There can be few sights that resonate more with us than spring lambs in the Scottish countryside. Thankfully, the weather this year has been much kinder to our hard-working sheep farmers, crofters and shepherds, and most would acknowledge that that has allowed for a good lambing season.
We have a lot of sheep in Scotland—there are about 2.6 million breeding ewes on 13,000 holdings. In total, there are about 24,500 farms, crofts and smallholdings now with sheep.
Of course, the concept of sheep on our hills was once controversial, but, ironically, they now help us to keep people on the land, with many farms and crofts using land that is not productive for other purposes to rear sheep.
We are also seeing a more diverse sector, with more traditional and native breeds making a comeback. If anyone has watched “This Farming Life”, they will be aware that breeds completely new to Scotland are beginning to feature.
As the Cabinet Secretary for Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform has just said, all sectors will have a role to play in addressing the climate emergency, and farming is no exception. The sheep sector is already doing so—its grazing systems produce high-quality meat with low inputs. However, we must go further and faster, and I will fully involve the sector to develop new tools and production methods to better address climate change.
Working with farmers to make change happen is crucial and has underpinned how we have taken forward the key recommendations for Government from “The Scottish sheep sector review”, or the Scott review.
Our approach to traceability and provenance is key to that. We have introduced electronic tagging to create a robust recording and traceability system through markets and abattoirs. The data is held in ScotEID, which is an electronic identification system. That allows keepers to maintain their own information and makes compliance with the necessary sheep tracing legislation easier.
The system’s effectiveness enabled the Scottish Government to win a dispensation from the European Commission, to allow for incomplete reads to be acceptable in the common agricultural policy cross-compliance regime. That represented a significant win for Scotland.
The European Commission is proposing to change the rules through a new animal health regulation. The proposed changes would have been difficult for the particular circumstances of our sheep sector, which can often involve movements during a sheep’s lifetime in Scotland and across the United Kingdom from birth to fattening to finishing.
There has been a significant period of engagement with the European Commission to make the case for our current excellent sheep traceability system in Scotland to continue. I have corresponded with and met Commissioner Andriukaitis, and Scottish officials have worked closely with their UK Government counterparts to secure their support as well. In particular, I thank Alyn Smith and Catherine Stihler for their work as MEPs, alongside key stakeholder bodies, on the issue.
The European Commission’s consultation is live and I strongly urge Scotland’s sheep farmers and crofters to respond to it. They need to make their views known in support of the current wording of the new regulation.
Last year, the Scottish Government supported the sector’s efforts to persuade the European Union to introduce an allowance for alternative methods of ageing lambs for the purposes of removal of specified risk material—a key control for BSE.
The new method would have removed the need for manual dentition checks on lambs, replacing it with a much simpler date-based cut-off, saving the industry in Scotland and across Great Britain millions of pounds.
The Scottish Government and Food Standards Scotland have worked with the industry to develop an implementation plan and protocol. It would have given effect to a key recommendation of the Scott review, so we amended legislation and were preparing to go ahead.
However, as a result of Brexit uncertainty, the UK Government did not want that change to go ahead. It was concerned that continuing to argue for a differential position for Scotland and Great Britain would impact adversely on the UK’s application for third country status. In short, our sheep farming sector in Scotland was seen as expendable.
We have continued to press the issue, but the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs recently determined that it could not prioritise it, as we have in Scotland. Nor could we go it alone, given that that would mean that Scottish sheep farmers would be subject to different systems across the UK, adding complexity that would make sales in other parts of the UK impossible. Therefore, I have reluctantly agreed that we shall not be proceeding with that change until next year.
Of course, none of the everyday challenges of sheep farming compare with the overwhelming risk that Brexit represents. The reckless attitude of the UK Government and its failure to take no deal off the table threaten to make the export trade in sheep meat completely unviable. We may now have a stay of execution until 31 October, but no deal remains a very real risk.
No deal would result in our lamb exports being subject to the EU’s full most favoured nation tariffs of 40 per cent or more. That would increase the price for EU markets, have the potential to cause domestic prices to fall by around 30 per cent and reduce competitiveness. Therefore, officials across the UK continue to work on a proposed compensation scheme for the sheep sector to address the potential fallout. Our preferred option is a headage scheme.
Although we welcome undertakings from Michael Gove that the UK Government will pay all the costs arising from a no-deal Brexit, the UK Government must now make clear how much money it will make available for a compensation scheme. The best option, of course, is for our sheep sector to be able to sell its product, so we continue to explore how to keep markets open and grow new ones.
More people in Scotland and the UK buying Scotch lamb would help. Last year, we gave Quality Meat Scotland £200,000 to support its campaign to promote Scotch lamb. The impact was significant, with a 27 per cent increase in spend per buyer on lamb during the promotional period. We want to build on that success, so I can announce today that this Government will provide Quality Meat Scotland with an additional £200,000 to support marketing activity in the coming year, to help it to continue to promote Scotch lamb to people here at home.
Additionally, after years of pressing, we have persuaded the UK Government to repatriate the meat levy. Amendments have been made to the UK Agriculture Bill to allow that to happen, but to get the UK scheme established, it is vital that the bill makes progress at Westminster; it has been parked for months now. With the help of key stakeholder bodies, whose input was vital, we will help to deliver an additional £1.5 million to support our quality meat sector including Scotch lamb, so I want to deliver a clear message to Michael Gove: get on with it.
Protecting livelihoods is also one of the reasons why we are supporting efforts to address livestock worrying and predation. Reports of attacks are increasing, and those of you who have seen photographs in the press and on social media recently will no doubt have been shocked as me. I am fully supportive of Emma Harper’s proposed bill to update the law on that issue.
We have commissioned research to gather more evidence on the scale of the problem and to explore the impacts on animals and on farmers, their families and businesses. We continue to support campaigns by SPARC—the Scottish partnership against rural crime—and NFU Scotland to raise awareness and encourage more responsible dog control in areas where there are livestock.
As we saw last year from the terrible impact of the beast from the east weather on lambing and the toll that that took on farmers, families and communities, climate and landscape are key components of successful sheep farming. That is why we established the sheep and trees initiative in 2016 to provide support to improve the productivity of hill-farming enterprises.
Trees planted in the right place can provide important shelter and extend out-wintering, thus improving productivity while maintaining flock size on a reduced grazing area. The initiative is working; since 2016 more than 400 crofters and farmers across Scotland have been awarded £70 million in forestry grants to help them to integrate new woodlands into their farming enterprises.
Although more than 80 per cent of applications for grants to create more woodlands are now from farmers and crofters, the role of agroforestry and diversified and low-carbon land use will only increase as we respond to the climate emergency. We will support the sheep sector to play its part, as we do already through CAP payments.
Many sheep farmers will have benefited from this year’s loan schemes. The less favoured area support scheme, in particular, made sure that farmers and crofters got additional support in early spring. In April, we started making 2018 LFASS payments, and I advise that, next week, a further tranche of payments, worth approximately £15 million, will begin to arrive in bank accounts. Around 2,600 farmers and crofters will receive money, which means that nearly 8,100 farmers and crofters will have been paid since April, with more than £39 million directly supporting remote rural and island communities.
Only Scotland provides that additional help to our most marginalised farmers and crofters, many of them in the sheep sector. This Government remains absolutely committed to getting financial help to those who need it most.
We value the significant contribution that Scotland’s sheep sector makes, not just to the rural economy but to our landscape, our culture and our heritage. Brexit threatens to remove sheep from our hills and people from our land. We cannot let that happen. I want to assure everyone in Scotland’s sheep sector that this Government will continue to support them. We will always stand up for their interests and we will keep making the case for Scotland to stay in the EU, as the best way to protect their interests.