A world away from 50 years ago – but not all has changed
As no one else remembers a report on The Scotsman’s farming page in early November 1969 about the Scottish ploughing championship at Drem, East Lothian, I’ll have to point out its significance.
It was my first article for The Scotsman. Sent out into the throbbing world of daily newspaper reporting by my new boss, the late Robert (Bob) Urquhart after two years on the weekly Farming News, I was as excited as it is possible to be by a ploughing championship.
So excited that I hung about my new office – one of four glass-sided cubicles in a room Bob and I shared with music critic, drama critic and the rugby reporters in what is now The Scotsman hotel – until copies of the next day’s first edition were delivered to the newsroom.
There it was. All my own work, bringing news to the nation, or at least that small part of it that read the farming section in what was now my paper. Fortunately the readership included my father, a lifelong Scotsman reader who thought Bob a good writer and astute commentator on farming. We were both proud, and I don’t use the word lightly, that I was now to appear regularly on the same page.
Well, well, not for the for first time the thought occurs “long ago and far away”. How farming has changed in the past halfcentury. Back in 1969 Scottish farming was dominated by pedigree livestock shows and sales, now … Oh, hang on a minute.
There are now many more breeds of sheep and cattle, most originating in other European countries, than there were 50 years ago, but the priority has always been with each new breed not to test and record, but to form a breed society and establish pedigree points.
Ludicrous prices are still paid for bulls and rams that have nothing to do with commercial values by the “form a circle” of “top” breeders.
Thankfully the rest of the farming world has moved on. One of my early jobs was reporting pedigree pig sales at Gorgie with the ebullient Bert Brydon as auctioneer – bowler hat clamped on, flower in buttonhole, massive and red faced, bawling, “Full of pigs and profit!” as a pregnant Large White sow waddled round the ring.
Bert is long gone, as is Edinburgh’s Gorgie market, where Cliff Bosomworth used to conduct interminable Hereford bull sales, selling a bull every three funereal minutes. That compared with Roley Fraser bouncing up and down on the rostrum knocking them down every 30 seconds at Perth, earning the gratitude of reporters keen to write up and phone copy as soon as possible.
Pedigree pig sales are also long gone as pig farmers, like poultry and egg producers – and to be fair the more forward-thinking beef, sheep and dairy farmers – learned to produce what shoppers wanted by relying not on the good looks of their animals and paying silly prices but on selection based on recording, performance tests and the most up-to-date breeding and feeding methods.
Crop production has also changed. A running story in the early 1970s was the closure of Cupar sugar beet factory. But when Cupar inevitably closed, farmers adjusted by using the 16,000 acres of beet ground lost – and subsequently many more – to produce with great skill and top management the wide range of vegetable crops now grown in the east of Scotland.
Machinery has changed most dramatically. As an irate engineer once told me, the so-called farming revolution of the past halfcentury is actually an engineering revolution. Today’s 300 horsepower, £200,000 tractors and implements the size of a smallbushavereplacedthe 60 horsepower Fordsons and little grey Fergies.
We all have regrets and I wish I had written much more about engineering and scientific developmentsinfarmingandinnovative and entrepreneurial farmers and much, much less about pedigree shows and sales and moaning, nit-picking, farming politics that seemed important at the time.
Oh, hang on again, farming politics hasn’t changed much either – every week another crisis, a grudging “half a loaf” response to any government action, still a belief that bigger subsidies are the answer. Beam me up, Scotty.