Advice is raining down in Farmer’s view

Longdistance haulage of straw adds to its cost. Who’d have believed it?

April is the cruellest month’ is the first line of a poem by TS Elliot.

Well, ain’t that the truth? It’s usually a hard month but this April is the bleakest and most desperate in living memory.

The title of the poem is The Wasteland, an apt description for the bare countryside, yellowed by brutally-cold gales and snow.

Last year’s dreich summer prompted the Cabinet Secretary to set up a weather advisory panel (WAP) to advise farmers and crofters on coping with bad weather.

It’s something they’ve had to do for themselves since time immemorial, but it seems that they now need advice on “feed budgeting” and “resilience”.

Reports of WAP meetings reveal that the panel was briefed by the Met Office and was told that the west is wet, the east is drier, and in future Scotland’s weather would be unpredictable.

Accurate forecasting of UK weather beyond five days is a notoriously inexact science, but nevertheless part of the WAP remit is to develop targeted forecasts to enable farmers to plan better, even though the seasonality of farming cannot change.

Meanwhile, the beast from the east and its return visit came and went without a cheep from WAP. Still, the horizon was scanned and it was thought that the impact of last year’s weather might persist into next winter, and since no agriculture-related initiative is complete without workshops, SAC was appointed to deliver them.

While waiting for WAP workshops on resilience and feed budgeting, farmers can go online to SAC’S Farm Advisory Service (FAS), set up with £20 million of SRDP funding, where updates on coping with bad weather are available.

The recommendations on the FAS list include nothing that farmers haven’t been doing for years, and it’s money for old rope. As for its advice on spreading fertiliser on cold, waterlogged ground? Least said about that the better!

SAC was also commissioned to investigate the effects of the weather on forage quality and the price and availability of straw. Really?

What did it cost the public purse to discover that limited supplies plus rising demand equals increase in price? It’s a simple, basic rule of economics. Long-distance haulage of straw adds to its cost. Who’d have believed it?

Slatted housing, planting shelter belts for outwintering sucklers, and shifting cows off-farm were identified as solutions to straw shortages. Maybe farmers will just decide that it’ll be easier not to keep cows!

With its talking shops and workshops, Scotgov has more shops than Glasgow’s Buchanan Street, creating the impression of ‘busyness’ and action, but it does nothing to lift spirits to know that WAP and SAC are on the case for next year.

It’s the here and now that matters to farmers at their wit’s end trying to keep livestock fed, and it’s most likely to be the suppliers and feed merchants who will be supporting them through the coming weeks and months.

As for WAP and FAS, there may be a bright future for them, teaching grandma to suck eggs!