In post-pandemic world the show must go on...
In years to come we shall look back at 2020 as a time when all the normal agricultural activities were swept aside by the pandemic. Organisers of shows, open days and every other normal feature of Scottish farming life vanished or, at best, appeared in a virtual or truncated video form.
The interesting part of the enforced change is how much of it will be temporary with a quick reversion to the old traditional events and ways of doing things and how many of the previous practices have been crushed out of sight forever by the Covid bulldozer.
Take an easy example: meetings.
One computer-based development that has come of age during the pandemic is the use of virtual or video meetings where banks of talking heads form a socially distant substitute for face-toface meetings in faraway places.
This has been a breakthrough for many farmers who have rapidly become conversant with the new technology. They see benefits not only in saved time and money in travelling but, as one farmer whose computer is in his farm office and not in the best room in the house remarked: “You can sit there in yer dungarees wi’ yer boots on.”
He has also learned that his nose does not need to be two inches from the screen as the resulting image is that of an anteater with a large proboscis. He and others have found it is also important to keep any marauding children or pets out of sight.
It is a fairly safe bet that many farmers’ meetings in future will be conducted by Zoom, team Skype or some other video conferencing system.
Such meetings deliver when the subject matter is business or knowledge transfer but they are a dead loss when it comes to the social chat or gossip with the cup of tea or drink in the bar before and/or after traditional meetings.
Apart from the loss of the admittedly inessential social chat, this further step to a computerdominated future is well and good but it falls down on other counts. The first is it does nothing for those who have not kept up with the technology or, as a colleague observed, those who do not have a child or grandchild to press the buttons in order to access the otherwise ethereal information.
Many years have passed since, at the beginning of the computer age, a friend advised me to keep up to scratch with new technology. While many other pieces of advice have come in one ear and out the other, I have tried to keep up to the mark with all the wonders that computers now confer on our daily lives.
It has not been easy and many a time I have had to revert to thinking that if some callow youth can press the buttons in the correct order then so can I.
Sometimes I have had to resist giving the box of tricks a good kick to encourage it to behave itself but mostly, with gritted teeth, I have kept up to date with all developments in the computer world.
However, there will be a percentage of farmers who do not feel up to grappling with the new technology, just as some of their forebears thought tractors would never replace horses.
There will also be some farmers whose isolated location does not permit any worthwhile broadband and whose attempts to join the internet are what could be called a buffering experience, with every shudder, flicker and freezing frame mocking politicians’ promises of superfast broadband in all parts of the country.
If meetings have changed forever, the one part of farming life that has not been compensated for during lockdown has been the social side. Thus it will be that, post-pandemic, the traditional rural Scottish summer filled with agricultural shows will return.
Seemingly against economic logic, shows will return with volunteers putting in hours of unpaid labour in erecting pens while exhibitors spend oodles of energy into bringing out their livestock not for financial gain but just for the bragging rights and plain old one-upmanship.
And yet, as we will learn this week, that seemingly most solid of shows, the Highland Show, has questions posed by its auditors on its viability. Some things have changed but others such as shows will resurrect themselves as they have a social imperative in the farming sector.