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The barley harvest so far at Cultybraggan -
and what it might mean for the future
James Irvine
Cultybraggan Farm, Comrie, Perthshire
Filed 19 Aug 06
©www.land-care.org.uk
The summer of 2006 has been a record
breaker, both for heat and drought. That may be fine for holiday
makers but too much of a good thing for many farmers. Not only does
the grass stop growing, but so does the barley. The extent of the
damage depends on the nature of the soil and how well it can hold
on to water.
The light, gravelly soil of the in-bye
land at Cultybraggan is in general excellent for growing spring
barley. If there is a lot of rain It does not get water logged.
But it does not like a prolonged drought. Three weeks without rain
at moderate temperatures is about its limit. This year's drought
exceeded that by far. Thermometre registered record breaking highs.
The first of this year's
Riviera barley safely in
a nice clean shed on August 16th, much earlier than usual.
Soon after, the rain poured down, putting a halt to further
harvesting until the crop dried out. These days, drying costs
have to be avoided if at all possible.
(to enlarge photo Click
Here)
Photo ©Kimpton
Graphics
Some years ago this farm put great
effort and expense into trying to produce high quality barley for
malting. But the failure of the malsters to pay a sufficient premium
for the malting quality that they stipulated, compared to barley
grown for feeding livestock, led to the farm deciding to grow feed
barley only.
No longer did I have to listen to
the idle promises of the malsters. No longer were the farm's sheds
blocked for weeks on end waiting upon the convenience of the malsters
for its uplifting. No longer did I need to worry about whether the
nitrogen level of my barley was in fashion for the malting market
of the day. If it was not, there was the threat of the rejection
of several artic lorry loads of barley being returned to the farm
at substantial cost.
It seemed that the malsters were
happy enough buying barley from the cheapest source abroad to put
into Scottish whisky, that was then marketed with the image of rural
Scotland. Frankly, I had had enough of malsters and their goings
on.
Today the value of the straw has
become greater than the value of the barley, be the barley for malting
or for feed. On a mixed farm like Cultybraggan, straw is essential
for the winter bedding of cattle, and the barley can also be used
as a roughage feed for the farm's own livestock. If the farm runs
out of straw in late winter or early spring before there is enough
grass in the pastures, the cost of buying in straw is cripplingly
high.
This year, as in previous years,
the fields before they were put down to barley were heavily manured
with the dung from the cattle sheds (1).
With 120 suckler cows and followers there is a massive tonnage of
dung by the end of the winter. The dung, with all that processed
straw, is rich in fibre. It is indispensible for maintaining the
arable land in good heart.
The generous application of dung
helped to retain some moisture in the ground during this summer's
prolonged drought. Although often inferred by the "organic"
movement to be a practice special to them, it is of course nothing
of the sort. It has been a common, and indeed a commonsense, practice
in conventional farming long before the "organic" movement
was thought of.
Even so, the barley straw this year
is short in length and the barley pea is small - a problem that
has affected wide areas of the country.
The relatively poor crop of straw
is likely to make the over-wintering of cattle in sheds problematical
- at least in so far as the numbers of cattle that can be so housed.
Out-wintering cattle on this farm is not only hard on the cattle,
the stockman and the machinery - it is also very damaging to the
ground.
To buy in straw is likely to be particularly
expensive in the late winter and early spring of 2007. Not only
because the yields this year are likely to be low, but less barley
has been grown this year grown throughout the country - it is just
not economic to do so. Also, there are competing demands for straw,
such as to cover a lucrative crop of carrots grown in parts of the
country that have the climate and soil conditions for it. The escalating
cost of diesel will make the transport of straw an even more expensive
business, likely to exceed the resources of even a moderately remote
farm.
A reduction in the numbers of livestock
on such farms seems inevitable, especially when the situation just
described may well be coupled with an escalating reduction in the
Single Farm Payment, as suggested in the government's Rural Development
Plan (2). Rural interests other
than farming are clambering to claim a chunk of the Common Agricultural
Policy money away from farmers and into their own pockets. Neither
the UK Government nor the Scottish Executive are showing much sign
of using the opportunity they have to match such funding.
Modulation (a politician's word for
cut-back) of the Single Farm Payment is also being used to subsidise
the new members of the EU. Their farmers will be brought forward,
while many Scottish farmers will be put out of business, ironically
at the UK taxpayers' expense. France, of course, manages to continue
with full production subsidies for its farmers, who are also given
every addiitonal encouragement its government can provide.
While the export market opens up
for Scottish beef, perhaps rather many of the traditional Scottish
farms - the very ones that created Scotland's enviable reputation
for quality beef - will have to cut back their production (3).
With few exceptions, it will be left it to the big boys to produce
commodity beef in big lots close to relatively high quality arable
land. And they will pretend that it has the quality of traditional
Scottish Beef.
So what is to become of truly
rural Scotland? Perhaps it will become just a playground for the
urban rich and for obsessive conservationists, who may have fancy
degrees from unversities and lots of ideological ambitions but who
have little or no skills in actually managing land.
©www.land-care.org.uk
References
1. Irvine, James
(2006). Farm activities: dung spreading. It used to be said that
"Where's there's muck there's brass". Sadly this is no
longer the case as far as farming goes.
See ENVIRONMENT Homepage, filed 04 Apr 06, Click
Here to View
2. Scottish Council
of the National Beef Association (2006). Response to SEERAD's Consultation
Document on the Rural Development Programme for Scotland, 2007-2013.
Click Here
to View pdf
3. Linklater, Magnus
(2006). Linklater's Scotland: Could we be on the verge of losing
another British industry?
Originally published in the Spectrum Magazine, 19th March, Scotland
on Sunday,
Reproduced on Land-Care with the kind permission of the author
and the newspaper.
See SOCIAL/ECONOMIC/POLITICAL Homepage, filed 21 Mar 06,
Click
Here to View
Finis
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