I would sum up the situation by saying that there has been no single impact on the agricultural farming sector, but when we drill down into the different sectors, whether we are talking about dairy, beef, lamb, soft fruit production, specialist crops or the cereals sector, we see that all sectors have experienced different impacts, largely due to supply chain issues, particularly early on in the lockdown.
I will come on to the availability of people to work on farms, which is an issue that has particularly affected the ornamental sector, the veg sector and the soft fruit sector.
First, I will go back a step. The first real impact of the lockdown for the agriculture sector was not about supplies beyond the farm gate and ensuring that the supply chain continued to function; it was actually to do with all the services and businesses that provide inputs to agriculture businesses. We were at a critical point in the year. March is the start of spring work, with calving, lambing, sowing of cereals and all the rest of it. At that point, there were grave concerns about the availability of seed, feed, fertiliser and fuel. Even the availability of sawdust was an issue, because sawmills had closed down, and availability of sawdust is an animal welfare issue for the people who use it. The availability of personal protective equipment is an on-going issue for people who use PPE all year round, in pig and poultry units and so on. There has been a vast array of different issues and challenges.
A huge number of businesses provide services or inputs to the agriculture sector across the rural economy. Because agriculture was largely enabled to keep going, as one of the critical national infrastructure components, the impacts have largely been okay for the wider rural economy. I echo the concerns that were expressed earlier about the lack of—or slow issuing of—guidance on social distancing and the appropriate measures that are needed to ensure that social distancing is robust and demonstrable in various situations, but we have engaged very much with the Scottish Government and other agencies on that and I think that the matter is well and truly settled.
You asked about different sectors. The dairy sector had some short-term and hard-hitting impacts as we switched away from drinking lots of milk from Costa Coffee and so on and it became all about retail. Depending on farms’ contracts and the processors with which they were aligned, there were different impacts. I think that Scotland fared far better than other areas—certainly the south-east of England. At one point, we faced the prospect of empty milk shelves in the supermarkets at a time when some dairy farmers faced the prospect of having to pour milk away, which seemed ridiculous. We are over that particular challenge.
The lamb price collapsed but then recovered very quickly. The beef sector has gone through a number of challenges, partly because of the need to realign the sector—I see the convener wagging his finger at me, so I will make this quick.
There are on-going concerns around the cereals sector that we are yet to fully understand, because of the slow-down but not necessarily the full stopping of the distilling sector and because of the possible overhang of supplies of grain that are already in store, given that we are about to hit the harvest—certainly, spring barley will be harvested next month. Where we will be in October remains to be seen.
Finally, I come to soft fruits. The availability of people to harvest fruit and veg is very important, and it remains an on-going issue because we are right at the crunch time for that.
So, yes, the impacts are variable. To go back to the original question, they include agri-tourism, fly-tipping, access and lots of other things that I could mention, but I hope that they are pretty much documented in our submission.
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