Scottish farming plans 2025: full of promises, short on facts

Long on pious intent and verbiage – short on facts. A rather muddled and ramshackle effort in truth.

There is lots about farming peatland and how it should not be farmed.

Fair enough but why not be clear and say just that. As is usual with the habitual spurious excitement about Climate Change they have entirely missed the key landscape issue in upland Scotland today.

The desk-bound city-dwelling bureaucrats who write all this policy without appearing to speak to farmers or land managers much, need to read the brilliant book (or should I say polemic?) by the renowned ecologist James Fenton, Landscape Change in the Scottish Highlands. Imagination and Reality.

Succinctly put – Scotland’s unique heather and peatland needs conserving not covering in trees. This could also apply to all proper agricultural land.

Let’s plough through the six so called Plans and Audits. The Suckler Cow SSBS 410-day calving nonsense has been comprehensively demolished by John Sleigh in these very pages. Jim Walker added to the furore also.

1. CARBON AUDIT

I remain unconvinced that these are even worth the paper they are printed on as the methodology is dodgy and they tell me little I don’t already know. I have now done two over the last five years and they served no purpose that I could see.

2. WHOLE FARM PLAN

I did my first one in the 1990s with LEAF. Very helpful and insightful with helpful and practical achievable outcomes. They are the only useful proposal in the July 2024 letter.

3. BIODIVERSITY AUDIT.

These will prove fancy and expensive I have no doubt.

I can write mine myself on half a sheet of A4 for my mixed Aberdeenshire farm.

Good outcomes: From ponds and hedges and small woodlands and beetle banks and unsprayed headlands and LERAPS next to watercourses and more.

A lot of this is already covered by Farm Assurance. The latter of course has always suffered from the manner in which it was first introduced. Top down not bottom up – just like the July letter. And of course the inevitable duplication much loved by bureaucrats the world over.

Poor outcomes: Include too many badgers (and soon wild boar and beavers – help!)

Too many feral cats. Too much docken and ragwort and thistles. Not as many curlews as just a few years ago.

My experience with Forestry Scotland has been mixed. It has certainly taught me that forestry needs to be more European ie multi-species, multi-year, multi-outcome, and less clear felling should be practised.

Monoculture of Sitka Spruce (a remarkable tree nonetheless) is bad for biodiversity. The bureaucracy is excessive, intrusive and sometimes downright rude. Edinburgh can be appalling, the regions less so.

The abolition of the old Private Woodland Officers many years ago was a backward step.

Farm forestry is a misnomer, it does not work, is hopelessly supported by government and good old SGRPID in their SFP Form can only refer to it as generic exclusion.

So clearly it does not exist for them.

4. SOIL ANALYSIS

Any self-respecting serious farmer does this on a regular basis anyway.

5. ANIMAL HEALTH PLAN

Fine but largely covered by Farm Assurance.

6. PEST MANAGEMENT PLAN

More needless intervention as no farmer wants to waste money on agrochemicals.

Where did all the talk about ‘we promise to reduce the paper burden on farmers’ go?

What a shame the SNP in their shameless desire to do something different in Scotland have failed to enlarge/evolve the successful Environmental Schemes that have proved their VFM (value for money) and Biodiversity Gain credentials over many years.

They were cheap and varied all over the farmed landscape.

In Galloway stone dykes were rebuilt. In Buchan small woodlands and hedges were created. And so on.

My conclusions? Vague and unprofessional – needs a complete rethink. Clearly if any version of this feeble effort is implemented it should not apply to crofts or small farms (perhaps below 50 acres).

If an attempt to encourage greener farming is desired this is not the way to achieve that.

To maintain food production and food security and make biodiversity gain there are tried and tested ways of doing that. Farmers who are reluctant to adopt greener practices should be offered carrots ££s and help they cannot resist.

Regenerative farming is difficult to introduce and can affect profits for a year or three.

I detect the sticky fingers of green NGOs all over this policy plot such as RSPB FOE Greenpeace etc whose knowledge of real coalface farming in Scotland is limited. They do not speak to farmers enough. I would have preferred something more like what has developed in England - after a few iterations.

Schemes with clear biodiversity outcomes that are measurable and paid for fairly.