing, will know only too well, his homeland of France has a premium brand for beef, ‘Label Rouge’. 
This has quite a strict criteria, an element of which is a minimum age. Without wishing to follow in John Elliott’s footsteps and talk up a market competitor’s product, I’ve been to France often enough to learn they know plenty about rearing beef! 
As an industry, we must not be complacent or bury our heads in the sand. Now more than ever, we are in a world market and we must not turn away from the challenges ahead.