THE WEATHER

Comment Andrew Arbuckle

The Tay, which I can see from my house, is said to have one of the largest tidal flows in the country. Covering agricultural events over the past four decades has resembled a tidal river, sometimes full on side to side, while at others quite reduced in scope and surface covered.

Up to the early 1990s and devolution, there was a Scottish minister in charge of agriculture but most decisions were made in Westminster or Brussels.

Scottish journalists would trudge south to events such as the Smithfield Show and the Royal Show, intent on catching policy guidelines and political gossip from the UK minister.

Whencapreformwason the agenda we would take off for Brussels to find out how talks were proceeding. Mostly these trips were fruitless as Agricultural Council meetings were held behind closed doors. Occasionally, messengers emerged from the smokefilled rooms – as they were in those days. Their role was to brief the Press but we soon found out all they were doing was spinning their particular line.

The best method of understanding the direction of EU policy travel was to leave the official buildings and go round the corner to the Irish pub where well informed people mingled. This venue was also far more hospitable, and incidentally is still believed to be the best listening post for farm policy gossip. When agriculture became a devolved subject, we had our own farming minister in Scotland and there was not the same need to travel to London where a seemingly neverending

0 Covering farming has been like watching the Tay’s tidal flow procession of people were appointed as ministers to look after the agriculture portfolio before they were shuttled back into well-deserved anonymity.

Scottish farming ministers looked after the industry north of the Border, only occasionally having a moan about the UK seat in the EU Agricultural Council meeting being taken by some newly appointed UK minister with responsibility for fishing.

With the devolution of politics, the agri hacks’ links with other organisations in England withered.

The arrival of Quality Meat Scotland gave a special impetus to promoting red meat produced in this country. We no longer needed the Meat and Livestock Commission, as it was then, to promote our beef and lamb.

Other relationships such as the link between the NFU north and south of the Border waned during this time as English policies were no longer relevant.

And that is how matters stood until the Brexit vote came along. This appears to have caused the tide to change again.

The European link is seemingly broken but, as time may prove, we journalists will probably have to keep an eye on what Europe is up to as it is pretty certain that trade deals will often be brokered on European standards.

UK ministers have also made it clear they want to hold on to some of the main agricultural support policies for up to another seven years so that there is a Ukwide framework that will in future ensure cross-border trading between Scotland and England.

They also want commonality on UK policies on such matters as animal and plant health and plant protection products and possibly more controversially on genetic modification.

Just how the northsouth battle over these issues develops is difficult to predict but, as it stands, we journalists will have to keep up to speed on what is happening in England.

Similarly, at least until the new policies are in place, the farmers’ unions will require to work more collaboratively than has been the case for the past 20 years. NFU Scotland is already making more visits to Westminster than it did in the previous two decades as it tries to pin down the politicians who will decide farming’s future.

It is interesting to note that recent QMS press releases are heralding the co-operation that exists between it and the English and Welsh meat promotional bodies.

Admittedly this is as a result of a shotgun marriage along with a £2 million dowry born out of an inability to sort out to whom the levies taken on slaughtered livestock belonged.

But it is there and, in a post-brexit world with our European market far from assured, this combining of resources might just be a sensible solution in seeking out new markets.

Like the Tay, with its rising and falling tides, agricultural journalists’ horizons keep shifting.