THE door permitting submissions to Brian Pack and his committee members has now clanged shut, allowing them to consider the various thoughts put forward by individuals and organisations who want to shape the future of farm support in Scotland.
Not unexpectedly, one of the most radical thoughts comes from former SAC chief and ice-cream and potato crisp supremo, Maitland Mackie.
His submission urges Pack – who at one stage in his career worked for Mackie – to firstly consider the global
scene in setting the agenda for Scotland.
Mackie sees a world where energy becomes more costly, and because one of the main fertilisers used in crop production, ammonium nitrate, is made from using fossil fuels, this main ingredient in crop production will also rise in price.
Mackie's answer – which is in line with a theme he has propounded for a couple of years –is to move away from fossil fuels into renewable energy.
His support for community-owned wind energy projects is well known, but his paper to Pack provides examples of tremendous returns on capital for those farmers working with local villages and towns to create small-scale energy projects.
Mackie has always been a free marketeer and it is no surprise when he dismisses out of hand the "somewhat romantic notion of 'local foods for local use'".
This is a nonsense, he claims when the cost of taking one kilo of lamb from New Zealand to Southampton by ship is considerably less than taking it from Caithness to southern England.
Scottish farming should move away from its subsidy culture by concentrating more on the market and working out how a competitive edge can be gained, he says. In order to get more for the primary producer, he wants to see more farming ventures linking up so that downstream benefits can be gained.
He is sure that food prices will rise as a result of scarcity and this will put more money into the industry – but, before this happens, he accepts there might have to be a short-term policy with a focus on keeping and enhancing skills, particularly those to do with livestock.
Moving his attention to reducing the carbon footprint, Mackie urges more scientific work to be carried out on minimum tillage. He has used this technique at his own farm base at Westerton, Rothienorman in Aberdeenshire for most of the past decade and claims a reduction in carbon loss by doing so. Additionally, organic matter has increased in these soils, as have worm counts.
There is a reduced need for fertilisers in soils with higher organic matter and the overall loss of climate change gases into the atmosphere is minimised.
Scotland should also be more aware of the ability of forested areas to soak up carbon gases and again he sees this as an area where there should be financial sums put to these environmental benefits.
