Make our message heard
ICALCULATED last week the number of meals we provided a year from our small farm sites. It turned out to be around 18 million - not bad for one of the smaller salmon farming companies in Scotland. I compared this to my beef and sheep farm, which is approximately 1,000 acres. (I estimate that the combined area of Loch Duart’s sites would be half of that area at maximal measurement).
We sell around 350 lambs and 120 beasts away a year. I reckon that yields, on a very crude basis, about 480,000 meals a year.
It’s a useful comparison when you consider how much area we use as an industry to create food for so many.
Of course, the inputs are different and many will argue that we have a different sustainability threshold, but these are different arguments.
of the area we are provided with.
When you think about the inordinately arduous process of attaining about.We have to get the message out that we use the small area we are allowed to have so well.
UK has a population north of 60 million. It is such a small percent produce a huge amount of the nation’s meals.
Agriculture employs around half a million people, whereas we are fewer than 10,000. When you look at legislation or public comprehension, agriculture is very poorly understood, despite the fact that there are regular television programmes to try and explain the industry.
How on earth, then, can the public ever begin to understand the complexity of what we do in a medium that few ever travel on, let alone in (the sea)?
- print. Our industry is disparate and spread out. Communication is hard
message across, how much harder is it for us, the new kid on the block?
Yet coordinate and communicate we must, both individually and as an industry, and we have to get better and better at it.
All rural businesses which develop or enhance our natural systems are going to become more challenged.
As can be seen from Environment Secretary Michael Gove’s speech on agriculture earlier this month, the logic of the town is to encourage more and more of the countryside to stop food production and increase access.
We will face further legislation designed to ensure that those who have hobbies in the countryside can exercise their rights. I am not suggesting they should not, but that we will have to this backdrop.
see a counter to all of the letters that have taken over our industry -AGD, PGD, CGD and so on. Our industry has faced many challenges and overcome them. I am sure that we will solve these ones in time, too.
The bigger problem of our image will still be an issue long after I am gone but this only means that we have to try harder and spend more on it.
rung and another year of this fantastic industry starts.
May I wish all of you who I know a won all of you who I do not know, the same, but I hope I get to meet you and learn more about what you do this year.