Buzz back at Lairg lamb sale as Covid restrictions ease
From the Croft by Russell Smith
The first great annual lamb sale at Lairg has come and gone. A total of 3,360 lambs were sold and the sale certainly had more of a buzz about it than last year when only one person was allowed into the pens for each consignment.
This sale is one of the biggest and earliest in the north and so tends to set the trend. The official figures show wethers averaging £68.63 (up 15 per cent) on the year and ewe lambs averaging £89.84 (up 23 per cent on the year).
Top price was £86.50 to Joyce Campbell, Armadale. This is very encouraging despite all the uncertainty from Brexit still hanging over the market – we store producers hope that the finishers don’t get burnt as we need them to come back next year. Our lambs at least seemed to benefit from the good growth of grass following the recent and much needed rain.
Personally, we were up for both wethers and ewes despite being the second lots into the ring. You need to get a little more each year as the price of everything keeps going up and you have to feel you are at least keeping up with inflation. How prices compare with 50 years ago is a topic for another day.
The weather held and the relaxing of restrictions meant you could at least enjoy a coffee and bacon roll outside while chatting to fellow crofters, although, like prices and number of lambs sold, the social scene isn’t what it once was.
Now we worry about prices holding up for the later sales.
In my column last month, I talked about possible result based payment schemes which might form part of a future support regime. The pilot schemes that have been trialled work on the basis of paying crofters for creating the environment for species to flourish rather than pay for the number of the species themselves (be they corncrakes or marsh fritillaries). So you get paid for what you can control.
Easier to measure certainly, but we still need to see the details and have worked examples down to individual croft level. The old Land Manager’s Options schemes were easy to apply for, worth entering, and generally had something for everyone to pick from. The new schemes need to reflect this - what works in Sutherland won’t necessarily work on Shetland or Lewis.
Presumably there will be a pick and mix where you can select the elements that work for your own ground and which are worthwhile undertaking.
This is not about milking the system but about making sure we get the support we need to continue to provide the public goods that the market doesn’t pay us for. Otherwise, we can’t continue and the community is diminished.
The Scottish Crofting Federation has pulled together some basic principles around possible future policy and sent these to the Cabinet Secretary to feed into the debate. I’ll go into them next month. But we hope they are concise, practical and understandable to all who read them. And the total amount of money available is important, not just how it is divided up.
The old EU Common Agricultural Policy ringfenced farm subsidies but that protection is gone and agriculture has to fight its corner against health, education and so on. There is a battle there to convince the public that subsidies are money well spent.
Russell Smith is a Bonar Bridge crofter and director of the Scottish Crofting Foundation.
