Chamber and committees

Yes.

There is no reluctance at all—I refute the idea that there is any reluctance to give you the information. Iain Carmichael has spent his winter going around crofting communities to speak to people and be part of the conversation.

When we were on the earlier agenda item, I think that I said that some people do not want to do this because, previously, receiving the money did not depend on doing these things. However, that has changed. There will be a requirement to be part of the scheme, and that will require people to do certain things. That has been communicated by the Government. We have sent out letters to every crofter and farmer in the country—they should have those letters. Iain Carmichael and his team have engaged widely across the communities, and there has always been the opportunity for people to feed back.

I accept that Beatrice Wishart wrote to me previously, but my understanding up to this point was that we were in a comfortable place, that people understood what was coming and that they were on board. We were then not in the right place, but that does not mean that we had not done an enormous amount of work to get us to the point at which we thought that we were in the right place and that people were all on board. Perhaps Iain Carmichael would like to add to that.

Yes.

Okay—you will not be surprised to know that I disagree with you. I do not think that this is a boorach. I definitely think that it has been complicated for all of us to try to work our way through this, and I do not dispute that, but it is not a boorach.

The rural support plan is, as I have just outlined, what we will have at the other end of this. We are going through the just transition, and we are working with the farming community to ensure that what we are bringing forward fits with its expectations but also aligns with the policy objectives that the Scottish Government has set and that are expected by the public for the money that we are putting into the sector.

We will all see what the whole picture looks like. I do not know all the answers at this stage, because we have not had the full conversations about all the bits that will be added to the support plan at the other end of the process. I can guarantee that, if I did have all the answers, every one of you sitting round this committee table would be asking if I had thought about this or that. That is the whole point about the method that we are using. Martin Kennedy said that we need to take the industry with us. This is us effectively trying to take the industry with us in order to deliver what is expected.

We are bringing the SSIs to you to approve or not—that is the prerogative of the committee—and we will have these conversations, but I do not accept that this is a boorach. I accept that the situation is complicated, and I accept that there are things on which we would have liked to be clearer from the outset, but they were never going to clear from the start, because this is a complicated matter.

Some of that is fairly technical, so we might write to you with that technical detail. An early list of measures was shared with key stakeholders, including ARIOB, and we are looking at delivering a number of different elements. As we move forward, there will be greater reach in what we will require people to do.

One of the great pleasures of my current job is that I was able to visit Amy Geddes’s arable farm near Arbroath. She has fully embraced the EFA-type stuff that is available at the moment. Her work is really inspiring.

Yes. A lot of support is available via the farm advisory service, the rural payments and inspections division area offices and the route map. Farmers can look to a number of areas.

We have already provided financial support for carbon audits and soil sampling. A lot of information is available to farmers as they work out what they want to do in relation to their farms.

No. I am going to look at why people are not coming back to us with their concerns sooner, when they have told us previously that they are content to do something. That concerns me. When an organisation that has said, “We have had the conversation, we have listened to the evidence, we know what you are trying to do and we are comfortable with that” and then sends me a letter, two or three weeks before the start of an initiative, that says, “We are not comfortable with any of that,” I want to understand what is going on, and I will pursue that. However, I absolutely push back on the suggestion that we have not co-designed things.

We have spent an inordinate amount of time—rightly—speaking to all the stakeholders that are involved in trying to get Scotland to be a world leader in regenerative agriculture, which allows us to produce food and do all the things that all of us in this room have agreed that we want to do. I will pursue why the situation that I described is happening at those stages, because that is not where I want to be and it is not conducive to having the right kind of conversations here.

I will ask Iain Carmichael to come in. He has been dealing specifically with this issue.

The route map has set stuff out from the start.

I have just had a quick check with James Muldoon—we are talking about probably starting to implement stuff properly in the autumn of this year.

I think that you are right. On day 1, we set out the vision, which is that we want to continue to be able to produce, in this country, the food that the country needs, and we want to support our farmers in the best way that we can.

A lot of the stuff that we are trying to deliver now came from the farmer-led groups. You will remember the five farmer-led groups; off the top of my head, I cannot remember what they were called. They looked at their sectors and asked how they could reduce the emissions from their practices while continuing to be sustainable. We are trying to bring all those things together. For months, the members of those groups discussed how they would deliver stuff.

One of my frustrations in talking about farming is to do with the fact that farming is vast. An upland farmer will have nothing in common with an arable farmer, a dairy farmer or a pig farmer. It is a vast area. We are trying to bring all those things together and ask, “How do we produce food?” That is the question at its simplest. How do we produce food in such a way that we can feed the country but also meet the objectives of the policy?

I see that the convener is indicating to me that I should wind up. Clearly, I am talking too much. I am passionate, convener.