To see the future, go to the edge and look at the past

Last Sunday, Gill and I took two farming friends from Yorkshire round Wester Ross. We went to Ullapool where we tasted the high standard of seafood on offer at local eateries then went home via Aultbea, Gairloch and Loch Maree.

That route was my old stomping ground when I was in vet practice in the 1980s. I left general vet practice in the 1990s and have had little necessity to take that route since then.

What I saw on Sunday shook me. The demise of food production is almost absolute. The amount of good grazing land that is without stock or will not be cut this year is, for any farmer, incomprehensible. Our friends cannot get over what they saw.

The huge number of crofts that 40 years ago were a thriving community are bare, some derelict, testament to the historic failings of a society which made personal wealth and cheap food among its chief targets. The abandonment and absence of productivity we now see around the huge modern houses that dominate the west coast landscape is a continuing result of that policy. This same scenario is developing around all edges of Scotland.

Our Yorkshire friends commented that some of the hills looked very green. It stopped the conversation when I pointed out that it wasn’t grass they were looking at, it was bracken. Hills that 40 years ago I saw supporting huge numbers of sheep and cattle are now rapidly becoming an extensive monoculture of bracken.

The unintended consequence is the loss of the very wildlife that existed because of the previous farming systems. So far there is not much sign of any new type of wildlife arriving. Monoculture tends not to attract wildlife.

Where once stood modest homes surrounded by well managed fields and common grazings carrying quality stock, supporting hard working families, there now stands rank grass, bracken, broken fences, collapsing buildings, rusting vehicles and machinery, an air of abandonment dotted with big modern houses surrounded by increasing stands of wall-to-wall birchwood, unfettered heather and moorland hosting enclosed areas of ‘natural regeneration’ and commercial forestry. How did this come about? Let’s look back in time for some clues as to how we got here.

I have two reports which I rescued from a rubbish skip in Inverness many, many, years ago (no, it’s not a hobby, it was outside my workplace). They concern research done by students from Glasgow and Nottingham University in 1959 and 1960. They report on interviews with folk in their 80s, 90s and 100s living on the west side of Lewis. The purpose was to gather a human documentary of life in Lewis in the late 1800s. What an insight. It is also an insight that someone considered such documents worthy of being dumped.

Before we go any further, stop and consider this question. What was the west side of Lewis like in the late 1800s? What do you think? I can tell you my answer was completely wrong.

Lewis, in the late 1800s was an island covered from end to end with grass. Yes, you read that correctly. Heather was almost unknown. Stock was predominantly small black cows numbering in the thousands. It was in this period that the land was divided up into what we recognise today as crofts with land quality and productivity being divided amongst the community.

Think about this process. It must have caused tremendous upheaval, rows over equality, access and anything else you can think of. Are there any modern-day parallels such as imposed change, land use change, community empowerment? Consider the position of the then new crofters and their landlords, the individual impacts and feelings. All were players in this change in land use, all affected by the consequences.

In time, it settled down (to a degree as history has shown) and a new order of society, crofting, established itself and was productive. Then came the First World War and a lot of men left Lewis to fight. Many did not return leaving the women of Lewis to carry on crofting. This came to a rapid end in the 1920s when input costs, mainly fuel, rose dramatically. making cattle production unviable. This was repeated in the 1960s leaving not just Lewis, but most of the Western Isles with few cattle. This, as experienced hill farmers, crofters and environmentalists will tell you, changes the flora and fauna.

Consequently, most of Lewis, other islands and the west coast is now covered in heather, trees and another plant now spreading rapidly – bracken.

What precipitated the demise of cattle farming in a time when there was no support system in place? To me it seems straightforward and I stand to be corrected, a lack of profit. Does this reflect what is happening today?

Primary food production systems and practices have been driven by government and then EU policy since World War 2 when the need to increase food security was recognised. Farmers and crofters have been good at delivering these policies; indeed, you could argue, too good. The high levels of support to produce cheap food diverted our attention from the need for profit in our businesses as the support payments were, relative to food values, initially very generous. This has now reversed and the consequences on our West Coast and Islands are there for all to see. Who would take on crofting or farming when the entry costs are so high, the returns so low, the near impossibility of obtaining land, never mind a house are so huge.

The parallels across Scotland with Lewis grow, month by month, year by year. We see land being abandoned, aging owners financially unable to let go due to the tax system, folk unwilling to let their land due to fear of the introduction of the absolute right to buy, margins that in many cases are low or negative and family having to work off farm to make a living or pack up and move away as has happened in the islands over the last 100 years.

Islanders faced similar issues as today’s issues a hundred years ago, but without support payments. It made their decisions somewhat easier but no less hard.

Can this country, with its import dependent food supply chain, its ambitions for local nutritious food production, its nature, biodiversity and climate change targets really afford to have an unprofitable primary food production sector? Can we afford to have vast swathes of potential food producing land converting to whatever the whim of its current owner is, be that an individual, an organisation or a community?

What will be the end game of the current government’s vision for agriculture and its green policies? Will reconnecting support to ‘activity’ be enough to revitalise remote rural and disadvantaged areas? Will it need a profitable agriculture industry as well as support? What will happen to our countryside in the next decade and beyond without a viable, profitable farming industry? Will local farming and crofting communities, nature and biodiversity be the ones that foot the bill?

What does history tell us about the future? For now, I ask you to go to the edge, look at the past and consider your thoughts on our future.