Linklater’s Scotland

Magnus Linklater

Columnist, Scotland on Sunday

This article, which was originally published in the Spectrum section of Scotland on Sunday
on 3rd April 2005, is reproduced on Land-Care with the kind permission
of the author and the newspaper.

Filed 07 Apr 05

Eric Neilson sits astride his New Holland tractor and contemplates the spring growth in his well-managed fields. He has been working the land at Mersehead, on the Solway Firth, for 30 years, and knows it like the back of his hand. For most of that time, the pattern of his year has been as immutable as the land itself - familiar to any farmer in Scotland. Using the rich Galloway soil to its best advantage, he grew acres of wheat and barley, fattened up sheep and cattle and experimented occasionally with oilseed rape and potatoes.

Ten years ago, however, Eric began doing things that horrified his neighbours. He blocked up the drains he had dug so carefully, allowed the ditches to overflow, left water to encroach over much of his carefully tended ground, watched as grass sprang up where once there had been barley, stopped sowing high-yielding crops, and stood back as fields which had, for hundreds of years, been reclaimed from the sea reverted to a state of wildness. Where once there were acres of grain, there are now acres of barnacle geese; where sheep once grazed, there are widgeon and teal; lapwing and redshanks have replaced the cattle; his new crops are spoonbills, snipe, skylarks and linnets.

Magnus Linklater
(photo ©magnus linklater)
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Because the farm has been bought and is now run by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, Eric is no longer called a farmer - he is a land operations co-ordinator. This, said many of his farming friends, is tantamount to agricultural vandalism, a shocking waste of good land. More recently, though, they have been going round to seek his advice.

Across Scotland, farming is coming to terms with the greatest revolution it has undergone since the war, and Eric's experiment, far from being seen as vandalism, has become a subject of keen interest to those in the business. Farmers, once subsidised by the Common Agricultural Policy to produce ever higher yields, more stock and fatter animals, will now be paid to "manage" the land, with an eye as much on the environment as on the market. A whole variety of CAP grants will be replaced by a single payment, no longer tied to productivity, but to new concepts which farmers are only just learning to grapple with: diversity, sustainability, added value, the idea that instead of extracting more and more from the land, they will be encouraged to develop their farms as businesses, opening up cottages for tourism, encouraging wildlife, gearing their produce to what the market wants rather than what the handout dictates.

Not surprisingly, in a deeply traditional industry, there is widespread scepticism about the scheme. Scotland's cattle farmers, in particular, who have for years produced the highest quality beef in the world, believe that they will no longer have the incentive to improve their standards. Because the effect of the single payment is gradually to reduce the amount paid per head, small farmers in particular say that commercial herds will be squeezed out, leaving retailers no alternative but to buy their meat from abroad.

James Irvine, who farms 540 acres in Perthshire, is pessimistic about the prospects ahead for his suckler herd (breeding calves to be sold on later). “Because the payment is based on the level of subsidy two years ago, it will reduce by 10% in real terms every year, with a view to eventual withdrawal altogether,” he says. “With supermarkets having a monopoly, and the option of imports from abroad, prices are simply not going to be obtained. People don't understand the basic requirements of farming.”

He is convinced that the tilt towards the environment at the expense of productivity has gone too far. “We have always in the past managed the two side by side. It has worked perfectly well, and has given us the kind of landscape that the people of Scotland like and want. This new reform is way over the top. The only people who will benefit will be hobby farmers, not real farmers.” He also believes that there will be more red tape, not less. The Rural Stewardship Scheme, which will encourage farmers to plant environmentally friendly crops, to leave wild margins round their fields and to grow hedgerows and plant trees, has introduced a bureaucratic weapon called cross-compliance, which means that any changes made to a farm must comply with certain environmental standards, dictated by the Scottish Executive's rural affairs department.

Irvine sighs heavily at the prospect. “The writing is on the wall,” he says. “This government is not interested in farming, it's only interested in the environment.”

Back at Mersehead, Eric Neilson has few worries on that count. Because the RSPB manages the farm, tiresome details such as the price of beef and the quality of barley are of less concern than whether the spoonbills will be mating this year and how much good nesting ground there is for the curlews. It is, he concedes, an entirely different kind of farming to the one he has been used to. But there is, he insists, just as much satisfaction to be gained from it. “You get to know what height the winter stubble should be cut to, and not to plant the fields where the geese are until mid-April. We have sluices on the ditches, so you can alter the water levels from day to day.”

He still ploughs his fields and keeps sheep to graze the grass, but his crops these days are more likely to be oats than barley, with old-fashioned hay-rigs to give shelter to the birds, and wide margins round every field, where birds can nest. “Wildlife is what it's all about,” he says, “but I still enjoy my farming.”

The results, says Dave Fairlamb, the RSPB officer in charge at Mersehead, have been dramatic. Last year he counted 5,500 teal, 1,200 pintail and 2,000 widgeon among a duck population that has soared in numbers. The reserve is visited by 25,000 barnacle geese, making up more than 1% of the entire north-west European population. Waders such as redshank and spoonbills, have begun to proliferate, and numbers of larks, linnets, yellowhammers and reed bunting have grown. On the day I was there, I saw more skylarks above me than I have seen for years, while out on the marshy ground towards the sea I came across the reserve's small colony of natterjack toads - the first time I'd ever seen one.

Dave would be the first to admit that few farms could contemplate anything as drastic as the Mersehead project. “But there are lessons here for what can be done under the Rural Stewardship Scheme,” he says. “What I am most pleased about is how this is fitting in with the local economy. We have drawn 27,000 visitors over the past five years, and that's good for the shops and bed-and-breakfast places round here. And we've found one thing that should give comfort to farmers: it's essential to have livestock on the ground if you want to attract birds - you've got to have grazing to keep the grass in shape. In some respects what we are doing here is very traditional.”

I doubt if that will be much comfort to James Irvine and his fellow beef-farmers, but what is happening at Mersehead cannot be entirely ignored, as farming absorbs the shock of the new.

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Linklater’s Scotland

Magnus Linklater

Columnist, Scotland on Sunday

Filed 07 Apr 05

Magnus Linklater

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