Chamber and committees

The process started long before I became a parliamentarian, let alone a minister. It started with farmer-led groups. As I mentioned in the earlier session, they agreed with the Government that they wanted and needed to change the way things were going. They knew that the systems would change. So, those farmer-led groups were established and what we are working on now came from that. I was not involved in all the iterations of the story, but that is how we got to this place.

The baselining that Rhoda Grant touched on is something that will help businesses; it will help their profitability. What we are trying to do is make this better for everyone.

So, the story for me is as follows. We came out of the EU against our will, we are now in a position where we have to develop processes and systems that will allow us to continue to support our agricultural and crofting communities, we are working in co-design—I push back on the suggestion that the conversation is a one-way street, because I do not think that it is; I think that it is very much a two-way street—and we are getting to the point where we will get things done. We are going to start making things happen.

As I said in the earlier session, I understand that people do not want to be doing things that they did not have to do in the past, but huge amounts of public money go into farming and crofting every year, and we have to be able to justify that. One thing that I want from this is to get us to the point where we can answer anyone who asks us, as the Parliament, or the farming industry, why we are justified in paying so much money.

We are already seeing that conversation happening on the inheritance tax that was proposed by the United Kingdom Government. It creates a division. It creates a “them and us” situation, and I am trying to get to a point where we are not in that position and where the public funding that we put into agriculture and crofting is accepted as doing something and delivering for the people, as well as for the communities, that receive it. That is the purpose behind this, as far as I am concerned.

So, if you ask me what the story is, I say that it started a number of years ago with the farmer-led groups, and it got us to the current position whereby we are trying to do everything that we can to support our farming rural communities with public funding.

That was discussed, was it not?

Do you want to answer that, Brian?

The farmer will decide whether they want to keep a barren cow, knowing that, even if she does get in calf the following year, they will not get a payment for that calf. I know from being a suckler herd owner in a past life that having a barren cow for a year was bad enough, but if I knew that I was not going to get a payment for her calf the following year, I would certainly have to consider whether I was going to keep her.

You might have reasons for wanting to keep a particular cow; they might have a particular genetic background that you want to hold on to, for example, or there might be some other mitigating rationale for why you would want to keep her—she might have stood on a calf or whatever—but it will not be our job to go around and check for barren cows. We will be making the payment on the calves that meet the eligibility criteria, which will encourage farmers to reduce the number of passengers that they keep in the herd, as it will affect their economic viability. Therefore, our job will be to ensure that we are making payments on the calves that are born into the scheme, as opposed to forcing people to cull cows that we think are inefficient.

Yes, work was done on seasonality, but I think that the consideration was more about the period between autumn calving and spring calving and whether those calves might drop out of the system.

I ask my officials whether any work was done specifically on autumn calving herds.

Yes.

You are asking me to look three years into the future. I do not know what the support would look like in three years’ time. Every time that I speak to committees and to farming communities, I stress that I want to do everything that I can to protect the beef sector to ensure that it is viable and has a critical mass so that Scotland can continue to produce top-quality beef. That is my aim. We will have to balance that alongside the other challenges that we face, but I will always be thinking about how we ensure that the industry’s viability is stable or that it improves.

We are going to monitor that as we go along.

You have gone way beyond the remit of the SSI.

We want to maintain and restore peatlands and wetlands. As you know, that is the purpose of the GAEC standards. We are concerned about actions that would dry out or damage those areas. Any use of adjacent land that would dry out those areas will be subject to regulation and will be part of any overall inspection that a farmer is subject to. That is when the assessment will happen.