 Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the fifth meeting of the Rural Affairs, Island and Natural Environment Committee in session 6. Before we begin, can remind members and those contributing to, if they're using electronic devices, to switch them to silent, please. Our first item of business is an introductory session on farming and crofting. Today I welcome to the meeting our first of our virtual remote panel members of industry stakeholders. We have Beatrice Morris, the political affairs manager from NFUS Scotland, Professor David McCracken, head of integrated land management department at Scotland's rural college, Mike Robinson, co-chair of farming for 1.5 inquiry and Professor Sally Shortall, member of Women and Agriculture Task Force. I'd like to thank you all for your briefings that you provided with us. Before we move to members' questions, I'd like to first ask our panellists to make some very brief opening remarks, and I would request that you keep those remarks to no more than two minutes. I'd like to invite Beatrice Morris to make the opening remarks and then move to David, Mike and then Sally. Good morning. Thank you very much for inviting NFUS Scotland to participate in the panel this morning. We are absolutely delighted to have this opportunity. We represent 8,500 farmers and crofters across the length and breadth of Scotland. Our sector employs around 67,000 people and we support numerous supply chain companies in rural and urban areas in Scotland. To provide a bit for the flavour of NFUS Scotland's work, we cover every sector of Scottish agriculture. We have over 300 work streams across our policy team and what we are discussing today provides a flavour in the headline of the issues that we are working on. Like other sectors, we are facing many challenges currently. Issues in relation to the pandemic impact Brexit and imminent changes to our future funding. In addition, the labour shortages and the very recent issue with fertiliser plants shows the fragility of our food system and the vulnerability of our food security. It has never been a more important time to recognise and value Scottish food and farming. As the work steps up to identify future funding for the sector, we very much believe that a holistic approach will be one that succeeds. Food production, tackling climate change and enhancing biodiversity are all interlinked and each of those strands are very important. To deliver our aims, we require both public funding and supporting regulation. We need policy that works and enables and funding that is appropriate. We cannot achieve our climate change ambitions by exporting food production. We are absolutely committed to working with our committee, the Scottish Parliament and the Governments to deliver a thriving farming sector. It is important to continue food and drink production for our country and for our exports, alongside developing initiatives and actions to address climate change and, crucially, for our rural economies that are supported and enriched by our farming sector. I'm the co-chair of the Farming 1.5 inquiry, along with Nigel Miller, who is the previous president of the NFUS. Farming 1.5 was an attempt to prevent duplication of effort in terms of how farming could meet its net zero requirements. It is very much written around what the industry needs to do, but we are trying to work out all of the different complex conundrums around employment and rural robustness and resilience, as well as biodiversity and meeting climate targets. We came up with a report with 15 major recommendations, which we think are a really important guide for the future of the industry, particularly post-2024. We are very concerned that, obviously, some of those actions need to start happening sooner rather than later. The real strength of the inquiry was not just that it was focused on what we need to do, but it was also the breadth of experience and expertise that we brought into the room from economists to rural society academics to all sorts of farmers and others as well. It is really the 15 recommendations that we are most interested in. Thank you very much. My apologies. I did see where we would go to David. Can we go to David now, please? No worries, and thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today. A common focus this morning will be the need to be clear about the outcomes that are desired before we seek to change policies and practice. As we have already heard, there is a recognition of the continued importance of producing food while helping to address climate change and biodiversity declines. However, we also need to recognise that we have failed over the past 30 years to deliver the scale of change that is needed to halt most biodiversity declines, let alone reversal. Therefore, what we need, but do not seem to be seeing so far, is for biodiversity outcomes to be mainstreamed in the same way and at the same scale that climate actions are now starting to meet. That will not only mean that broad biodiversity outcomes need to be given due consideration when developing greater environment of conditionality and future land management support payments, but it also means ensuring the availability of funding for more detailed targeted actions needed to produce biodiversity benefits where conditionality on its own is either insufficient or inappropriate. It will also mean debunking the myth that managing land for biodiversity outcomes only benefits wider society. If done appropriately, it can also increase the resilience of land management systems to climatic shocks. Managing land for biodiversity does not automatically imply that land management ceases. For many of the biodiversity outcomes that we need to achieve in Scotland, it is really about getting the timing and the intensity of the management right not stopping the management altogether. One of the key issues that committee will face in this session will be how to ensure that biodiversity outcomes are included appropriately within the range of outcomes that we need our land managers to deliver in the future. However, a related and probably much broader key issue for the committee's consideration is not only how do we encourage the integrated land management need, but just as importantly, how do we ensure that those integrated land management policies are also aligned with what we ultimately need our future food systems to deliver? Both in terms of improving environmental and societal health in Scotland, but also future proofing those systems against changes in external market demand. Trade-offs are inevitable, and we could go around in endless circles discussing the potential for those. However, if we are clear on the outcomes that are desired from the start, then we can at least assess whether the expected positives from any change in policy or land management outweigh the perceived negatives. I look forward to the discussions with you this morning. Thank you very much, David. Last but not least, Sally. I am here on behalf of the Women in Agriculture Task Force, which was established after some research that I was involved in looking at the position of women in agriculture in Scotland. The direct aim of that was to try and address some of the inequalities around women's role in agriculture. Women rarely inherit land, even though they are very active in the farm family. They are very underrepresented in leadership positions in farming organisations, and women told us that they do not access the types of training that they should. The task force was established by Minister Ewing and it was co-chaired by Joyce Campbell, a sheep farmer. We met over a two-year period and came up with various recommendations to the Scottish Government around measures to improve women's representation in farming organisations, access to training and issues around new entrants and so on. Scotland has led the way on this whole question of gender equality. The European Court of Auditors and DEFRA have been following behind, so it would be really important to ensure that Scotland maintains that momentum. One item that I would like to say is that I do not see the women in agriculture issue as an item on the agenda. Women are part of the agriculture industry and are really important insights on how to achieve climate change targets, on how to achieve the sorts of goals around regenerative sustainable agriculture that we are looking toward on the implications of EU exit and on how to look at diversifying the different farm income streams. I think that it is really important that we see the whole question of women's role in agriculture as a wider one of the agriculture industry and commenting on all of the items on the agenda rather than just being one. Thank you. Thank you very much and I very much appreciate you all keeping your opening statements brief because we will certainly have plenty of questions. We have got a number of themes that we are going to explore and I will ask members to ask questions on that as we go through the next 80-odd minutes. I am going to open up by one of probably the broadest questions that we are going to ask and it relates to future agriculture and rural policy. We have heard that the Government is planning to bring forward an agriculture bill by 2023. It seems a long way away but we know that the guarantee on rural support payments is due to finish in 2023 at the start of 2023. We seem to be a long way from understanding what future policy is going to be, so can I ask the panel and I will start with Beatrice what she believes the key requirements for any new agriculture and rural policy might be? We are absolutely delighted to be co-chairing the ARIOP board alongside Cabinet Secretary Mary Gougeon. We need a portfolio of different policies and practices, no one silver bullet that we will be able to deliver. Initially, we need to set up the pilot schemes quickly to identify what works. We also need to indicate and do some data analysis, so that we can measure exactly where we are and what we need to get to. We, as an organisation, are certainly participating in the consultation that showed in November with our members. It is very important that we are gathering the ideas there from them. However, to underline that the recommendations of the farmer-led groups that are already out there is a really good starting point. What we are absolutely key about is that the group acts quickly. There are not many harvest left until 2045, so we need to get something started soon. Ultimately, my message today is that we need to deliver quickly. Beatrice has already indicated that we need a package of measures. That is important. If we start only looking at one aspect of the whole support package, environmental conditionality, for example, on its own, without knowing how it sits within the wider suite of measures. In my opening statement, I mentioned the need for conditionality for biodiversity benefits and additional support funding for wider, more specific, targeted biodiversity measures. That is the same for whether it is biodiversity or whether it is support to wider agriculture, particularly with regard to less favoured area or area of natural constraint. If we do not know what the overall package is, simply looking at one item on its own could result in quite a lot of unintended consequences, so it has been clear. I think that we are clear. We know what the needs are. We just need to make sure that the policy actually fits that in both the farming for 1.5 degree report and NFUSs and the SRUC's recent report give some indication of what that combined package could be. Mike McDonald, I agree with a lot of that. Time is of the essence, absolutely. We need to make sure that our priorities are in tackling all of this. We cannot achieve national climate targets without adopting this significantly within agriculture across the board. Biodiversity needs to be a part of that. Absolutely. We need pilot schemes up and running. We need soil testing in place. We need to improve the advisory service, all those things. However, overall, we need to be as joined up as possible. I agree with everybody else. Again, I agree with everything that has been said. One of the issues that has come up in some work that I have been doing with DEFRA is that farmers are aware that, in terms of pursuing issues around soil restoration, there is a cost during that transition period, and we are very keen that there would be some kind of conversion payment to ensure that it remains economically viable for farmers to convert to meet the targets that are required. In terms of rural development, the agricultural subsidies are being phased out over a period of years, but the rural development fund has just gone over a cliff. That is real issues around stimulating farm diversification initiatives, which tend to be led by women. That is something that needs to be considered. What is going to replace that fund? We have another year, at the end of 2021. We have one more year. It would appear that we still do not have a direction of travel with regard to policy. We have had consultation after consultation. We have another consultation group. Elsewhere in the United Kingdom, we have had the principle of public good for public money and the public domain, if you like, for quite some time, but no such direction of travel in Scotland. I am quite surprised that there is not more of a message from you to suggest that we are running out of time to get those policies in place. How long do we need to run the pilot schemes for before we can decide on policy? We had an announcement from the minister that, by November, which is only six weeks away, we would have policies to tackle emissions and agriculture with absolutely no indication what those policies might be. Is there a bit of a lack of urgency? Beatrice? I am very pleased that the group has now started, and we were calling for that over the summer that it was absolutely imperative that that was implemented as soon as possible. We have had our first meeting, and there are meetings fortnightly now, I believe, going forward. There is an urgency to get going. Farmers are very keen to start on this route to change as well. We are doing all we can and working all we can to implement. However, the recommendations from the farmer-led group are there, so, hopefully, we can take them on board. We are not starting from a blank sheet of paper. There is a lot of work already being done that sets out some ideas already. You wanted to come in on that? Yes, just to say that absolutely there is a lack of urgency. We are getting there, but it is a slow process. Some of that is through duplication. We have really got to just do one thing and do it well. There is a tendency to keep reinventing the wheel, and I think that we are going over some of the same ground again and again, instead of actually bringing forward action. We do know what we need to do, particularly around climate change. I think that we need to know what we need to do around biodiversity. We are just not quite doing it, so yes, absolutely there is an urgency. There is a need to start actually implementing things as soon as possible, and not waiting for everything to come through in a bill in three years' time. It is too urgent to do that. We will have missed a third of the next decade if we are not careful. Okay, thank you. I am now going to move to further supplementaries. I am going to bring in Ariane, then Rachel and Jim. Thank you, convener. The bill that we are talking about is proposed to include, and I am just going to direct that question to Mike. The bill is proposed to include enhanced conditionality of support against public benefits, which targeted outcomes for biodiversity gain and low emissions production. Do you agree with the soil association that the conditions for support should align with those in the EU farmed forks strategy, such as reducing chemical pesticides by 50 per cent by 2030, and be interested to know what other criteria you and others involved in farming for 1.5 enquiry would like to see included as conditions for subsidies, for example—long question, sorry. For example, should support be contingent on certain levels of carbon and methane reductions or use of agroecological practices that support nature to regenerate itself? Thank you, Ariane. The short version is, do we think that it should be conditional? Yes, absolutely. Conditionality is absolutely essential. We think that there needs to be targets against each of the greenhouse gases. There is no point in just creating unit efficiencies if we still go on to produce and emit more greenhouse gases. We need to express limits around nitrogen, methane, carbon dioxide. We want a greening menu from 2022. We want general contracts, reduction contracts with farms. We want to see percentages of land committed to biodiversity. We want all farms to sign up, so there are a lot of things that we would like to see as conditions. Okay, would anyone else like to come in on that, Davie? Thank you and thanks for the question. I agree wholeheartedly with what Mike had just said. It is only through a level of conditionality are we going to get the scale of action needed for some of the delivery mechanisms that we actually need. I am harking on a bit biodiversity. From a biodiversity perspective, we have had a scattergun approach over the last 30 years in Scotland and elsewhere in the UK and Europe that has not really worked. For many of our biodiversity outcome needs, we need to have all farmers or at least many farmers working towards the same goal and some level of biodiversity conditionality will achieve that. There are other aspects of biodiversity benefits that will need more specific, more targeted funding in a particular area. Most of that will need to be at a landscape scale. Your original question about environmental conditionality—yes, we need it—needs to be mandatory. I will link it back to the first question. We already know what we need to achieve in the farming and food production future policy group, although that did not produce a final report. The interim report is out there in the public domain. That not only sets the context for what we need to achieve and why, but it also sets the level of urgency of why we need to actually do that. I am going to go to Rachel Lenn Jim and Beatrice for further heads-ups. Thank you. It is to all the panels. Even if we change farming practices, we reduce livestock numbers and increase woodland planting. The scale across all sectors will not be enough. It is reported that we will fall short by around about two thirds of meeting those net serial targets. What does the panel think that that means in terms of the recommendations of those climate group reports? What more needs to be done and what impact will it have on farmers, consumers and policy makers? Beatrice, would you like to kick off? Just to go back to the conditionality very quickly, we absolutely believe that the conditions need to encourage active farming. What we are very keen about is when you are looking at carbon emissions, you are looking at carbon sequestration as well. A whole lot of work is going on on farms currently. It is increasing the amount of carbon storage on farms as well. As technology improves, we believe that we will be able to make changes going forward. I do not believe that we should look at just one aspect. It has to be a holistic thing of the whole farm. There is more precision farming going on, more regenerative farming going on. There are a lot of things going on there, and we are certainly wanting to start on that journey to help to deliver it. It is certainly something that we are committed to working towards. Can I open up to the rest of the panel, please? Perhaps Mike? Yes, thank you, Rachael. Obviously, nobody thinks that this is going to be straightforward within the farming 1.5 report. Again, what we have tried to do is set out the stages that we think we need to go through here in order to achieve net zero. Obviously, they start getting more difficult. Fundamentally, that cannot be done without eventually fairly significant land use change. It goes beyond purely farm agriculture and into the whole issue of land use change. There are a number of areas that we need to see starting to be adopted much more readily and relatively quickly. An obvious example being agroforestry. It is an area that is still contentious for different reasons, but there is absolutely a need to see that rolling forward. We are going to see that over time—maybe that is the emphasis of the bill—that it has to be about that sequenced change from measures that we can adopt immediately, a list of actual breeding measures that farms can take on board, the training and all the things that need to wrap around that, but ultimately it is going to have to lead to land use change. David, do you want to add anything? Again, to agree with Mike, in particular, but also Beatrizmin, I am unsure of the package that you put in the question, which would result in two thirds failure by two thirds of meeting the target. As Mike and Beatriz have emphasised, precision farming, agricultural changes to agricultural practices will get us so far, but it is actually land use change and how we integrate that with our land management systems that will be the main route to get us to net zero. If your premise was that if we wait too long, we are not going to achieve it by 2045, that is correct, we would need to start changing those, encouraging, facilitating changes to the agricultural practices now, but we also need to start encouraging, facilitating the change to the wider land management practices now as well, both equally important. I have a quick supplementary before I bring Jim in. If agriculture or our land-based industries are going to struggle to get to net zero, we are not self-sufficient in red meat, so we have imported quite a percentage of our meats, whatever. We are at the risk of reducing agricultural production, particularly in the red meat industry, to hit our targets in the UK, but there are unintended consequences that we then offshore beef and lamb production to areas where the carbon footprint is bigger, and ultimately globally it results in a slower transition to net zero. Has that been calculated within the plans going forward for rural support and particularly agricultural production, Davie? There are elements of red meat production in Scotland that are vitally important for the production of other outcomes, whether it is biodiversity or what we call wider ecosystem services. I do not see that we are potentially in danger of offshoring depending on what type of possible knee-jerk reaction we might take. It comes back to looking at things in the whole, in the round. We cannot just look at agriculture and agricultural practices in isolation. We need to instill that additional land management, land use, change in association with agriculture and the other land uses out there. If we start that sooner rather than later and achieve it at the scale that we need to achieve it, I do not see that we are going to fall as short as both yourself and the previous questions seem to imply, but it goes back to your question originally about urgency. We need to start at 9, we should have started at 5, 6 years ago, we need to start at 9, 2045, not long away, 2030 is even closer. To come back to the previous question about how targets are going to be achieved, I would just like to underline Beatrice's point that she made. Science is developing all the time. I am in the gull of natural and environmental science, and scientists are working on that all the time. Our tools to try and meet those targets will improve as time goes on. The question about the red meat sector is really important. It might be worth consulting with colleagues in Northern Ireland where it is going to be impossible for them to meet their targets because of their heavy reliance on being red meat producers. I know that they have been looking at what does it mean if they reduce red meat production, but then it is coming from somewhere further afield. Obviously, there is no benefit in offshoring emissions, if that is all we managed to do by bringing in measures, but I do not think that, in this case, that is necessarily an issue. It is just one of the issues that we have got to sort out in the way that we present the legislation and the way that we determine how that moves forward. That is true of any sector, obviously. It is no use if we simply shut down what we are doing and then just start importing worse and more purely produced products from abroad. We actually are self-sufficient in beef and lamb, so that is not necessarily a particular problem anyway in this particular instance. We already produce more beef and lamb than we consume domestically in Scotland. We still need to make sure that we take the measures. It is a bit like efficiencies. Just by being more efficient, if you are still producing more, it is not helping anybody. I hope that, if we take the leadership on that and sufficiently put that into place, it might even be an advantage to us in the long run for exports and things. In the first instance, I do not think that there is a great risk of offshoring here, because beef and lamb are already more than produced at the levels that we require domestically. I just like to pick up on that last point, because both Rachael and Finlay have both talked about the reduction in livestock levels that we are aiming for. The cabinet secretary has already made quite clear that there is no plan to reduce the suckler cow numbers in the country. I do not think that we need to get that on record. I want to come back to the point that was made earlier on about the policy that we are currently looking to develop. In Scotland, the conditionality is going to be 50-50, whereas the UK scheme is currently all about public funds for public goods. That is probably more aimed at yourself. Given the fact that we see the farming community as being absolutely critical to us achieving our net zero target, I also think that it is critical that public goods are food production is regarded as a public good. We need to have food. We need to have a resilient food and drink sector in this country and we need to have the primary producers producing that. How do you think that you are going to get the uptake of the farming community's enthusiasm for a policy? Is the 50-50 ratio one that you think is acceptable to the farming community? I know from my point of view that farmers want to produce food, but they accept the fact that we need to do things differently. How do you feel that that is going to go down to the community? I think that it is going to be a challenge, but it is certainly something that we at NFUS are absolutely committed to and working with our farmers to help them to deliver what needs to be delivered. Everybody accepts the fact that we are going to be helping to tackle climate change. We are in a great opportunity position with our land management used to enhance biodiversity as well. It is going to be key going forward. It is something that we at NFUS will work hard to ensure that our members are brought along the journey with us. If we are looking at a 50-50 policy, do you think that it would be a harder sell to have a complete conditionality on public funds for public goods as it is in the UK, where there is no mention of food production at all? I am just asking you what is going to be able to do. We want the farming community to go with this policy. We want them to embrace it. Is it going to be easier to get them to embrace a policy where they are still regarded as food producers or will it be easier to get them to adopt the policy where it is simply regarded as, and I am quoting, we are nothing but park keepers? I do not know about that, I am sorry. I was at an event last week down in London and the importance of food security and importance of food production was certainly talked about. It was very significantly down there. For us, producing food alongside tackling climate change and enhancing biodiversity is the three strands that we are going to be committed on and taking forward, and that is something that we are keen to work on with the Scottish Government and other stakeholders. Davie, you have indicated that you would like to come in on that, and then Mike and then Sally. Yes, thank you. I just wanted to reiterate it. I intimated it in my opening statement. We need to actually get the wider agricultural industry to accept and recognise that delivering biodiversity benefits, taking action for climate change, is not just something that they are doing for somebody else, for a wider society. Many of the actions, if not all the actions that they like to be doing on their farms and land, will be beneficial to the future sustainability of those farming systems or of the food production that they want to do. They are not immune from ongoing climate change at all, and many of the actions that they can put in place will help to increase the resilience to that. With regard to your question about the 50 per cent versus 100 per cent, while I can appreciate why the rest of the UK or England is looking at a purely public funding for public goods perspective, the original premise of your question is how do you move farmers from the current situation to that without major, major disruption to the industry as a whole and food production, but also the associated management that is needed to deliver the climate change and biodiversity goals? The 50 per cent goal is not an end point. It is a road on the journey, but it should be more acceptable to the vast majority of farmers if we ensure that they appreciate why it is a benefit to them to engage and not just to wider society. My sense is that there are a number of different issues that were thrown up there by that set of questions. My experience is that the farming community is more willing to act around this than ever before, and the crux of it is how do we achieve what we all need to make happen and make sure that we still have a robust agricultural community beyond helping to deliver that? I appreciate that there are short-term concerns around conditionality. My question is why is 50 per cent conditionality reasonable or too much? Why is 50 per cent completely unconditional so reasonable and why is that necessarily a really good idea? We have major change needed here. We have a willingness to act around that. I do not think that we should be shy of making some of that conditional—in fact, all of it is conditional—but we have to make sure that the way that we implement that makes sense and does not create victims and problems. I think that it is as much about how we do it as what we do. The first question is that I am not sure that 50 per cent unconditional is particularly helpful. I also think that we have to be careful that we are not ignoring the advice. The UKCCC's advice around livestock numbers was fairly clear. If we are trying to tackle climate change, we cannot do it without land managers, without agriculture on board. We need to make it as easy as possible for them to help and get on board and do all the things that they need to do. We need to try and back that and make that happen, not just cherry pick the bits that we think will work. I think that this is an excellent question. Research that I have been doing in England suggests exactly that farmers feel that they have been abandoned and that it has become an environmental policy. That is one of the biggest and most fundamental changes in how agriculture has been conducted in decades. I think that it is really important to work with the farming community and to ensure that they have the business skills that are required for this transition, because it might well be that having a combination of biodiversity and being food producers but producing food in a different way is a much more profitable way to farm. It is about ensuring that the business skills are there to maximise profit through this enormous change that is expected of the sector, but the Government must support it through that and give it the tools to achieve the end point. I think that some of my questions may have already been answered in the previous questions, but I was interested in the climate change and biodiversity loss and how we achieve that balance between the changes in land use and ensuring that farmers and crofters are still protected and able to do the job that they have to do. How do we manage that? Sally has touched on ensuring that there are business skills to manage changes. I would be interested to know how the panel's views on how those changes are managed, particularly for crofters and farmers. Certainly by looking at things together. I have spoken to farmers who have done analysis on some of their cattle where the carbon emissions are less, but when you move over to a different field, the carbon emissions are slightly more, but the biodiversity in increasing there is absolutely off the chart. It will have to be looking at the whole farm together and not just one particular aspect of it. Improvements need to be made with regards to trying to assess biodiversity. It is not as easy, I do not believe, but it is not as easy to assess biodiversity enhancement as it is to assess the carbon side of things. Improvements there might need to be made. I am just looking at it from an overall perspective, and it would be beneficial. To work backwards from what Beatrice fellow panel member said, biodiversity assessment is relatively easy, as long as you are clear what aspect of biodiversity you want a particular farming system to achieve. That leads me on to the main response, while some aspects of what we want future farmers and crofters to provide are likely to be in common. There will be a need for all farmers and crofters to be doing something for soil health, because that is a common factor across all farming systems in Scotland. Dealing with water quality issues will not exclusively, but will primarily be focused in on some aspects of a sort of a bloland in agricultural areas, but not exclusively, as I said. However, when it comes to biodiversity, although there might be some general gains from biodiversity to being made by all farmers doing a little of the same, actually it comes down to what do you want an upland farmer to do, or more importantly, what do you want an upland farmer or a crofter or an arable farmer? What do they need to do to improve biodiversity? The elements that they will need to do will differ, because there are different opportunities in the uplands and in crofting systems. Not exclusively, but it will be making sure that we have the continuation of farm management practices that are still producing some of the biodiversity that we know and that we want in Scotland going forward. In our lowlands, dairy and arable situations, it will be what else needs to be done on those farms to restore habitat to improve the biodiversity and that can actually occur on those farms. Thank you. I am going to ask Ariane for a supplementary on that. As we are discussing around the topic, we are going to move to links with land use for a question from Jenny, but Ariane, would you like to come in with your supplementary? Thanks. Briefly, Mike, earlier you mentioned agroforestry. I am hearing that agroforestry is going to be a big important part, but you mentioned that there were tensions related to agroforestry. I wonder whether you could unpack that a little bit for us. Thank you. It is really just that there is not a clear framework for promoting agroforestry. I know that within farms there are anxieties about its practicability on the farm, particularly in terms of getting in the way of machinery. It is a practice, even though it is a traditional practice, and we have had agroforestry for many, many years. We have really not seen a lot of it in recent times. There is a resistance to its adoption because it is seen as unhelpful for other wider farming practices, but Beatrice may have thoughts about its adoption. I do not think that we have a system in place that encourages it very well, supports it very well or promotes it sufficiently. I am new to the sector. I just want to underline that it is not about forestry or farming. We are absolutely key about that. We believe that we can work alongside each other. One of the things that we are looking at is what we are hoping for farmers to be more enabled to introduce woodland alongside food production. There have been great examples of that already happening where they can create wildlife corridors, where they can provide, once the trees are a certain height, stated grazing for livestock, etc. It is really important that we are supportive of the Scottish Government's woodland creation, but it cannot be the detriment of farm land and that we need to work together and all collaborate in order for that to work alongside food production. Something that we are hoping for is for farmers to be better enabled to introduce and stitch it within their land already. That is something that we are keen to take forward. Beatrice and Mike have already talked about the detail of what I would have said in terms of the need to promote agroforestry. I want to make the observation that agroforestry, regenerative agriculture and many of the terms that we are using in this session and discussions about future support policies, are all quite broad. They mean different things to different people. We need to be clearer what we mean by agroforestry in this case, and what agroforestry might mean to one farmer will be completely different to what agroforestry might mean to another in terms of what is relevant for them to produce, put into their farm, integrate into their farm in order to achieve benefits from it. We need to be clearer on what we are actually asking for. I thank the panel for joining us today. It kind of moves on from what you were just saying there, Davie, about the impact of having forestry on different farms and how that impacts on the farms that haven't got the forestry, for example. Most of the panel have commented on whole-farm farming, and I would be interested to hear your thoughts on whole-community farming and how you see the regional land use partnerships and frameworks supporting active farming. I represent a west coast constituency with islands as well, and I am interested to know to get your thoughts on how a just transition works for the different types of farming that are across Scotland as well. I do not know. Davie, do you want to go first? Sorry. There were a lot of questions in that question, so you might need to remind me of latter aspects if I forget that. First of all, going back to what I just said before, we talk about wanting to put more forestry into farms. We need to put more trees, woodlands, and we are relevant for us into farms. Terminology is highly important there. I think that the tenor of your question was asking about how do we get more community engagement in putting woodland into a landscape. Yes, that is right. Looking across the whole area and not looking at it as both farm by farm. All right. We will certainly come down to whatever that whole area be a catchment part of a catchment, whatever you are considering. As I have said earlier, it is being clear about what are the outcomes that you want from putting more trees in woodland into that, and what does that mean for what type of trees in woodland that are relevant to putting, and the engagement with the land managers, be they farmers or the local communities that have access to land to have a discussion and agreement as to what is feasible going forward. That is not just feasible in terms of whether they are willing to do it. It is also feasibility in terms of whether they are able to access the funds, the support and the guidance that allows them to actually do that. You also mentioned the new weekend allanges partnerships and their role in that. Then certainly they could have a potential role in that. At the minute, I would say that despite the fact that we are in our third land use strategy, the regional land use partnerships have literally just started. I am not familiar with all five of them, but the vast majority, if not all five of them, they are vast areas to actually cover within the pilot area. I would imagine a question for each of them will be what are we going to target where and look at within each of those. Unfortunately, regional land use partnerships are early days to see whether they are going to be able to have a success with that, and whether they are going to be able to address all the land management change issues that we need going forward. However, your question was about woodland, and I would have thought that woodland and more woodland creation and management are at a wider landscape level involving communities and land managers. I would have thought that that could be one of the easiest ones, but it depends on the area. It depends on how much trees, woodland and forestry are already there and what the land managers and the rural communities attitudes are to, or perceived attitudes are to, woodlands and forest. I work all over the country. I know that there is quite a lot of adverse reaction among some communities down in the south-west, where we already have very high proportion of woodlands and forests in the landscape. It will depend on the region, the area and what type of woodland and trees you are looking to try and enhance and facilitate. I think that there was a final part of your question, I am afraid that I have forgotten that one. I asked about what does a just transition look like for west coast and island farmers? I do not think that a just transition necessarily looks much different from west coast and island farmers than for the rest of Scottish agriculture, with the exception that we have to take into account the additional constraints that they are under in terms of transport on and off the island, cost of imports on to the island for their agricultural practices or for, if you want to create woodland in some of those islands, those trees have to come from somewhere and it is highly unlikely that they will actually, A, have been produced somewhere in a similar island environment and need to make sure that the trees that they are sourcing come and have been produced in an environment that will enhance their ability to actually establish and grow. There are some island-specific issues that need to be taken into account, but I think that if we get the overall just transition approach to agriculture in place, we can then try and then work on the additional nuances that might need to be put in place for particular sectors and for particular communities. You have used islands in this example, but there will be other remote or equally remote rural areas of Scotland where there will be possibly even less aspects to transport links to the rest of Scotland. Thank you. Before I bring Mike in, you touched on regional land use partnerships, but I am a bit confused and it would appear that you are not quite certain what the outcomes of these regional land use partnerships should be either. What are the measures of success or otherwise of those pilots? You touched on whether policies need to apply to a particular farmer, a particular sector or a farming system. You mentioned the south of Scotland, where we have already got a lot of trees, but we have also got the milk fields of Scotland in the south west. We have also got a very important circular cow sector. We have also got some world important peatlands and so on. What is your measure of whether those land use partnerships are successful and what are the outcomes that are expected to be and how are they going to feed into future rural agriculture and rural policy? I am going to ask you that question, but I will also bring Mike in on the same to address Jenny's questions. In principle, the focus of having a regional land use partnership in this instance is to bring different land managers and stakeholders together to discuss land use and land use change for a particular area and region that is appropriate. My query about how much the regional land use partnerships can achieve in this first phase is based on two premises. One that has literally just started. Two, part of this first phase is to do exactly that for each of the regions to try and establish what might be the best approach to taking this particular region. Three, you might want to, in later sessions of the committee, investigate or question whether the regional land use partnerships have been supported enough in terms of funding directed to them for this first phase to allow them to investigate that in particular. The reason I said all of them, I would expect, might have to in this first phase focus solely on one particular region within the wider pilot area is that I do not believe that they have been given sufficient funding or capacity to actually test the regional land use partnership to the full extent of the geographical areas of the pilot areas that have been established. Thank you for that. Can we bring in Mike on the same questions and then I'll bring in Beatrice Morris. Again, I'm trying to do my best to answer the questions and apologies if I'm a bit throaty. I'm at home with Covid today. So, land use change sequestration needs to reflect soil type, topography, the production and biodiversity priorities for the farmer, the locality and also the targets for Scotland as a whole. So, for me, regional land use partnerships are a really important delivery tool in all of this. As such, their membership must reflect the local community, including land managers, farmers, proffeters but also have roots in all other community activities and an eye on the national priorities. Obviously, there's a lot of things that might mark that success. I think that membership is a very easy measure of that success and that diversity, but we also need to map the potential of each region to be able to deliver against those national priorities. For me, the percentage of deep green gas reductions and the biodiversity improvements that are made are very obvious and key measures. In the farming 1.5, we talked about about 30 per cent of land being given over to nature. In terms of the Just Transition Commission, the biggest single thing is just in terms of reskilling. There is a need for more farmers. We've got a huge skills deficit, potentially, around some of that knowledge. For me, that's an area that needs to be prioritised. There's a slight bonus on Just Transition towards the oil sector, and we need to make sure that the rural communities don't miss out. Thank you. Beatrice, and then we'll come in with that supplementary from Jenny. Just to underline, I absolutely agree with what Mike has just said. Farmers need to be part of the rural land use partnerships. We don't operate in isolation. 72 per cent of the land in Scotland is under agriculture management, and it's absolutely imperative that we're part of those discussions. If you look at the way that farms impact on the rural economy, I visited a farm a couple of weeks ago and they calculated that they used 92 supply chain companies, the majority of which were in a five mile radius of their farm. We need to take into consideration the business of food production when decisions are being taken about land use in areas certainly, so we would like to be a key part of them. There's some concern in some areas where the pilots are starting up that there's not that much information and collaboration, and so that's something that we certainly want to increase with going forward. Okay, and Sally, and then I'll move to Beatrice. No, no, Sally, if you could come in and address Jenny's questions, and then I'll go to Mercedes. It's eyes for the religious glow about me. My blind is broken in my office, so there's nothing I can do about it. Just to say that I think there are gaps in our knowledge, and I know that a lot of my colleagues are involved in different projects called treescapes, working with colleagues in Scotland, but they're looking to try and understand the types of questions that you've asked around what will be the role of the community, how do farmers interact with all of that, what are the appropriate kind of trees for different areas, and what quantity. So I think it's important to recognise there are questions we don't necessarily have the answers to, but there are people working on it, and if I could just come back to an earlier question about biodiversity and crafting, I think that that's a really important one in terms of public goods and ensuring funding for public goods, and there is also a gender dimension to that because women are almost twice as much represented in crafting as they are in farming more generally in Scotland. Thank you, and I'll move to questions. Excuse me, I have from Mercedes. Thanks, convener. Just while we're on the topic of land use and management, I'm thinking about, we're seeing, I think, a reduction in farmers and ageing population, and many potential new farmers are priced out of starting up because of the cost of land. And I know in the recent programme for government there's commitments to modernised tenant farming and to reform small holding legislation. So I was just interested to hear from the panel if there's any particular measures that you'd like to see to make it easier for potential new producers starting out and to really put power into their hands, into the hands of people that are going to be working the land. I think that that's a really interesting question. One of the issues that we see time and time again, one of the bottlenecks in achieving a more innovative type of farming is the intergenerational transfer of land. So you see, and it's usually men who are farming the way the farm was farmed six generations ago, which is no longer in tune with the kind of climate targets we have and the types of objectives we want to reach. So the whole question of new entrants and regenerating the farming sector is really important. I think that the whole question of actually bringing in new blood, because we see that time and time again when one of the really important contributions women make in the farm is when they marry in, they're actually bringing a whole new perspective. They're questioning why it is done like that and leading to different and better practices through their role and decision making. It's a difficult one to crack because it hinges on private property and people's rights to do what they want with private property. There are some interesting examples from Ireland of share farming where you see older farmers working with new incoming farmers in partnership and giving them scope to be more innovative. I think there's also ways of thinking about leasing or making machinery more available and also innovative ways of making livestock more available. Maybe they rent livestock, keep the offspring, because what you're seeing is a kind of two-tier agricultural sector where the inheriting sun has far less cost than the tenant farmer coming in and the tenant farmers, the new entrants that we interviewed in Scotland, were by far and away the most innovative cutting edge undertaking the types of farming initiatives that you really want them to be. Often they were working full-time to have the income to put back into the farm and they were still continuing to be really innovative and forward-thinking. The difficulty in securing tenancies just now is absolutely key for young people. I've met young farmers who are on what's called contract farming, so it's like 364 days of a tenancy, which means that the investment isn't possible to make. They can't secure loans, so it's a very short-term viewpoint of it. That certainly needs to be addressed. Attracting new entrants into the workforce is absolutely key, and certainly work needs to be done there. I know that it's not just securing people to come in and own the farms and long-term wise. We're also struggling to get attract workers in as well. There's been a lot of coverage about the shortage of seasonal workers, but permanent workers as well are very difficult to secure just now. That's something that we're looking to address and identifying shortages and identifying where the pinch points are, but it's a whole workforce issue that does need to be addressed and we're keen to work with people to help to facilitate that. Before we move on from land use, Rachel Hamilton has a brief supplementary question. We know that, in Scotland, forestry targets have not been met and the Government has no intention of bringing in any new forestry grant funding schemes before 2024. If farmers were incentivised to have support through new forestry grant schemes to have the right trees in the right place at the right time, we could get on and start to meet those net zero targets quicker. The short answer to your question is yes, but I would argue that there are already existing incentives for farmers to integrate more trees in woodlands onto their farms at the scale that they might feel comfortable with in the short instance. The existing woodland grant schemes are not prioritised by those that are seeking to put in larger areas of woodland and forest in the goal of chasing those individual annual targets for new establishment. More could be done to develop additional complementary schemes to help and encourage farmers to take them up, but more could be done to help to facilitate them and to see the relevance of some of the schemes that already exist. If I may just answer that and a little bit on the previous question. The first is that a factor that we felt within the inquiry team was that it slightly fell between stoves. It was not quite the forestry department, it was not quite agriculture and I think that meant that it was not really getting the focus that it could and the emphasis that it could. I wanted also just very quickly to answer the previous question about the need for new farmers and there is absolutely a need for a lot of new blood. It is no different to any other industry. A lot of young people are voting with their feet and I think that a very strong and real commitment to these issues around climate change and biodiversity would attract a lot more people into the sector and yes, there absolutely are issues to do with access to land, but a really important factor here as well is the image that is portrayed of the industry and I think that grasping those appropriate targets and tackling them head on is actually a very, very positive thing for young people right now. Thank you very much. I will now move on to questions and impact of EU exit and relation to agriculture from Alistair. Thank you very much, convener. As you have mentioned, I am interested in your take on what has been happening post Brexit and particularly I know that the NFUS has had things to say about trade deals. A question perhaps for Beatrice, perhaps for Davey McCracken as well about whether you have any views or concerns about what future trade deals might look like for farming. Beatrice, do you like to start? Our concerns about the Australian trade deal are very well publicised over June. We are very concerned that the statutory trade and agricultural commission has not yet been established. We have been told that the establishment of its gun is imminent, but we absolutely need that to be up and running in order to analyse and provide advice on the possible impacts of trade deals on agriculture. The number one ask that we have is set up straight away. The other thing that we absolutely need more of is better effective consultation with the agricultural sector across Scotland with regard to the trade deals. When we are talking to our Australian counterparts, our New Zealand counterparts, it is very clear that they are much more involved around the table at an earlier stage. That is something that we are absolutely key about. We are often told that, when we are concerned about the unrestricted trade, we should be more ambitious and look out to be exporting more. In order for us to do that, we need more investment in the processing capacity sector in the country. That is absolutely key. What is concerning for us is that the culminative impact of trade deal after trade deal with unrestricted access will impact the farming sector, which will have a negative impact on our rural communities. I am not in the best place to provide any detailed thought on trade deals per se or the impact of those. However, I did include in my written submission an indication, a suggestion that we should be paying proper attention in Scotland to what we are looking to trade in the future. We are looking at developing our agricultural support policies, our land management support policies, and potentially divorcing and isolation from our food and future food systems support policies. It is not my area of expertise that is calling elsewhere in the SRUC, given the food policy. The policy of insight in other countries in the EU is looking quite closely to amalgamating their land management support policies with their future food support policies to ensure that they are trying to future-proof their agricultural systems, to be moving, to be producing the type of agricultural goods that the external market, if trade deals allow the external market, are likely to demand. That will change, and it is changing for Scotland as well as the rest of the world. As I said, it is not specific to the intricacies of the trade deals, because that is not my area of expertise, but it is just a suggestion that seeing agricultural support in the wider sphere of what type of food systems, food policies we want to have in Scotland, how much of that will help to address some of the food-related issues that we have in Scotland, and to make sure that future-proof farming systems are producing the type of goods that could be traded elsewhere. Do you really think, Professor McCracken, that the impetus behind the trade deals has anything to do with the issues that you have just mentioned? My personal view is no, but, as I said, I am not a trade deal expert. I am just trying to step back and see what the wider context we also need to take into account. It is one thing to take a trade deal to produce, to provide markets from goods that we are already producing. I am just saying that we will not necessarily be needing trade deals to provide markets for those same goods in 10, 15, 20 years' time, but it will be other good that we want to ensure that we can enter that market place. Can I ask again, perhaps, Beatrice, to begin with, what your feeling is about the implications of the UK Internal Market Act when it comes again thinking particularly here of imports from outside the UK and what it means for Scotland's ability to legislate in that area? I do not want to put words in your mouth, but you have concerns about the quality of what might be imported, particularly in terms of meet in the future. Does legislation such as the UK Internal Market Act give you any concern about Scotland's ability to offer any kind of legislation that would restrict imports that would be unhelpful to the Scottish industry? Standards for us are absolutely key. We are renowned for our high-quality standards around the world and we do not want any changes to—we do not want any products coming into the country that will have less high standards than we currently produce here. We are absolutely key for that. We need to have the ability for Scotland to make changes or to be flexible with regard to our agricultural policy. The common frameworks that are in place that are aiming to maintain the internal market are important. The internal market is an important market for Scottish agriculture, but we need to maintain that flexibility for Scotland to be able to tweak things in order for the benefit of our agricultural sector up here. I am not sure whether I will see a hand-up from Sally Shortall. I completely agree with Beatrice that in terms of international trade and new trade agreements that we need to consult with farmers and producers. I urge that you are mindful of gender representation when you are doing that, because the point is that you have to have women involved in farms at the top table so that they can influence the types of decisions that are being made. Following a report from the European Court of Auditors, DG Agri is starting to take this more seriously and is aware that in having consulted with representatives of farmers unions to COPA and Coega, they have really been developing trade deals and agreements with men. It is just very important for the efficiency of the industry and the benefit of the sector that we ensure that there is a gender balance at the top table of those trade agreements. I think that many women in agriculture would agree with what you have just said about women being excluded from those deals. Do you feel that Scotland has been excluded from those deals as well? It is the same question that arises for Northern Ireland as for Scotland. It is very difficult when there are different views of what EU exit should look like and trade deals, and that has to be negotiated within a UK internal market and common framework context. It is very difficult. Finally, can I ask you about a subject that one or two people have touched on? Again, it is related to the aftermath of Brexit and that is about labour shortages. I do not know if anyone wants to put up their hand and indicate who wants to come in on that, but clearly there is a connection between the two things. Again, perhaps begin with Beatrice. You received evidence a couple of weeks ago talking about the labour shortage within the food and drink sector. To mirror what I said earlier on, it is more than just Brexit. We have had problems accessing permanent staff for some time now, which we are looking to address long-term. We need short-term action to help what is currently going on just now. We have had soft-fruit farmers, for example, who last year struggled to secure staff because of the pandemic. This year, the issues have compounded that, and they are now looking towards next year. No action has been taken despite the fact that they are struggling to get seasonal workers over. They are now thinking of changing commodity, and they are thinking of moving away from soft-fruit. That would be absolutely catastrophic. Soft-fruit takes up 1 per cent of the agriculture of the land mass, but delivers 16 per cent of the economic output. The seasonal workers pilot programme needs to be reviewed, and we are absolutely key for that. However, we are calling alongside Food and Drink Federation and Scotland Food and Drink, as they were a few weeks ago for the 12-month Covid visa. It is a perfect storm just now that all those issues, Brexit, the pandemic and longer-term workforce issues are all adding into a situation in which our members are losing money, they are losing crops, they are not being able to be picked up by HDV drivers, they are not being able to harvest them, and it is very serious. It is something that is very serious. Without immediate action being taken by it, and we are talking to the Home Office about this, the message is getting through, although this is not going to go away anytime soon, so decisions are being taken about next year already. I am going to bring Jim in on a second supplement. I want to direct this to you as well. You suggested that the NFUS were concerned about the Australia deal. I would like you to elaborate on that a little bit more. Given that, as far as I understand, there are bilateral safeguard mechanisms to ensure that there is a safety net for industries if they do face serious consequences from an increase in imports, and it seems fairly unlikely that we will see a big increase in imports from Australia. There are also existing deals or policies regarding the fear about importing food of a lower food standard, and it is clear that the manifesto and all the trade negotiations that the UK Government will not compromise on environmental protection, animal welfare or food standards. Where exactly do your concerns come from? Yes, there are some short-term reassurances that have been included in the trade deal, but they are short-term. I think that the figures that I do not have them to hand, but they do rise up significantly over the next 10 years. It is the culminative impact that we are majorly concerned about. The Australian trade deal has effectively paved the way for unrestricted trade. New Zealand is due eminently. We are assuming that it will be very similar to the Australian trade deal with regard to what has been agreed there. It is that trade deal after trade deal and the impact that we are concerned over our agricultural sector. As far as I understand, I may be wrong about that, but if you are standing looking at a supermarket shelf and there is beef from Scotland or beef from Australia, it will be clear where they came from and the standards are going to be the same. What I think is more difficult is when it is a processed product coming into the country and how the standards of that will be able to be guaranteed and assured. I am not quite sure that that is 100 per cent as simple to do. Ben Trist, you could write to the committee and give us an indication of what volumes of beef and produce is likely to come in. That would certainly give us a good indication of where to address your concerns. Jim, would you like to come in with a supplementary? Yes, very quickly. Ben Trist, have you had any response from the UK Government with your request for a one-year Covid visa to allow us to fill that short-term gap in the workplace across the food and drink sector? Not yet, no, we haven't. That is concerning our members because we have asked for a specific action to be taken. There has been no indication that that is going to be delivered and that is why there is some serious concern about what their options are for future years. I move on to questions again from Jim on profitability and resilience in the sector. Profitability and resilience in the sector is a very loaded question because you have so many different sectors and profitability and resilience will be different across each individual sector. I will come to you first because I specifically want to look at hill and upland farming and where the profitability and resilience are going to come from. We have touched quite a lot already on planting trees, which I am glad that you did rather than just forestry, because I would like to try to see whether we can get away from this conflict between trees versus farming. There has to be a way to integrate both of them together. I can see real opportunities for us developing a timber industry that farmers could be a part of. There are bound to be jobs there that can be created out of a timber industry. We can also be using timber in rather than having sheds, maybe having woodland. I would like to explore some of that and how that will tie in to ensure that we have profitability and resilience in the upland sector at the moment. As you hinted in your question, our upland farmers are not profitable at the minute without subsidy and even with that support, many of them are struggling to get over the red into the black. You have indicated in your question one element that will be important going forward. It is what other direct income generation products can they have on their land? Integrating trees and woodland much more into upland farms, we believe very strongly, is one root and will be an essential root to consider. We have talked earlier in the discussion about whether the incentives are there or promoted enough to allow them to do that. I would also add that our hills and uplands are highly important for a wide variety of other reasons. I have been talking a lot over the past few years about how our upland farmers or wider society in Scotland will be looking to our upland farmers not only to produce food products, not only to produce timber products and possibly even different type of timber products in the future but also to manage water quantity. Flooding and flood mitigation will be a very important activity for our upland farmers to produce or provide in the future. However, we do not have capital grants to allow those who have peatlands on their land with degraded peatlands to restore them. However, we do not have any on-going annual recognition financial payment or payment for public goods, payment for ecosystem services that will actually reward our upland farmers for doing that. I do see that there are a lot of opportunities for upland farmers going forward to increase their income streams to more than ... Some of those markets do not yet exist in terms of being able to provide them with the financial reward for doing so. That is a big question for not just our agricultural policy but our wider public support in Scotland going forward. I think that it really just comes back down to conditionality. We want to see farmers rewarded for looking after soil carbon, soil regeneration, biodiversity, flood alleviation and all of these other ecosystem services. As we say, there are public goods that go beyond just the physical production. We need to start to reflect that. I think that that is the opportunity to allow us to do that. In terms of referencing previously very quickly the sort of trade deals issue, there is an opportunity in trade deals. Obviously, we do not want to see climate change and biodiversity targets that we are imposing domestically abandoned in order to make sure that we get trade deals. We should be using the trade deals to project high standards and to drive globally the things that we are doing and to build our reputation internationally for that, because I think that it is not just about becoming important. We have lost you. Beatrice, can we ask you to come in the back of this until we can see if Mike's connection settles down? Certainly. We have talked about labour shortages. We have talked about processing shortages as well. We need regulation that enables—I absolutely agree with what Mike was saying in this—enabling farmers to do more with regard to climate change and to biodiversity and avoiding unintended consequences. That is absolutely key. One thing that we have not touched on yet is the local supply side of things. That goes back to the processing. That needs investment in order for that to be delivered. We are certainly keen to work with stakeholders and to increase the profitability of farms alongside the environmental work that we will be doing as well. I was involved in some research with the Scottish Government where they were trying to develop legislation around migrants. What I found really interesting was how progressive it was, because the starting point was how to protect the human rights of a vulnerable group of workers. It will be interesting to see how much scope you have to develop your own legislation around that. In terms of profitability—excuse me—and resilience in the sector, again, it is about looking at the whole-farm family activities and being competent of the types of diversification and entrepreneurial activities that are developed on-farm and often are led by women. It is looking at how to resource that, subsidise it and ensure that there is sufficient training about it. The other thing that we found is that women have a greater understanding of the food-to-bork chain. We are quite imaginative about how Beatrice was talking about community production, which can also be a means of increasing profit. It is one part of the overall jigsaw, but I think that it is an important one. I will brief Jim's question primarily about upland systems. I just wanted to come in, although conditionality on direct payments or future payments in whatever form will be important, I do not believe that our upland systems are only taking a conditionality route. We will provide enough funding into those systems to make them profitable. That is why I highlighted earlier on the need for additional funding, for additional public goods and additional public benefits that are much more complex to help to deliver. David, can you clarify whether you mean to get support into the farms that are already doing the things that have been asked to do over the past number of years? That is part of it, but what it was primarily meaning was that, if you were thinking of let's improve, let's put more conditionality on the level of direct support that is currently going to upland farming systems, that is not going to be enough to make the change. You would need to bring the LFAS, which sits separately, into that wider package going into upland systems and improve the conditionality on to that. However, the type of outcomes that we need, what we can achieve via conditionality is not going to be enough to recognise support and reward them for the additional management that they will need to do beyond conditionality to achieve those wider outcomes. It is a bigger question, I would argue very strongly, that we should be supporting those individuals and systems as much as we have already been delivering those goods, rather than just actually setting the clock now and only providing recognition and reward to those individuals that start to produce them now. That would be inherently unfair and unjust. Thank you. I will now move to Rachael Hamilton and Karen to ask some questions on women and agriculture. I would like to start off by asking Beatrice how the NFUS encourages women into leadership positions in its organisation. We are very supportive and we have been very active in women and agriculture since day one, our former president, Andrew McCormack, chaired a working group. We have opened up our membership to family membership now, which recognises that there are a lot of family businesses with often the partnership between people and a family playing incredibly important roles within the farms. We have seen a growth in the number of women participating in our branch, regional and board level. We are helping, we are trying to improve crossover change and we are doing what we can to promote it. We are very supportive of women and agriculture task force. We are certainly doing what we can to support the events and networks that they are doing. There is still more to be done, but they are certainly moving in the right direction. I go to Sally. The Scottish Government wants to legislate to ensure equal rights of succession for women in agriculture. The women in agriculture report in 2019 looked at areas of barriers for women coming into agriculture such as childcare, responsibilities, access to land, finance, training and education. Do you believe that legislation would drive the change that you are seeking or, for the reasons that I have given in terms of the barriers, that those need to be addressed first? There is no legal barrier to women inheriting land. There is nothing in the legislation that says that women cannot. The barrier is a cultural one. Farming is understood as a male occupation. When parents are looking at the successor, they look at the boys. When we were doing the research, we interviewed one young woman who was the eldest of four girls. She told me that when she was 13 and her brother was born, she knew that she would no longer inherit the family farm. She subsequently went on to rent land with her partner when they were both working full-time. She was working in the agricultural sector and brought that knowledge to the farm that she rented. However, the barrier there was not a legal one, it was a cultural one. The country in Europe that has legislated around this is Norway. Back in 1974, they introduced the Elodia law, where they made the eldest child the legal heir to the farm. You can argue that there are inequalities in that, too. In terms of gender representation, it has a minimal impact. It is not legislation. It is tackling the culture around the issues that need to be addressed. The Scottish Government is doing quite a lot of work on that. The previous question about what is the position of women in leadership roles is really important in terms of the message that it sends out. Where are women in the sector? Where are they at the top table? The task force has recommended that unconscious gender bias training has taken place. Men, we interviewed, said that they would not vote for women to have a position in farming organisations. Women told us, and we have seen reports of it subsequently in newspapers that, at a certain point, they are asked to leave farming meetings because the social part is finished and the business part is about to begin. There are multiple approaches that are needed around succession and planning, pointing out the talent that is in there, ensuring that women are represented in the industry, and that also requires being mindful that, when positions on executive boards are being replaced, there is an illness on the agriculture and food industry to ensure a gender representation when they are appointing new board members. It has to be a multi-pronged approach. I agree that the whole question of new entrants is a real issue, and a particular one for women, because of the difficulties that they have accessing land. I would like to ask Mike and Dave if they believe that it is not only difficult for women to get into agriculture, but it is also difficult for new entrants, for young people and for farming to have a diverse representation. Do you believe that the net zero targets will draw in a new group of people through different interests such as innovation, and we will see a sea change in the number of representation across the board in agriculture? First of all, to set up a bit of context, I am only responsible for one part of SRUC, but within our Auckland research centre, six of the seven members of staff are all female and all three of our existing PhD students are female. I have a wider suite of teams, and two of the four teams are led by females and include female lecturers. For me, it is not the agriculture side of things that is important. I am not responsible for our wider agricultural courses, but the good female representation, both in terms of the leadership and the lecturership roles within those but also within the students. For my area of SRUC, my issue with representation, both in terms of staff but also in terms of students coming in, is in the forestry area. I have a forestry team that has dominated, well solely, male, and I have students candidates coming forward. Two of those forestry education and training needs are 98 per cent male, and that is something that we do want to change, but we do need to change. You have hit the nail in the head in terms of the wider skillsets that we actually need within Scotland and elsewhere, but within Scotland in terms of the green recovery from pandemics. We will draw on both a wider set of skills and a wider set of knowledge and understanding, but we also need to crack that perception that work in rural industries, farming and forestry, is only for Baroni males. We mentioned precision agriculture earlier, technology and the range of skillsets that we are looking for. Our wildlife and conservation management course, which is led by a female colleague, is dominated by female candidates. There will be more of the way of opening up, but I think that I would have come in at one of the earlier questions. We need to have more of a consideration right from school in Scotland that those types of employment in rural industries, A, are different from what the school pupils, their teachers and likely their parents might actually think, but also whether it is farming, forestry, wildlife and conservation management, sustainable land use, will need to involve a greater range of technologies and metrics that should and are open to all. We are not instilling enough knowledge, information and interest in female candidates to come forward into some of those courses, but we will be working actively to change that. Not only do I hope that change, but it needs to change, as Sally and Beatrice have already said. I know from the experience of working with women colleagues and managing women colleagues that they bring a different mindset, a different approach and possibly a much more collegiate and less competitive approach to actually trying to make important decisions about areas of conflict. Before I bring anybody else in the panel in, I will move to Karen for her questions and then we can address all the questions at that point. Directed to Sally, you spoke a lot about the role of women play in diversifying within the sector. I was able to visit a farm that is diversifying into agritourism along with their working farm, and the women's farm was highlighted in her farm and practices. They have been incredibly successful being environmentally aware of reusing and recycling materials to make camping pods, for example, educating people on the farm as well as supporting local economy. It really ticked so many boxes, so to speak. That is one example where I note the pragmatic approach of the women really took off when she was given that pathway and support to do this. I just want to ask, is the gendered lens of the sector you are using really helping to open up that often untapped potential and entrepreneurship of women in the sector? Could you explain how you feel that the work that you have done will enhance the whole sector and not just the women? Question. I would be very disappointed if anybody thought that our work is simply about enhancing the position of women rather than the whole agricultural sector. We were very clear about that both in the research and the task force report. I hope that I have not caught the Covid, but I seem to have a tickle in my throat. The whole point is that bringing women in is beneficial for the agricultural industry. One of my colleagues said, you do not leave half your team on the bench, so this is much better for the agricultural industry. I will give you an example of an upland farm where a woman married in kept asking why they were doing things the way they were doing. They were milking, losing money and overfist. Her partner was suffering with his mental health and she completely changed the type of farming that we were doing, took them into environmental schemes, changed to native breeds and farming communities to change people's breaking rank with how the farm has always been farmed. However, she turned a farm that was unprofitable into one that is now profitable. She would not talk about herself as a woman. She would be talking about the type of changes that she introduced into that farm and how the agricultural sector needs to come at things differently. There needs to be much better business skills because she could see that in the farm they were not operating as a business. That is difficult when you are a family. When your siblings are your parents, you do not think that we need to sit down and have a business meeting, so everything tends to get done on the back of a farm packet, but a fresh pair of eyes coming in can see that more clearly, and that is very much what it is about. That is the important point. There has been enormous potential that people are starting to see. It is important that we tap that, but it is also important that we recognise that it is there. I agree with David that there is some good representation in agricultural training and courses. If you look at a lot of the admin people in LFUS, you will see a lot of women who did not inherit the farm, but went into farm-related employment as advisors and so on. The key question is who is at the top table making decisions, negotiating trade agreements, deciding on the appropriate subsidies, making decisions about the future of the farm, and that has to be everybody active in the family farm. Thank you. That is certainly something that will take away at leaving some of your best players on the bench. It is a very good point when it comes to women in agriculture. That is a good point to finish on. We have touched on budget and touched on LFASS and so on, but we have really got seismic shift coming for farming in rural areas when it comes to the challenges ahead. I ask whether the panellists, and I say very briefly, believe that we need additional budget to bring forward those policies, to pump prime new projects. Given that we hear so much about the health benefits of better biodiversity and the environment that we live in and land managers, farmers or whatever, have a big part to play in it, do you reckon that we need an increased budget for this sector and do you think that your arguments for it will be listened to and will be delivered in the future? I start with Sally Beatrice, Davey and then finish with Mike, please. I am sorry, I missed half that question. Do you mind repeating it? Yes, certainly. We are going to see seismic shift in rural areas with agriculture policies by diversity and so on going forward. Do we need to see an increase in budget to help to deliver that? I think that the key thing where budget will really need to be invested is in business skills. We are asking farm families to embrace a completely different way of being and acting. I think that it is really important that we work with them to provide the skills that they need, whether that is farm consultancy, whether it is short-term training, all of that will need investment and I do not think that we can expect farm families to be paying for that. For me, at the practical level, I think that there is going to be budget needed for that. What we are asking for is the certainty of ring-fenced funding and multi-annual funding commitment that at least matches current levels. That is what we are calling for. Before asking for more, Beatrice has said that we do not need to start from what we have and make sure that we are looking to see how it can be best utilised. Clearly, those will be highlighted through the session. A greater proportion of that spend—it does not need to be an additional spend but a greater proportion—needs to go on a biodiversity and wider environmental management. However, we also need to have some consideration. We are entering a new world. How much of our support to land management going forward needs to come in the form of an annual payment for something and how much of Sally was indicating how much could be achieved by one of pump priming payments, training, access to capital grant or whatever that allows them to move from one plane to another that allows them to be much more sustainable in their own right moving forward. Basically, we are doing at the moment, but I think that it has got to be driven around this need for change. The industry has a huge opportunity to be seen as much more progressive and to take action that the whole of Scotland needs. It probably needs a short-term injection to help with that shift. That is essential, but otherwise it has got to move. That is probably around training and all sorts of other issues and helping to deliver what we have presented in the farming 1.5 inquiry. That brings us to the end of the session. I thank you very much for your contributions this morning. They have been very welcome and I will help inform our business, our work programme going forward. I thank all very much. I am now going to briefly suspend until 10.50 to allow for a change of witnesses. Welcome back, everybody. On our second panel, I would like to welcome Stephen Young, head of policy of Scottish land and estates, Christopher Nicholson, chairman of the Scottish Tenants Farmers Association, Pete Ritchie, the chair of Scottish Environmental Link, Food and Farming Group, Donald MacKinnon, chair of the Scottish Crofting Federation and Miranda Gleod, Scotland Policy and Campaigns Coordinators for the Land Workers Alliance. Once again, can I ask you to make a very brief opening statement? If you could keep your comments to about two minutes, that would be very helpful. I will invite Stephen Young to make the opening remarks and then move to Christopher, Pete, Donald, then Miranda. Thank you, convener, and good morning to everyone. Thank you again for the opportunity to speak to you today. Just a little bit of background to Scottish land and estates, we are a membership or organisation, we are land managers from all parts of Scotland, both large and small scale, everything in between, and all types of land ownership model from private owners, NGOs. Our members are involved in all aspects of rural business, which gives us a fairly unique take on rural development, so we are covering all areas, not simply agriculture but everything else. We have long talked about, due to that, taking an integrated approach to land management. Today, obviously, we are talking about agriculture mainly, but the impacts that agriculture has on all land use need to be understood, and they are all interconnected. Changes to one make changes to others, so they have to work together. Within land management there are pressures coming from many different sides, and we are being asked, like every sector, to reduce emissions. We are looking to increase sequestration. We are looking to increase biodiversity. We have been asked to reduce affordable nutrition. We have to maintain the rural economy, and we provide wellbeing services for society as a whole. I am not sure that any other sector has been asked to achieve all those things simultaneously in a short period of time. All of them can be achieved, and I think that land management can play a role in all of those things, but support is desperately needed to do that. Support itself is not simply financial support, but knowledge and understanding, training and skills to deliver those things, and to hold supply chain approaches, understanding what impacts the market has on those other elements, and where resilience can be built in, whether it is a market return, whether it is Government support or where we can do that. The other area that is within knowledge transfer is understanding the win-wins, understanding where support is not needed. What are the areas that we can make changes in that have benefits both economically and environmentally? They can almost take care of themselves. They need to be understood by all and to have a better understanding of where we are all trying to go in the future. Once we have that very clearly laid out and have policies in place, I believe that we can deliver all the things that we are looking to do. On behalf of the Scottish Tent Farmers Association, I would like to thank you for the opportunity to give evidence to your committee today, looking at the challenges ahead for Scottish agriculture. The tenants that we represent tend to be the smaller to medium-sized family farms, often concentrated in the more marginal farming areas and with a tendency at the core of their family business. They do not enjoy the benefits that come with land ownership. Those are the types of farms that are facing the greatest uncertainties as a result of Brexit, greening and the adoption of new farm policy. In contrast to other occupied farms, it is difficult to see how tenants, currently limited by restrictive agricultural leases, can benefit from future policy measures that focus on carbon and greening without, first, being changes to existing tenancy legislation. Furthermore, the new interest in land from green capital is resulting in the removal of tenant farmers to be replaced by, so far mainly, commercial forestry and other greening measures like rewilding. I ask that the tenancy legislation is amended to allow fair access to carbon and greening-related measures for tenants. The new farm policy that we are likely to see in the Parliament is feasibility-tested for the tenanted sector. Fogus Ewing, the previous cabinet secretary, promised that there would be a level playing field between tenants and owner-occupiers for access to the future measures and that tenants would be able to play their part in climate mitigation and increasing biodiversity, et cetera. However, there is still to get there and not much time to do it in, so those are the points that I would like to make to start with. Thank you. Thank you for inviting to the Scottish Environment link to give evidence. I chair the food and farming group. What we want to particularly emphasise is the value of taking the camera back a little bit in this conversation. As people have said, the agriculture bill is due to come in in 23, and there is lots of work going on at the moment to look at some of the mechanics and the objectives of that, but we also know that the Good Food Nation bill will be introduced and possibly sooner than that, and we think that it is vital as a food and farming group that these two things are tied up together. We are the food and farming group, and the Good Food Nation bill should set a framework for food policy across all the areas—environment, climate change, consumption, production, use of natural resources, waste—and that framework will shape what we then want to pay farmers to do and how farmers can contribute to that business of a Good Food Nation. They have an absolute essential role. There is no food without farming, and all the discussions that we had earlier about imports and exports and the islands at rural areas, small farms, women, are all part of that mix. We want to emphasise the need for policy coherence, joined up policymaking between food and farming and make sure that when we think about farming, what we support farmers to do, and how we can help farmers to have a prosperous, sustainable future that has to be part of how we do food in Scotland. Thank you, convener. I'm Donald MacKinnon, a crofter from the Isle of Lewis and chair of the Scottish Crofting Federation. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to give evidence today. SCF represents just under 2,000 members from across the crofting counties and is the only organisation solely dedicated to representing crofters and crofting. Crofting brings numerous benefits to the Highlands and Islands and to Scotland as a whole. It is part of the solution to the climate emergency, the biodiversity crisis and reversing depopulation in those areas, but it will only fulfil this potential with appropriate agricultural support and legislation that works for crofters and crofting. On agricultural support, we need to see clarity now on the future direction of the support system. That system needs to take a holistic approach, reducing carbon emissions, promoting biodiversity and recognise the socio-economic impact of support. The system needs to reward and encourage existing good practice as well as incentivising change where required. On legislation, we were very disappointed that the programme for government for this year did not include reference to any intention to deliver crofting law reform. SCF has continually warned that if a crofting bill is to be delivered in this parliamentary session, then work needs to start on that now. The market in crofts is completely out of control with local young people in particular completely priced out. The situation is not sustainable and we need to start working towards a long-term solution to that and other legislative issues. Thank you for the opportunity to contribute. Thank you very much and good morning. My name is Miran Dakhild and I am representing the Land Workers Alliance. We are a union of farmers, growers, crofters, forecers and other land-based workers. As we are still relatively new to Scotland, I feel the need for a bit of an introduction. We have an active membership stretching as far north as Shetland and as far south as Dumfries and Galloway. Most of our members work at smaller skills. They include crofts and small holdings, market gardens and community projects, but we also increasingly have medium-sized and larger farms joining us, which combine a variety of activities from horticulture to arable and from livestock to agroforestry. What binds us together ultimately is that we all believe in agroecology, a term that was used earlier this morning. Farming with nature and with people looking to support both and use the land to benefit both. We support an integrated approach to farming as well as an integrated approach to agricultural and fruit policies. There are things on the agenda today that are of great interest to our members, such as agricultural subsidies, climate and biodiversity measures and anything around what a just transition could look like, but also more implicit top six around land ownership and access, new entry and support and local supply change. Thank you very much for having me here today and I am looking forward to your questions. Thank you and I appreciate you all keeping your introductions brief, but you are all very welcome. I am going to kick off with the first questions on future agricultural and rural policies and EU exit in relation to agriculture. Broadly, can I ask each of you in turn what your key requirements will be for the new agriculture and rural policy that will be brought forward to this Parliament before 2023 and what the impact of EU exit will be in that future policy? The key element is that integrated approach to land management, understanding how different industries fit together. For too long, we have seen issues between forestry and agriculture. How do we make them work together to get a cliché about the right activity in the right place at the right time? While we are doing that, we have to maintain a critical mass in terms of food production and agricultural production, maintaining value in Scotland and adding value where we can to maximise returns to the farm gates. Really, where we need to start, the policy is to put on the clear aims that we have and work down as to where we want to go. The farmer-like groups have made a good start. The concern is that they are purely looking at agriculture and what we have done is to divide sectors within agriculture as well. There is a danger that we can get competition between sectors and that could make things worse. I hope that the arrow will sort that out and will all work together in terms of making sure that there is diversity of thought among that as well. In terms of the new policy, support does not have to be simply cash payments, knowledge transfer and having the farm advisory service, which is strong and there to help people to develop their businesses. Capital funding to put in place a lot of the measures that we will need to meet the climate change objectives. A clear long-term view is that rural businesses have long life cycles. We cannot just have 90-degree turns every few years. We have to have long sustained goals. Looking at the work so far and all other farmer-led groups, things such as biodiversity score cards and the conditionality around environmental problems are all positive steps in the right direction. Just getting them right and making them fit for purpose but also achieving our goals so that they are workable at ground level but also meet the national targets will be hugely important. All sectors need to move forward together, and that is civil in Europe. As I say, it is forestry, it is peatland and it is agriculture. We have to move forward together because if we get out of step then it causes huge issues for businesses' planning for the future. You have raised all sorts of uncertainties for Scottish agriculture. What does future policy look like? Issues around labour supply. That has got a shortage of labour and access to labour. It potentially might have greater effect on Scottish agriculture than other issues such as policy. We do not fully understand the impact of the free trade agreements that have been agreed or in the process of negotiation. They might be free trade agreements, but how fair are they for Scottish producers that may be producing at a disadvantage in more difficult circumstances than in other countries? In the past, looking to the future, it is clear that, certainly for the uplands and marginal lands, we are looking at much greater integrated land use in the future. We need to look at our relationship between forestry and agriculture. We know from past experience that, where we have considered individual rural issues in their silos, they have had a lot of unintended consequences—often negative consequences—on vectors. I agree with those who say that we should be looking at this more holistically and not considering individual enterprises in their own silos. We are up against quite a time limit to not just design policy but to see good farmer uptake and understanding of it. We have to be careful—the policy makers have to be careful—that new policy is presented in the framework and language that farmers understand and that access to it and application procedures are fair and open and easily understood for all in the rural sector. We need the new policy to be completely clear eyed about what it is that we are supporting farmers to do. The current policy is as bad as it could be. It is detached from any impact on practice, it is dead weight money at the moment and it is inequitable. Most of the money goes to the biggest farmers on the best land. It is not clear at all what the current system is designed to achieve and we need to be absolutely clear with the new system that we are aligning farm support with climate and nature objectives as well as good quality food production and nourishing the people of Scotland. We have to be dead clear on the purpose and then we have to be really rigorous about how the instruments that we are developing are going to achieve that purpose. We have to properly have an anti-payment evaluation, some modelling of that, some clear work that has not been done as well in DEFRA as it might have been. What are we trying to achieve here with public support for farming? That is the first thing. Within that, we think that there needs to be a clear pivot to agriecology, as Miranda mentioned earlier, combining farming and nature, not putting farming in one box and nature in another box, and a pivot to local. We have seen a huge interest in the pandemic in stronger local food economies and there is a huge role here for strengthening local food economies and for strengthening horticulture, particularly small and medium scale horticulture, the glasshouse sector, etc. Finally, we want to stay aligned with the EU. The EU is bringing in a sustainable food law in 2023, which will provide a overall framework for food policy in the EU following the Farm to Fork initiative, and that will frame the future cap in Europe. If we are going to stay aligned to Europe, we need to have this overall framework of food law, but we need to link what we support farmers to do to really clear policy objectives. On that, there is an awful lot in that contribution. Do we have time to do it all before we see a bill go through the process and become an act by 2023? Are we ready too late, specifically on your contribution? No, we are certainly not too late. We have to get a wiggle on, and we need to have a process that is inclusive, which I think the new process is panning up to be, but which is evidence-based. We have to have clear, transparent modelling of what it is that we are trying to achieve with these subsidies. The current subsidy system broadly inflates the price of land, which is its main impact on the basic payments. There are small subsidies around the edge of that, which are constructed by the new entrants. We have lost the agri-environment climate scheme for the time being, and most of it, we need to get that back into place in the short term. Along the term, we need a farm support system that is designed fit for purpose. As other people have said, it is fit for 20, 25 or 30 years. It cannot be a scheme that we set up and then we change up to five years. We need to put our best efforts into that. We also need to look around the world at how other countries are tackling climate nature emergencies through the way they are changing their farm support. We need to make sure that there is always going to be politics in that thing. There is always going to be winners and losers, but the important thing is that we are transparent about that. As Donald says, we have to make sure that we include farmers at all scales and sizes, whether they are part-time farmers, full-time farmers, women farmers, urban farmers. The framework for support has to be inclusive of a lot of those, but we have time to do it. As I mentioned in my opening remarks, the policy has to achieve a lot. The three points that I mentioned in my opening remarks are reducing carbon emissions and tackling the biodiversity crisis and recognising the socioeconomic impact of support. Those are all very important. I would also add to that the importance that the policy aims to encourage active farming and crofting and active use of the land and that it is linked with food and food production. I think that there is a danger that that is a lot that is trying to be achieved and that quite rightly reducing carbon emissions is top of the agenda, I would say, from a policy perspective. However, there is a danger that we could focus on that at the exclusion of some of those other really important outcomes that can't be overlooked. At an actual scheme level, I think that it's essential that any schemes that are developed following on from that policy are accessible to smaller producers, in particular crofters, and that they take recognition of crofters common grazing, which are a fairly unique system that can't be just shoehorned into any old scheme. It's also really important that Pete mentioned agri-environment schemes that are accessible to the vast majority of producers in the country. At the moment, their competitive nature has meant that we're not getting enough land into those agri-environment schemes, and that's something that has to be a priority going forward. Donald and Maranda, finally. We very much agree that future agricultural and rural payments should very much be re-centred around the objectives to protect biodiversity, address climate change and to provide greater equity. In that regard, I fully agree with Pete that area-based payments in themselves are problematic. We are still paying for the size of land in question, even if we condition those payments on better management. We need to wrap our heads around the fact that good things can be done in small spaces. Give an example, some economic analysis has been done on one of our members' crops, which combines small-scale livestock production with horticulture, estimating that he is generating about £42,000 annually in public benefits, be it environmental being in terms of employment and other community benefits, but he is only receiving £1,200 in subsidies because he is a small-scale farmer. There isn't enough talk about overhaul of payments altogether, and I understand the politics behind it, but that is something that needs to be said. If we keep the basic payments, there are a number of examples to give of things that we definitely should be doing, whether it is to keep the quite low minimum area requirement. Three hectares here in Scotland, as opposed to five hectares in England, has been quite positive. We should also be taking some inspiration from what is happening in the EU. It has now introduced mandatory redistributive payments, which give more money to the first few hectares of a farm. We should look at the accessibility of agri-environmental schemes for everyone, but ultimately we should start looking at the objectives of what we are trying to achieve. A question for Donald and Miranda, given their interests in crofting. I suspect that the clock is against us, so I will ask two questions together. One is about legislation and the other is not about legislation. On the issue of legislation, many people agree with you that the need for legislation is for crofting. The crofting law is one place to begin, but you also mentioned the cost of taking on a tendency to be out of control. Do you feel that there should be a reassessment of what is meant in law by the improvements on a croft in order to prevent such tendency assignations and the cost of them getting out of control? The question that I had was not about legislation, but about the effectiveness in your view of the arrangements that we have for dealing with crofts that are not so much absentee crofters because people can, I know, sublet and otherwise make use of crofts, but crofts that are abandoned or derelict. Do you feel that the croft and commission could do more to intervene in those situations? Donald, do you want to kick off and then we will go to you, Miranda? On the first point about legislation, I think that the crofting law stump is a good place to start on this. It identifies a lot of the major technical issues in the existing legislation that need to be sorted out to allow crofting to the law as it exists at the moment to work effectively. I think that we are getting to a point where there is a realisation that that might not be enough, and certainly what was proposed in the last parliamentary session, which was a phase 1 and a phase 2 approach, that phase 1 bill would not go anywhere near some of the more fundamental issues that are being raised more recently, certainly in the last year or so. On your point about improvements, whether that is a route to tackling this issue, I am not quite sure of it is. I think that it is something that maybe needs to be looked at and considered. I am certainly not here to say exactly what needs to change in the legislation, but fundamentally the issue at the moment is that the price of a croft that a croft can change hands for is not regulated in any way at all and the transfer of owner-occupied crofts is not regulated at all, at least with the tendencies that there is an element of regulation there, but the price does not come into it. I am not saying that it is easy in any way, shape or form, but we need to start having these conversations now about what the options are and gain the views of the wider sector on what people want to see. I believe that we are approaching some sort of consensus around that. I think that that will in itself take time, but I think that there is a lot of agreement out there in the crofting community. On your other point about how you can solve some of the issues around neglect of croft land within the current system, it has been very encouraging to see the steps that the crofting commission has taken through additional funding to employ development officers in the Western Isles to start with the pilot scheme. I think that a lot of those issues are at a basic level, could be solved by education and through crofting commission staff on the ground, being able to speak to individual crofters about how they could sort out their situation, because I believe that most people want to do the right thing and that there are just certain barriers in the way to doing that. I do not think that that will be enough either. I think that there probably is a place for the crofting commission to enforce its regulations that it exists to do. I do think that that will require additional resources to the crofting commission, which would give them the opportunity to do more in that area, because I think that there is a willingness on the path of the commission to do that. I think that they are just struggling to get to that part of their work, and that is certainly the understanding that I received from them. I hope that answers will hear questions after. I will not add too much to Donald's analysis of the crossing legislation and the issues around some of specific requirements. What I would want to add is that, as to your second point to inactive crofts, that that issue goes beyond crofting, but the issue is slightly different. Obviously, for all its weaknesses, crofting comes with an added layer of protection that you cannot in principle decroft unless there are stipulations met, whereas that kind of protection does not apply to small holdings that are often situated towards the south or not always. That means that, in that case, there is actually a real risk that some of these small holdings simply cease to exist. They are sold more often than not. They are sold separately. The houses are sold separately from the land. That adds to the big problem of there already being real need for land. A lot of people actually want to go into farming, in particular small-scale farming, that are struggling to find land, to find affordable land, to find suitable houses to go with the land. Just on the sort of topic that we are now touching on, the agricultural tenancies or whatever, I will ask Jenny and then Mercedes to ask some questions on that topic. Great. Thank you, panel. I think that this is a question that is really directed at Christopher Nicholson. I am interested to know what level of contact the Scottish Tenant Farmers Association has had with the Scottish Government in relation to the needs of tenant farmers in relation to future agricultural policy. Also, if you could expand a bit more on one of your opening remarks about what the just transition would look like for tenant farmers. I think that there is a strong awareness amongst policy makers, the civil servants and Scottish Government, and, importantly, the Scottish Lands Commission and the Tenant Farming Commissioner as to what is needed. We have had a lot of contact with the Lands Commission over this in the past few years. Also, previously, we have had meetings and communications with the current Cabinet Secretary, Mary Gougeon, as to what the needs are for the tenant sector to allow tenants to play their part in climate change and increasing biodiversity, et cetera. Barriers are well known. I think that there are ideas there as two solutions. I know that the Tenant Farming Commissioner, Bob Mackintosh, used a paper looking at the barriers and fixes available or that might be needed for tenants to play their part in tree planting and quite extensive tree planting. That was as a result of a request from Fergus Ewing to look at how tenants can plant more trees. The barriers that are identified and the fixes that are required to allow tenants to plant trees are pretty similar to the barriers that exist and the fixes that are required for tenants to play their part in wider greening measures and climate change measures. I think that it is quite well understood. It is just a case of getting on and making the changes. I thought that it was quite interesting that you referenced the Scottish Land Commission there. I noticed that Andrew Thin made some comments about pressures of farmers and crofters facing over carbon rights and more widely on tenant farmers' access to climate change measures. Can you expand a wee bit on that, please? The element that is impacting on tenants is the new financial interest that there is in acquiring land for greening measures, whether that is carbon credits. At the moment, what we are seeing the most of is forestry followed by rewilding, where areas are being removed from the tenants sector. They might be secure tenants and their landlords are doing deals with them to resume parts of their lease or where they are non-secure tenants on limited duration tenants. Those leases are not being renewed. It is more attractive now for some landlords to sell land with vacant possession without tenants to the new sources of green finance that we are seeing, whether that is pension funds, private equity or industries looking for future carbon offsets. That is focused on the more marginal lands where it is typical of livestock grazing farmland. The main impact that we are seeing is doubling the value of land. That means that where tenants are offered the opportunity to buy their farms, landlords are looking at not agricultural values but forestry values. That is unaffordable for tenants. The new source of green funding that is looking to acquire chunks of Scotland is a similar problem that Wales is experiencing as well, because it has large areas of marginal land. It is really reversing some of the aims of land reform in Scotland. It is not increasing diversity of ownership. It is doing the opposite and trading ownership. Often it is not looking at wider integrated land uses. It is very focused on carbon at the expense of the environment and other land uses, as you see by, especially in the south of Scotland, from south Ayrshire across to the borders. Huge areas of commercial citrus spruce are being planted. Often it is tenants who bear the brunt of it. Donald MacDonald and Stephen MacDonald will like to come in. Donald MacDonald, first, is Stephen MacDonald. I just wanted to come in on the point about carbon credits and Andrew Thin's comments from the Scottish Land Commission. That is an increasing concern for crofters and tenants. There is a lack of understanding of where that is heading at the moment. It is heading forward at a rate of not—with a lack of clarity—on who the carbon credits belong to and who is entitled to to trade them in the future. For crofters, that is particularly in relation to peatlands and peatland restoration, which crofters have already taken forward on their common grazings. I agree with the comments that Andrew Thin made in that statement, that there should be a pause on that until there is greater clarity. It is a topic that the committee should pay close attention to as those things move forward. I agree with Christopher and Donald that it is complex. That speaks back to the need to integrate different land management sectors. Land use change is a key part of the strategy, but the climate change plan, so how does that sit? Are we running counter to that when we are looking at agriculture purely? In terms of Andrew Thin's comments on pausing, that is a difficult area, because it is not that easy to pause if we are going to meet the climate change targets that we have. We cannot put things on hold for too long. It is an opportunity to bring money into rural areas. In terms of carbon credits and the peatland code, do not just get given a carbon credit for owning the land, it is a result of active management, so you have to have done something. You have to physically plant a tree, restore peatland and, in both of those schemes, you have to prove that it would not have been cost-effective to do that work without the money that you were likely to get from the carbon credit, so it is a theory of additionality. There is something there that says that this is part of risk and reward. I know that Andrew Thin's comment and I take on board the element that we do not know in future whether we will be asked to be carbon neutral as a business individually or as a sector, but in terms of agriculture and rural business, it is always about risk. Everything that you do will encourage risk and reward. Particularly in some of those elements, there are long-time fees, for example. It is a long time until they are cash-generating in themselves, so it cannot pump crime there. As with everything, it is probably not wise to sell everything on day 1, but it is all about understanding that risk and running any business in cars risk. People can make that decision as long as they have the information in front of them. What I would say in terms of pausing is that, if anyone is planting trees or restoring peatland, even if you sell the credits now, they have to get on and register them so that they can sell them later if they want to or they can be dealt with. If we stop or we do not do that now, then we are stocking up problems later on, so we need to be really clear what we are trying to achieve here, both in terms of climate change, agriculture and land use, but also in what messages we are sending out to people and how they can achieve that. That all comes back to having clarity across all the different things. Thank you, Stephen. We now have short supplementaries from Rachel Hamilton and Beatrice. I just wanted to ask Christopher Nicholson if he believes that the new entrance schemes and, indeed, the environmental schemes are too limited in scope and, obviously, the budget has been cut in those schemes. Does that have an impact on how tenant farmers can look to the future? It does. There is quite a bit of concern amongst our members about the future of agri-environment schemes. Given that the tenanted sector tends to be concentrated in the more marginal areas, there was good uptake of those schemes amongst tenants. Unless you are in a designated area such as a SSI, there is no longer access to the agri-environments. In terms of new entrants, that funding is being missed by new entrants. I think that it is always a struggle for new entrants to find land to rent, and often land that comes up for established farmers who landowners see as a safer bet than an unknown new entrance. However, the Scottish Lands Commission has had a positive effect on encouraging some of the big landowners to let long-term new entrants. We are now seeing new entrants taking on 20-year leases, which is a very healthy sign, given that, across the UK, short-termism is a major issue in the tenanted sector. The average length of a new lease in England is only three or four years now. Recently, I looked at a list of farming opportunities to rent land in the UK, and the only ones that I could find over 10 years were all in Scotland. That is the effect. It is encouraging that landowners to take a long-term view rather than a short-term view. While funding for new entrants is vital, the big effect that the Lands Commission can have on changing how land is let, there is also a bigger issue around the fiscal framework in which landlords operate. We have seen in southern Ireland tax reforms or changes to the way income tax is treated around the letting of land has had immediate effect in creating longer leases, which improves the productivity of the land. Similar benefits could accrue in Scotland if we look at the fiscal framework around which tenants and landlords operate. Funding for new entrants is important, but there are other factors at play as well. Donald, you mentioned the crofter's common grazing and peatland restoration. I wonder if you saw opportunities to expand woodlands on common grazing and if you saw any barriers to doing so. Yes, there are opportunities for expanding woodland on common grazing. Since the Crofter Forestry Act in the 90s, crofters have led the way on small woodland creation on their common grazing. Would you have to be careful about what the land type is on those common grazing? In the past, trees have been planted in inappropriate locations on deep peat soils that would be much better maintained as peat and, in some cases, restored and improved as peatland rather than being planted with trees. It is important that any forestry schemes that are suitable for crofters can be taken forward by common grazing as a group of crofting shareholders or that they are available at a scale that is suitable for individual crofters to take forward as part of their own crofting enterprise. There are opportunities, and it is important that the schemes are croft-proofed in a way and that they take acknowledgement of the unique set of circumstances that crofters find themselves in. Thank you. I have a final brief supplementary on this from Jim. Thank you, convener. Is my light on? Yes, it is. Sorry. This is probably more directed to Stephen and to Christopher. I had a question earlier on in my head about what our tenants fears in relation to the support going into tree plant and peat restoration and stuff like that, and we have kind of skirted round about it. I would just like to understand the relationship between the landowner who may well be putting in the investment to plant trees while taking support from the Government to do so, and how that affects the tenant. I am going to talk about tenants. I am not just talking about pre-991 tenants. I am talking about people who have long-term leases. Is there an equity of cost and funding that comes into the farm as a result of that, and how do you differentiate that? If you have a 20-year lease and the trees will not be harvested for 30 years, how is that going to work? To suggest a last question about a 20-year lease and the trees, to arrange an evaluation of those trees at the end of the 20-year lease should the tenant be leaving. We hope to see that many of those 20-year leases are renewed to the same tenants or their successors as the evaluation might not come into it. What happens to tree planting at the end of a lease is something that needs to be addressed. There is a fear amongst tenants, and it is a genuine fear under the current legislation that a tenant who does plant trees may be requested should the lease come to an end to reinstate it as agricultural land or face dilapidations claims due to the change of use of land. Those are areas that can be modified or amended in tenancy legislation. I also think that the thrust of the forestry policy in Scotland is to create large blocks of commercial forestry as a means of achieving what are quite ambitious planting targets. I think that it is 18,000 hectares a year. Given that there are about 50,000 farming businesses in Scotland, I think that there is a huge opportunity that is being missed by not focusing on what individual farmers could do. If a quarter of those farmers planted small amenity plantations or small-scale commercial forestry on just an acre or two of their farm, it would go a long way towards meeting forestry targets—a Government forestry targets. It is difficult. The schemes that are available at the moment are very much focused on the bigger commercial scale. I know that a lot of farmers who have tried to apply through Scottish Forestry to plant smaller areas on their farms but have failed. I think that, to integrate farming and forestry and for them to coexist, the way forward is smaller blocks of forestry integrated with farmland rather than whole parishes disappearing under one block of commercial forestry. Certainly, looking south of the border, there is more generous and easily accessible funding for smaller-scale on-farm planting of trees. I think that farmers out there are willing to give it a go, but they cannot see a way forward at the moment. There are some good examples of people who have achieved it, but there are a lot of people who have become frustrated while trying to achieve small-scale on-farm plantations. There are solutions there. We will now move on to questions on climate change and biodiversity laws from Arreanna. I am going to ask my questions all together. I will say them slowly so that you catch them. This is directed to Pete from EnvironmentLink. Pete, you mentioned at the beginning in your opening about the keenness for the good food nation bill to be a framework bill against which to judge our future policies. What would you like to see in the good food nation bill to lay groundwork for a strong and coherent agricultural bill? In your briefing paper, you had a recommendation that a proportion of farming support payments be redirected to local government. Is that something that you would like to see in the agricultural bill and how much of the farm support budget would you recommend goes to local government? Can you give us some examples of how they could use that support to accelerate the transition to agricultural farming and healthy diets at a more local level? I have a third question, which I think could be Pete. I would like to bring in Miranda also on this, which is around potential announcements that the Scottish Government might make for new targets and commitments on farming to coincide with COP26. I would love to hear from both of you, and if we have time, other people, if they want to come in on that, what would you like those targets and commitments to include? On the good food nation bill, we want a framework for food policy that sets that really clearly what is the purpose of the food system in Scotland and what we want to deliver. At the core of that, it is healthy and sustainable diets for everyone, that everybody in Scotland can afford to enjoy a healthy and sustainable diet. That means changing the way that the sort of food we are eating, less of processed food, more local food, more unprocessed food, less sugar, a diet that meets our own dietary recommendations from the Food Standards Agency and other places. Everybody should be able to enjoy that in Scotland. That has implications for what we want our farmers to do to produce that diet. There are two things that we are asking farmers to do when they produce food. One is to export it and one is to feed the people of Scotland. We need to get that balance right so that we are paying attention to feeding the people of Scotland well from our own resources. That is the key thing. We want the right food to be at the heart of that bill because that places obligations on government to ensure that everyone can eat well, to ensure that people can eat sustainably and to ensure that the food system is joined up both nationally and at local level. We want to see an independent food commission and we want to see some targets in the bill. There are three parts to that. In terms of redirecting money for local government, I emphasise that this is not a sort of collective link policy. Some members support that, but we have not bottomed everything out on this. If you think of an example, improving public procurement of organic and local food as happens in France, in Denmark and in lots of other member states in the EU, supporting local authorities to do that to improve their procurement processes through a bit of the charm support money benefits farmers. It is not that money is being thrown away, but it is a very direct way to get money into the pockets of farmers who can produce food for local schools, food for hospitals and so on. Similarly, we would like to see a big focus on horticulture and urban and peri-urban horticulture, including a revival of the glasshouse sector in Scotland, which we lost in the 70s, but we could easily bring back now we have such an abundance of renewable energy that we could use. A focus on horticulture, focus on urban farming and a focus on lots of measures that can link producers to consumers and get short food chains in place. At the moment, a lot of farmers have to go through lots and lots of channels to get their food to market and they are controlled by a very few large retailers and that can really put farmers at a disadvantage. It can also drive some of the food waste that we have seen recently, which is down to Brexit. It is no mistake and to some extent Covid, but to see huge amounts of produce going to waste, broccoli, cauliflower going to waste, when short food chains could have got that food to people who could have bought it and eaten it. Finally, before I hand over to Miranda on the things that we could do in terms of bold ambitions for COP26, we would like to see bold commitments, like we said in the Farm 1.5 report on meat and reduction targets. There are technical measures that we can use to drive that forward, but we have to adopt them at scale. Reducing nitrogen use in line with the Colombo Declaration and the Sustainable Development Goals so that we can halve nitrogen waste by 2030, we waste half the nitrogen that we put on our land in Scotland. That just ends up in the water in the air. It is a major pollutant, we need to tackle that. We think that we could have a broader measure to reduce the global impact of the Scottish shopping basket. That is something that Tesco and WWF have adopted a few years ago, and they are actually making some progress on. The COP is also looking at reducing the impact. There is a lot of supply chain actors here who want to see these changes and the Government could certainly support that. We would also like to see some bold action on organics. It is great that the S&P Greens agreement and the programme for government have a strategy for organics to increase the area of organic land. We think that we could go further than that. Like other European neighbours, organic procurement targets into law so that we actually get our children in schools enjoying organic food. Organic food becomes something normal that kids eat every day, not something that is seen as a posh or out of reach for people. There is an American said that agroecology is the way forward in this, and we need to find bold measures to support the transition to agroecology. Thank you. In terms of COP26, and I think that this ties into a lot of what Peter has just said, we would like to possibly see a bit of a more integrated approach than that we have currently been. That includes both recognition of the value of whole farm approaches that indeed includes organic, but it is also a bit broader than that, but also really understanding what the value of local food production can be in this regard. We talk a lot here, but also in the context of agricultural reform about farming practices and how we are going to adjust farming practices and land use on farmers. Ultimately, the whole supply chain is responsible for a lot more emissions than just a farm. This includes all kinds of things, transport, refrigeration, but also, importantly, the footprint of inputs that go into farms. I think that we might not recognise enough the position that many farmers are in. There are sandwiched, in many ways, between, on one hand, side, agri-input industries from seeds, machinery, pesticides, and on the other hand, the commodity and supermarket. There is only so much room to wriggle. Really, in the context of co-op recognising that this is a whole supply chain approach and that there is real value in refocusing for its unlocalised food production, and genuinely local food production for community in the context of climate change mitigation. Jenny Minto, or, big apart, Jim, have you got a supplement on this question? Again, it's directed to Pete and to Miranda. We've got a bit of a problem in that food isn't cheap to produce, but it has to be cheap enough for people to be able to buy it. How do you square that? Miranda, do you like to go first? It's obviously a tricky question, but it also ties into a problem, a very systematic problem, of the fact that cheap food isn't really cheap food. It's cheap food for the person who buys it in the supermarket, but it comes with huge externalities in terms of the environmental, as well as the social costs. That doesn't really give the solution. I would like to make the point that we do see that some of our members who are working in tandem with both the environment and the community, providing huge environmental and social benefits, can do that at a reasonable price. I would like to highlight the importance of those people in the supply of localised good food at decent prices during Covid, where a lot of the other systems are built. We saw record numbers of people signing up to local veg boxes, where we could actually see that this can be done, but it's not necessarily an easy task. Again, it does require us to rethink the entire system, to really think about what we are trying to achieve and how we are going to achieve it. That means redirecting some of the money. At the moment, the suppliers of good produce, with the least footprint, are just not receiving the benefits in terms of both economies of skill, but also in terms of where public money is targeted, to really be able to compete with a lot of others. That's a shame. There is a lot of scope, but it's just a difficult thing to do. Thank you, Peter, and very briefly. Good question, Jim. To start with the human rights-based approach and the right food and make clear that over the next couple of decades, the Scottish Government is going to take responsibility for addressing this issue so that we move away from having a two-tier food system where so many people can't afford healthy, sustainable food. The Scottish Government is doing quite a lot with things like the child payment, and doubling that would again help, but that's focused on families with children who, often particularly single parents, are the most food insecure and the most worried about running out of money for food. Things like best start foods are really positive, too, in terms of increasing access to fruit and vegetables for the small people. But there are methods in other countries, too, as well as these cash-based mechanisms, to link small-scale farms around the set, specifically with low-income communities, by facilitating market access for those farms and subsidising what they do in terms of public goods by providing the issues for food locally. With the Glasgow Declaration of Government to Glasgow for COP26, we've got Sao Paolo coming to speak, and they have a massive programme with organic farmers in and around the city providing that sustainable food locally, and the local government has got organised to make that happen. There are things we can do to connect the farmers who want to nourish the people of Scotland, who want to get food into every household in Scotland that's safe, healthy and sustainable, and that's good for you and tasty, with the people who need that food. This isn't an impossible problem to solve, but we've got a bit used to thinking that there's no way of solving that problem. If we put our minds to it, we can afford to and manage nourishing everybody in Scotland well. Thank you, Pete. We're very conscious we're running out of time. We've got two final questions. Karen, and then Rachel. Yeah, thank you. I had a little bit of a preamble from a question. I think Jim was looking at my notes, he's still on my question, but I'm just going to go ahead and do this anyway, but it was more in regards to what Pete was discussing and answering to Ariane's questions, and we have quite a task to include environmental sustainability alongside health and dietary guidelines, and part of that is not allowing the importation of food produced to lower environmental standards than that we produce in Scotland, and not to simply discard the issue of environmental damage. We need to take the issue of poverty, diet, health and environment seriously as a package deal. We have a real problem of food insecurity and food poverty, and the food foundation estimates that the poorest desirial of the population would have to spend 74 per cent of their disposable income to eat, according to government guidelines, for a healthy diet. Where is that figure for the richest desirial? It's just 6 per cent, so it is quite a dilemma and poverty doesn't just harm those living in, it also harms the local economy and the environment overall. I was going to ask how can we square that with the food growers and producers receiving a fair payment, but also supplying that food to people at an affordable price. I'm hearing a lot about shortening the supply chain, and I was just wondering within that are there other packages of measures that we could really pin down on and hone in on? And if you could give your expertise on that, that we could take forward. Can we maybe ask that to Pete and then Stephen? With families themselves. We're teasing that question out with families themselves, and we're listening to families about what is a healthy enough diet, what's a sustainable enough diet for them, and how can they afford that. So I think there's much more work to be done to really bottom out the gap, but it is substantial and it's serious. For at least 20 per cent of our population, they really would struggle to eat a healthy, sustainable diet. They just couldn't afford what they know they'd like to be eating, and that's a real problem. Part of it is going to be cash measures, and the Scottish Government can only do what it can do, but it has made some progress on that, and part of it has to be food measures and really trying to reorient some of the food system so that we do get nutrition available to everybody. Free school meals are an important part of that, and there are other things we can do around the edge of that to improve access to fruit and vegetables in particular, but to unprocess products and to make those affordable to people. But it does mean a rethinking of how we do food and not simply relying on the private sector to deliver the nutrition that hasn't managed to do that up until now. We need to go into partially with the private sector and say, okay, let's work together, let's see how we can regulate the private sector to make sure that it's delivering more of what people need to eat, unless of what people don't need to eat, but at the same time, how can we set up pricing mechanisms, but also income mechanisms, and the living wage absolutely crucial in all this. Usdor research showed that people who were part-time on a lower wage simply were much, much more likely to be food insecure than the people who were full-time who were being paid living wage. That gap, quite a small gap in the actual hourly rate, makes a huge difference to food insecurity, so we need to pay attention to the ways in incomes, but we also need to look at how can we, by other ways, to shorten the food chains, make food more accessible to all of us. I don't think it's impossible. It's going to be tricky and it's a long-term kill. Thank you, Pete, and very briefly, Stephen. Yeah, it's probably more on Jim's question. I'm going to go by agreeing a lot what Pete's saying about local food, I think, as well. This links to trade as well, and one of the key things is really understanding the true cost of the high-production and environmental standards that we've got. Once we've understood that, that's where the public good funding can come in to fill that gap, but it all comes down to understanding the systems that we've put up. Thank you. I appreciate your brevity. Finally, in the last minute, we've got Rachel, women in agriculture and land-based industries. The Scottish Government wants to legislate for equal rights to succession for women in agriculture. I just wondered how your organisations promoted women in agriculture, considering that we do, as we listened to the last evidence, that we do have an issue with a cultural problem, with bringing women into farming, and not only that, we have issues with access to land, finance, childcare, and the responsibilities that women have. I'd like to start with Miranda. Yes, thank you very much, and we absolutely agree that this is a very important topic. I mean, anecdotally, we are a small organisation here in Scotland, but with a growing team on the ground, and we are all women. It's difficult to say what that is, because it's all ecological, but to some degree, there is a lot of diversity in this sector, and we see that both in the way we run our organisation as well as on the ground. We are actually, in terms of diversity, focusing our efforts, notwithstanding that we do see that there are definitely members who deal with issues around succession and childcare, including myself, to be honest, but we are also looking at the wider scope of increasing diversity, including all gender identities, as well as looking to increase diversity of minority communities across the board. It's not easy. I think that it is really about, for us, it's about increasing the accessibility and visibility of the sector at places where it counts, and that means, for example, in schools at relatively, at all stages, primary schools, secondary schools, trying to get it into the minds that this is the place where people want to be. Thank you, Miranda. Can I just quickly hear from Donald as well with regard to entrants into crofting, female entrants? Thanks. I think that Sally Shortall mentioned in the previous session that crofting has a slightly better story to tell on the involvement of women in the sector. I think that we could do better. I don't think that there are any legislative barriers here, but I do think that some of the my response to Alasdair Allan's question earlier on about how we encourage new entrants into the sector in general. I think that there would definitely be some benefits to women in that respect as well. I think that it's something that needs urgent attention, and certainly we engage with the women in agriculture task force and fully support their recommendations. Our board at the moment is 50-50, and we all hope to maintain that going forward. Thank you, and I think that Stephen Wishart has come in on this for the last word. Thank you. I apologise, my internet connection dropped there, so I'm not sure if I have missed anything. In terms of SLE, we are using the support of women in agriculture task force, our chief executive, Sarah-Jane Lline, has sat on it. 50 per cent of our senior management team is female and 30 per cent of our board, and we are working to improve that. In terms of women in agriculture, I was a wee bit disappointed yesterday to see QMS board have an all-male new intake of board members, and that's nothing against individuals. I'm not sure if that sends the right message for a modern and progressive industry, and Kate Rowell has tried really hard to get more diverse applicants, but it's something that we need to look at and try to improve. In terms of what we're doing, when we're recruiting on to our representative committees, we've changed the way that we do that, we've changed the wording, changed the language that we use, we've used testimonials to try to encourage people to part and get involved, and that is starting to make a difference. It's encouraging, stronger voices, and I like to chat to Sally Shortle's comment earlier on about not leaving your best players on the bench. That's a huge part in this as well. Thank you very much. It's a shame not to bring in the tenancy sector, but it's so important. We're women in tenancies. Well, it's up to the landlords to let land to women. We have about 25% or a third of our board is made up of women at present, but I don't think that's representative of the tenancy sector as a whole. I think that the number of women tenants is a percentage of total tenants, but we are a lot less than 25%. Most of the women tenants I know of, the farm was not originally led to women, but they have inherited the tenancy. I do notice a positive trend lately of some landlords letting to a couple rather than an individual, which recognises the importance that both partners have to play in the working of a family farm. I think that has to be encouraged, but yes, I would like to see greater encouragement of women in the tenancy sector. There are some agriculture where women play their fair share. In particular, I'm thinking of the veterinary sector, which often has to do a lot of the hard work dealing with large animals. If women can manage that without any problem, then I'm pretty sure that they can manage the rest of farming without much much. I think that there are barriers to do with custom and legislation around succession. True, there's nothing stopping someone leaving all their land to a daughter on the sun, but equally there's nothing preventing a land bequeathing all his land to a son instead of a daughter. I suspect that there's a bit of culture, custom and legislation that needs to be looked at. Thank you very much. In the sessions run over by five minutes, I'm quite sure that the cabinet secretary won't mind waiting five minutes as we've got your views on such an important topic. Once again, thank you for your contributions today. We will now very briefly suspend the session until I change over in witnesses. We now move to agenda item 2. The committee will now take evidence on the animal welfare licensing of activities involving animals, Scotland amendment regulations 2021, and those regulations are subject to the affirmative procedure and refer members to paper 2. I welcome Mary Gougeon, cabinet secretary for rural affairs and islands, and her officials, John Nicholson, policy manager for animal welfare team and Grant McLarty, the solicitor. I invite the cabinet secretary to make an opening statement. Thank you very much, convener, and I'm happy to appear before the committee today to discuss the amending instrument, which makes some minor amendments to the 2021 licensing regulations that were approved by the Scottish Parliament in February this year and which came into force on 1 September. As amendments proposed aren't contentious and they're limited both in terms of their impact and their scope, I want to keep them open in remarks brief, but the amendments being considered today amend the conditions which are applicable to two out of the six licence types available under the 2021 licensing regulations, and that's mainly animal rehoming licences and animal welfare establishment licences. The other types of licence are unaffected. The change that's specific to animal rehoming activities is the removal of the prohibition on the supply of kittens—that's cats under six months old—as pets if they're not bred by the licence holder. That change will permit persons who hold a licence to engage in animal rehoming activities, including foster carers working with animal welfare charities to rehome kittens. The need for that change was brought to the attention of the Scottish Government during discussions with Cats Protection on the development of detailed guidance for local authorities. Given the significant issues with the unlicensed puppy trade, we don't propose to remove the corresponding prohibition on the supply of puppies, which applies to holders of a licence to engage in animal rehoming activities. As to do so, we would no doubt encourage those involved in that drug trade to attempt to use animal rehoming as a cover for their unlicensed breeding and dealing activities. The stakeholders also brought to our attention during discussions on the development of local authority guidance that they would be met in mirroring certain safeguards, including in the conditions applicable to rehoming activities, in those that apply to animal welfare establishments. Accordingly, those amending regulations will prohibit holders of a licence to operate an animal welfare establishment from supplying unwinged mammals—mammals weaned at an age at which they should not have been weaned—non-mammals that are incapable of feeding themselves and puppies, kittens, ferrets and rabbits aged under eight weeks. While it is very unlikely that a holder of an animal welfare establishment licence would supply such an animal, we have agreed that the inclusion of those additional conditions is appropriate and medited as it further safeguards the welfare of particularly vulnerable animals. I hope that the committee will agree that although the changes that we seek to make to the 2021 regulations are relatively minor in nature, they are important because they remove a restriction that has potential to impact on the rehoming activities of cats protection given their routine use of foster homes as part of their rehoming activities. They also bring forward some additional protections for particularly vulnerable animals under the care of those operating animal welfare establishments. With that, I would be happy to take any questions that the committee may have. Thank you, cabinet secretary. I am delighted that the first piece of legislation that the committee is dealing with is kittens, but it may be minor, but it says none of the less very important when it comes to animal welfare. Would any members have any questions? Thank you, convener. Cabinet secretary, one kind of cat protection has raised the possibility that this amendment may enable rehoming to be used as a cover for illegal kitten trade. Will any measures be put in place to monitor the situation and ensure that the illegal kitten trading does not increase as a result? I thank the member for raising that concern, but I would say that we are only proposing this amendment because it came to light through discussions with cats protection as we were developing the guidance for local authorities. We did not have any objections to providing this amendment to the regulations, but when it comes to monitoring, we want to make sure that there are not any adverse impacts to that within regular engagement with animal welfare stakeholders and with other organisations, too. We would be in close contact and if there were any issues that came to light, but certainly from what we proposed so far and from discussions with cats protection and other animal welfare stakeholders, this is an amendment that has been welcomed. Thank you. Just a very quick question. I am just widening out on Arrianne Burgess' question about the level of consultation and who the consultation was with. Thanks. In relation to this amendment, there was obviously a consultation undertaken when we were introducing the licensing regulations, but some of the issues that we are looking to address today only came to light when we were developing the guidance for local authorities and working with our animal welfare stakeholders. We have been working closely with them throughout the process and then developing that guidance. That is why we are bringing this forward today to address that. Although there was not any formal consultation, we are in close engagement all the time so that we can identify those issues and address them. The amendment does not appear to do anything to halt the trading up of kittens, which often happens when individual kittens are offered for sale on the internet, they are resold at a higher price, with people posing as the owners of the parents of the cats. As if they have bred the kittens, does the cabinet secretary see any further amendments to the licence regulations to clamp down on this form of trading? Again, that is something that we would closely monitor. I would say that the licensing regulations that we introduced, which came into force on 1 September, really modernised the whole licensing system that we have. It made it more robust. We have gone a long way in trying to tackle some of the issues that have been experienced. Of course, that is something that we will continue to monitor. As I said in previous responses, we are in close engagement with animal welfare stakeholders, and that is continuous. If there are other issues that emerge that we need to consider, then we will of course look to do that. Can the cabinet secretary tell us how you will be monitoring the system and looking at the question that Finlay Carson has just asked you? If animals are not chipped, it means that there is a possibility that they could be traded on further. Does that happen in terms of upselling? Like I said, we have proposed amendments through the engagement that we have had with our animal welfare stakeholders in developing the detailed guidance for local authorities. We work closely with the likes of the SSPCA, so we have worked with them in developing and training and a toolkit that can be used as well. Again, that is something that we will closely monitor, but in regular engagement with the likes of the SSPCA, with CAS protection, with other animal welfare charities and organisations, through that regular engagement we will pick up on any issues that are there as well. We also have the Scottish Animal Welfare Commission, which deals with particular issues too. I would really just want to assure members and to assure the committee that when it comes to this, we are in close contact with all of our stakeholders in the hope that we can pick up any early issues if there are any that emerge through this process. Again, it would come back to the point that the licensing regulations that we introduced, the amendments that we are proposing today, have been welcomed by those stakeholders. Any members have any further questions? No. We will move to agenda item 3, where we move on to the formal consideration of the motion to approve animal welfare licensing of activities involving animals, Scotland amendment regulation 2021. I invite Ms Gougeon to move the motion. Motion S6M-00997, that the Rural Affairs, Islands and Natural Environment Committee recommends that the animal welfare licensing activities involving animals, Scotland amendment regulation 2021 be approved. Does any member have a wish to debate the motion? If so, is the committee content to recommend approval of this instrument? Agreed. Finally, is the committee content to delegate authority to me to sign off our report on our deliberations on this affirmative SSI? That completes consideration of the affirmative instrument, and I thank the cabinet secretary and our officials for attending today. We now move into private session.