Scottish farmers being paid to obey rules

08-09-2010 | Not Specified

September has arrived and we seem to have missed out on much winter weather here at Table Hill.

Usually we would expect a few decent falls of snow, but on the three days we have seen it this year it has been gone by lunchtime. We just hope the "moon man" is wrong and the bad weather is over and spring is here.

The worst event was the flooding late in May/early June but I missed out on that because I left for Scotland and Paul was left to endure 150mm of rain in my absence. Every email he sent for the first week told of more and more rain and more and more blind sheep, but more about that later.

It had been seven years since I had been back to my homeland, so I was getting the message that I was long overdue to make the trip over to the other side of the world to catch up on family and friends, and check out how farming is faring over there.

I had a great time, but returned glad to be farming here, not over there in their high price but highly regulated industry. I came back with the impression that farmers in Scotland are now being paid to look after the countryside and obey rules, and a lot of them aren't doing a very good job of it. I stayed on several farms and visited a few others so it was a bit of a busman's holiday, but interesting.

The subsidy system has now changed from being production oriented to a Single Farm Payment (SFP) to farmers based on their claims during the 2000-2002 reference period, with a few bonuses you can claim, such as if you don't cut your silage until late in the season (presumably that is better for the wildlife). If you don't conform to the rules you will be penalised. For example, if the inspector arrives unannounced and finds your sheep and cattle not double tagged you will be fined a percentage of your final claim, about 2-3% I think. With no incentive the stock numbers are falling, and a lot of farms looked a bit run down, with maintenance obviously not a high priority.

The good farmers were still taking pride in their operations but the bad were getting worse, I felt. A new rule coming in this year means you can't claim on the percentage of your land covered in gorse, so several farmers were burning gorse in spring, killing lots of nesting birds and wildlife that they have been paid to protect for the last decade. Even the farmers admitted it seemed stupid.

The SFP can be claimed in pounds or euros so farmers are becoming currency speculators and the stupidest thing is the SFP belongs to the farmer, not the farm, so when I enquired about buying land I was told I had no right to claim subsidy, I would have to buy that separately. The retiring farmer can rent an area of unproductive hill ground for a small payment and still claim his mega-bucks of subsidy as long he has proof he has some land to "farm".

I spoke to a few farmers who have farmed with subsidies for many years and have now realised they are being dictated to about what they can and can't do and would rather not have the subsidy. Many depend on it though, as their farming operations are not economically sustainable.

Sheep and beef farmers are getting reasonable money for their produce, with lamb making about $8/kg carcaseweight - and higher in the early season when I was there. Beef was just over $6/kg at the processor, so I didn't hear too many complaints about prices. I stayed with a farming couple I used to work for. Previously they had a dairy herd and arable operation, but have since left dairy because they were continually screwed down on milk price by the supermarkets to the stage it was uneconomic.

The farm is now all arable; they are still not making much money cropping and are reliant on subsidies to break even much of the time. They are now investigating wind turbines to try to make the farm economic. I noticed a major growth in the number of wind turbines since my last visit; they have sprouted up everywhere in the countryside and don't seem as despised as in New Zealand.

In general I found food more expensive than in NZ but milk is cheaper.

I visited a friend who is a farm consultant and has been involved in setting up Scotland's first Monitor Farms, based on the NZ model. It was going okay but Scottish farmers seemed less keen to share their financial information and discuss topics so openly.

I spent one day with a university friend who is employed to take city schoolchildren to farms to show them where their food comes from because, as in NZ, many city children have no access to farms.

There is a strong buy-British campaign in the supermarkets and all meat was well labelled with the country of origin, with "Prime Scottish lamb" in large letters across the packaging. I made a point of looking for NZ lamb, but the lamb shelf space is small in most supermarkets and I had to look hard to find the NZ product. Few people I spoke to ate lamb. Several didn't like the taste and the rest thought it too expensive, especially compared with pork and chicken.

Lamb chops retailed for about $27/kg while pork chops were half that price. A good beef rump steak was a similar price to lamb chops, while boneless chicken breast fillets were only $14/kg. When I ate out, many of the restaurants didn't even have a lamb dish on the menu. Rack of lamb was $45/kg so out of reach of many budgets.

We have been well-protected from the recession in NZ; it was much more obvious in the UK, with many of the councils struggling financially and a lot of road maintenance being delayed. There were horrendous stories of councils being unable to clear snow off roads, so they were closed for weeks. Eventually farmers had to clear the roads themselves.

I hired a car and was glad it was a small, economic model because petrol was about 266c/litre. In general farm-input costs in Scotland have increased as they have here, so I found few reasons why I would want to return to farming there - but never say never.

While I was having a great time in Scotland, Paul was looking after the farm. Unfortunately the day before I left we drafted up the ewes and noticed a few blind with pink-eye. This turned into a major outbreak and by the time I returned, hundreds were affected. Thankfully they had been with the ram long enough that it didn't affect tupping and we achieved our highest scanning result yet - over 200%. Our swede crops weren't as good as we wanted, so the ewes were back on to grass earlier than hoped. This has not been too bad in a mild winter and the ewes are in good condition. We have not fed any baleage, so having few bales made due to dry conditions late in the summer has not been a problem.

I found the baleage yields in Scotland an eye-opener. The friends I stayed with lambed on their baleage paddocks, spread slurry from the cattle wintering sheds but applied no artificial fertiliser. The paddocks were shut up about six to seven weeks and they harvested 40 bales/ha. As it was a new baler they weighed a sample of bales and they averaged about 800kg. This was 32 tonnes of grass/ha, about 6.5t/DM grown in a relatively short time. It's amazing what you can grow when you get 20 hours of daylight in the summer.

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