In these strange times, some things change, others don't
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I HOPE you are all keeping safe. In these strange times some things have changed, but others stay the same.
The Scottish Crofting Federation has been trying to stay up to date on a whole range of topics.
We had a telephone meeting with Fergus Ewing (Cabinet Secretary for the Rural Economy) and his officials.
Not surprisingly, staff had been reassigned to work on the pandemic but it was still disappointing to learn that work wasn’t going ahead on the Less Favoured Areas Support Loan Scheme (LFASS )replacement.
Any new mechanism would be likely to favour crofters and hill farmers in the remoter areas.
The plan seems to be to use the second tranche of the Contingency Payments to make up the shortfall in the LFASS payments next year but there was no word on what will happen in 2022.
Nor are we any further forward on what will replace the current system of single farm payments and the other schemes.
So the present set up will probably limp on for a few years yet.
The National Development Plan for Crofting is still going ahead and should be out early autumn with drafts available for comment earlier than that.
We all know that plans in themselves don’t mean anything: it is the actions that come as a result of the plan that count.
So there will be a lot more lobbying to be done yet.
But the Integrated Administration and Control System (IACS) round seems to have gone well as most folks have gone on line – for us, we are getting used to the computer system and nothing changes much from year to year so it was reasonably straightforward.
Due credit must go to the local Rural Payments and Inspections Division (RPID) staff working from home to support crofters and farmers.
Brexit, of course, hasn’t gone away and talks seem to have stalled. To me, it seems crazy that the UK government is determined to stick to an arbitrary and self-imposed deadline when we are still trying to overcome a pandemic.
Surely it makes sense to give ourselves more time to get thing right rather jeopardise people’s livelihoods by rushing something so important.
At the moment, we don’t know what trade rules we will be following in eight months’ time so it is difficult to make rational decisions on, for example, how many ewe lambs to keep for stock. Extending the transition period for two years would give us certainty on trading arrangements for 2021 and time to plan for further ahead. The SCF has written to local MPs to push these views.
Now that we are well past lambing, we have to start thinking about the next tasks.
The Covid-19 rules about shearing look like they can work with a bit of common sense.
Auctions, by all reports, are functioning OK for
now.
But the crucial tests for Lairg and Dingwall will come with the big lamb sales in August and September – which are only two months away.
Crofters are going to have to be able to shift lambs before the autumn and grass starts to run out. Crofting survived foot and mouth so we can survive Covid-19.
