Serious drain on agriculture

When Richard Lochhead comes to constructing the next Scottish Rural Development Programme (SRDP) there should be one word at the front of his mind, and that is drainage.

Looking back over the year it is very obvious that the country’s drainage infrastructure has been found wanting in a serious way.

That doesn’t just apply to fields but to every waterway large or small, right down the river systems.

I have been told by locals — people with experience and knowledge — that the flooding at Comrie last month had more to do with the Ruchill Water being partly blocked by an island that has grown over the years than it had to do with the heavy rain.

If that is the case then building new flood defences is a pretty pointless exercise — surely it would be easier to dredge out the new island and clear the channel. It seems the obvious thing to do. If water can’t get away freely, and if it is held up again further downstream, then that obstacle has to be eased as well.

The problem as far as rivers and burns are concerned is that landowners and managers are terrified to do anything for fear of being prosecuted by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa).

Draconian fines — and I have seen them reported at up to £10,000 — are one thing, but Sepa has a public relations policy of naming and shaming.

Add on the fact that contractors doing the work are also being fined, and it is little wonder that there is such widespread fear.

A year or two back a landowner on the banks of the Earn 20 miles downstream from Comrie told me he had been stopped from removing accumulated gravel from the sweeps of the river even though his family had done so every year for generations.

The result, of course, of leaving the gravel beds is a build-up of water and flooding of land and homes.

Farmers are being faced with similar problems with field ditches.

In what must be one of the daftest water-engineering decisions ever made, it was decreed that only one side of a ditch should be cleared at a time.

It is an impractical task, and for any digger driver with a sense of pride in his work it smacks of a job half-done.

Really, it is time to take a grip of the drainage crisis gripping and often paralysing the country. That is where the next SRDP comes in. Unfortunately it is a bit away thanks to the delays in formulating the new CAP, but hopefully by 2015 there will be a wellfunded SRDP in place.

There will also be a queue of people wanting a share of it, but my contention is that water engineering should become a distinct category for grant aid and stand above all others in terms of priority.

If climate change predictions are correct — and the Scottish Government seems to have fully bought into them — we are in for more wet summers and more what are now called ‘weather events’.

That means more rain and more water to clear.

As this year proved, the field drainage systems across the country are now woefully inadequate. Most of the installations are old. Some date from the post-war era when drainage was valued and subsidised.

Many others go back a century and a half. They simply don’t work now. A well thought-out strategy for Scotland would aid the installation of new field systems with bigger pipes and gravel backfill.

These would lead to ditches both deeper and wider than the present ones, and these in turn would lead into rivers kept clear of obstruction.

Then we would have productive farmland capable of producing food in a wet year, and people living close to waterways wouldn’t have to be worried about being flooded out on a regular basis.

At the same time it would make sense to create irrigation ponds down the line of the streams just in case there is ever a dry summer again. It would be a properly integrated water management system.

We have the diggers to do the job — let’s get the funding in place and get on with the work.