 We are back online, and we are not going to blame rural connectivity. It was an issue in Holyrood, but thank you very much for your patience. We have taken the decision to postpone the marine panel, which was due to start about five past eleven. We are going to have more scope to scrutinise and ask questions of our terrestrial witnesses, which will be a bonus. So, I am going to go back to—David was in the middle of answering a question on funding. David, if you can recall where you are, we will bring you back in and then I will move to questions from Alasdor Allan. That was a long time ago, definitely. I am proud to remember what I was saying. I was in the middle of a rant about something. Can you remember what I was talking about? David, I could give you something that was going to lead on from that to give you a start, and then we will move to Alasdor Allan. We have talked about the additional cost that Rachel Hamilton touched on for organic and public procurement, but we are unlikely to see a cost reduction in food to the consumer, and we are seeing prices rising in agriculture inputs. If we try to transition, there will be quite a squeeze. Where is that funding going to come from, and what would the mechanism be for farmers like yourself to continue to produce high-quality food and be profitable? We were just talking about that. We had a little private discussion of the event here. What we found was that, once we had our heads around organic, we could actually produce our milk for the same price. The organic guys do not like me saying this, but, for the same price, we were producing milk at £24 a litre when our industrial neighbours were costing them £28. We are looking at the cost of labour going up dramatically. We are looking at the cost of fertilisers, probably to pesticides, and the whole thing is going up dramatically. We are seeing the conventional price in the supermarket that the supermarkets are offering to farmers, rising quite markedly over the past six months. What we found was that it was not the subsidy, it was not the extra premium that we were getting from the market, because at the farm gate it was only between 5 and 10 per cent on average that we were getting more than conventional. We actually had our subsidy cut because we had to cut our numbers initially when we went organic, but it was the fact that our production, our productivity of the farm, after 10 years of being organic, recovered. We were carrying almost the same stock as we had when we were putting on all the fertilisers and pesticides, but we had driven out £40,000 of costs out of the system. If you look at fertilisers, we were putting on 100 tonnes of fertilisers. The fertiliser is now at £750 a tonne, not £75,000 alone. We are now looking at a situation where, to be sustainable, to be a sustainable, resilient business, you are going to have to go towards organic. A lot of the biggest states, where we were just talking about that again just a minute ago, in Fife, are moving towards organic because they see the costs rising of their systems. Those are arable and Duplin States, and the costs are rising and the subsidy is being reduced. They are saying that the way forward is to go organic, driving costs out of the system. That is very much what we see. In terms of resilience and good for the environment, it has to be the way to go. The cost to the public, I do not think, should be significantly more than it is at the moment. It is about getting our heads around the system, learning how to do it properly and getting our support mechanisms in place in education, training and support. We are talking about the EECS scheme. I asked the RSPB to come along and look at our EECS plan because we were doing way to graze grasslands and ponds. It took two years before anybody from RSPB arrived by which time we had our plan in place. We had no support, so I was a farmer. I am willing. I wanted to do the thing right, but there was no support. There was no advice. You end up just doing a plan that suits you. Of course, everything is probably in the wrong place. EECS is well intended, but I do not think that it will deliver the outcomes because there is no support for farmers who do not understand what they are doing by themselves. You have mentioned some of the ways in which the public sector can support the kind of outcomes that you are looking for in dairy farming, whether it is through subsidy or whether it is through public contracts for food. We have touched on the issue of price, but I was interested to know your view about supermarkets. Given that supermarkets exert traditionally anyway this huge influence over the price of milk, where do supermarkets fit into this picture, or do they not fit into it? How do we ensure that supermarkets start to take these questions more seriously? You are on mute. We deal with the supermarkets at the moment, but their objective is to make money for the shareholders and not for the suppliers. It is about keeping the suppliers alive just. A lot of supermarkets have direct supply contracts, and those direct supply contracts are linked to the cost of production. I think that supermarkets are almost unnecessary evil, and it is making sure that they are held to account in terms of encouraging good standards of production. It comes back because they will only respond to one person and that is the customer. If the customer is demanding high-quality food produced in a proper, sustainable way, and that comes back again to education and to the Government to give the lead, the supermarkets will follow. The lead has to be made through public sector procurement. I am very against subsidy. I think that subsidy is so damaging that the dependency that is creating, I would get rid of subsidies tomorrow and I would create the market through public sector. That is the way in which I would operate. The supermarkets will follow, because if their customer is trained, educated and informed, which they are not at the moment, then the supermarkets will follow. I am not really disputing what you are saying about the importance of public contracts, but I am just curious to know if you think that there is anything that, meantime, the supermarkets should be doing that they are not doing just now. They will only move when their customer is demanded. They are not going to do anything that they do not have to do. Do you believe that supermarkets respond to customer demand? Are we not in the situation in the UK where we have some really big players in the supermarket sector who actually dictate the supermarkets that put products on the shelf? Because there is a lack of choice, it is not consumer driven that sees food products on our shelf. It is the other way around. Is there not an issue with that? I will leave that with you. I want to bring in Andrew who would like to touch on or respond to Alasdor's point. I hope that I am going to do justice to his words here, but when we were speaking in the group, I was counting a colleague of mine who has come to SRUC in the last few years from Denmark, and his perspective on the growth of organics in Denmark is very interesting. I will hopefully do justice to what he said. The big things that I took away from that were that organics in Denmark was marketed and grew massively off the back of being the premium choice. That is how it was pitched to consumers. With the right support from farmers, drawers, processors, retailers, it has become a significant market share in Denmark. The other point that he has made is that he has been struck since he came to Scotland by the difference in attitudes to what Government can do. I hope that I am not going to misrepresent him here, because there is too much expectation on Government here to pick up all the pieces for the sector or to do everything for the sector, but there is also not enough expectation on Government here to intervene at the retail end. In Denmark, the Government has set rules and regulations, but the farming sector is not always asking Government to take the lead on everything. However, it expects the Government to properly regulate retailers and be more muscular in how it interacts with them. There is something to be certainly looked at there. I do not doubt that the retail sectors in the two countries will be different, but we seem to almost treat the retailers as something that we cannot influence. They are only influenced by this mystical thing called the consumer. I move to Arianne for the next set of questions, please. Thank you to everybody for really great discussions so far. I think what I am trying to understand are the blocks and the resistance in the farming and crofting communities to moving towards organic, regenerative, agroecology and so on. What I am picking up from this conversation and some other conversations that I have had with this meeting is the knowledge transfer that needs to be there and the baselining. Land ownership has not really come up yet in this conversation, but I am aware of some things around tenant farmers' short-term tenancies and causes issues for tree planting and things like that. It is also beginning to strike me around farmer indebtedness that some farmers are probably in debt to their current practices. That is just a set up for a few questions that I have. One is about regenerative farming practices and whether they are currently taught in agricultural colleges. Andrew, you have talked about your five demonstration farms, but I am wondering whether there is a need for an advisory service that would provide or arrange training and regenerative measures and that one of its key responsibilities could be to support a just transition for the whole sector. I have been bringing this up quite a few times in the chamber and in conversations. What would that look like and how could we start going about it? I know that this is going to have to be a bit of a high-level response, probably. Maybe some of it needs to involve some of the baselining that you have mentioned earlier. I think that maybe we will just start with Andrew and then if anyone else wants to come in on that. Thanks, Michael. I think that we should see if we can try and arrange to show you in more detail what is already happening because there is a farm advisory service that is funded by the Scottish Government. We deliver that. Regenerative agriculture is part of that. The current programme comes to an end at the end of March. The Scottish Government is currently tendering for an additional two years. It is our intention, if we are successful in winning the two years to come, that regenerative agriculture would be a significantly larger proportion of what we do alongside other biodiversity and climate change measures. The advisory service is already looking at that. As I said at the beginning, farming for better climate through its regenerative agriculture focus farms is looking there, so that is another advisory service extension service that is damning that. The level of education that I am slightly less familiar with is its other colleagues at SRUC's domain, but SRUC has a very long-standing organic trial set up near Craveston in Aberdeenshire. I know that I have colleagues, particularly people like Christine Watson, who have a really keen interest in organic agriculture and teaching that. It would be fair to say that, in the past, it would be a less significant part of the curriculum, although there would be times in the past where it was more prominent. It would also be fair to say that it is rapidly going up the agenda. I would imagine that that is not just at SRUC, but in many other places as well. I would be very happy to talk to you separately if you would like more detail on this. Thank you for that. I saw Michael indicating that he would like to come in on that. You started by asking about blocks and resistance to mindset change. I think that it is old habits, old habits die hard. We have had 40 or 50 years of CAP support and people have got into a particular way of doing things. It is very difficult, not easy for them to change that mindset. We have all mentioned that we are on a journey. This is a transition and it will take time to get us on to this new mindset. What we have not got is time before going to address these emergencies. They are genuine emergencies and we have to get on with it. Can I make a fairly radical suggestion in terms of knowledge transfer? We know through the network that the pilots that you have funded of peer-to-peer learning, farmer to farmer, get farmers out on to farms and get them to hear from other farmers and other crofters what works. It is a very powerful way of driving a change in this mindset. We would love in the network if you could support a big uplift in the KTIF fund. At the moment, it is little penny packets. We know that you are open to bids for a much bigger contract, which of course we are not in a position to bid for, but there are a lot of farmers out there who are in the education system, some of them. You know that people, I will mention names, but you probably know some of them. They are on ariob and those kinds of boards. They are educators and they are also farmers and they know the power of farmer to farmer, crofter to crofter, peer-to-peer learning. If I could also just touch on your point about tree planting, we think that there is an opportunity in the forestation programme, the forestation budget, to do much more for agroforestry, which would be a big win, a big early win for our climate and biodiversity emergencies, by supporting hetero creation. We know that agroforestry includes hedgerows. We would love to see more of that budget directed to hedgerow creation rather than the penny packets, frankly, that you have at the moment through the EECS scheme. Can I just ask—you talked about farmers and crofters coming together and knowledge transferred through that. On the back of Footh and Mouth, particularly in the south of Scotland and East and Galloway, there were group set up sector groups. We had dairy farmers come together, beef farmers come together with some strange and wonderful names like the cow boys or whatever. As far as I'm aware, they were hugely successful. They were facilitated by consultants. It was very much an open book process where farmers would sit round the kitchen table and discuss, quite openly, the challenges that they had. Unfortunately, the funding for the facilitators fell away and some of the groups fell by the wayside. Is that the sort of initiative that you'd like to see brought forward? Funding from facilitators to pull together groups of farmers with particular sectors? I used to work with people who are members of the cowboy group. It's a great idea to get farmers to talk. I think that farmers are perhaps more able these days to talk amongst themselves without a facilitator. A facilitator might be helpful, but I think that you will find now, particularly through networks such as the nature-friendly farming network, that farmers are much more up for just talking to themselves about really getting behind this question that we had from Ariane about mindset change. What are the blocks? Why are you not? How come it works for you? Would it work for me? It's that kind of, which is really quite soul-searching and bearing your soul in quite an intimate way. Anything that helps that is to be encouraged. I think that where facilitators would help would be in facilitating clusters farmers, for example, bringing farmers together to help upland waders, working for waders, curlews, lapwings, and so on. Species related to biodiversity gain would be greatly facilitated by funding for facilitators. To bring farmers together to get them to collaborate, you will know as a farmer that collaboration is not a Scottish or a British trait. The French farmers collaborate so much more easily than we do, but we are in a new paradigm now, and everybody realises that we have the pressure of these emergencies on us, and we have the pressure of costs that you have talked about. We need to look hard in a hard way at our businesses, and we need to come up with a new business framework that works for us as businesses and is also delivered by diversity and climate change. I want to pick up on the bit about baselining. I would love to hear from whomever on the panel. I would like to understand that a bit more, because it seems that, in conversation with the committee, baselining is important. We do not really know what is out there. We do not know what we are needing to track in terms of agriculture. I would love to hear a bit more about your thoughts on that. What does that mean, and what do we need to be doing to push the Government in the direction of making it more useful for farmers? Anybody want to have a go at that? Michael, thank you. Michael Russell I do not want to hog the floor here, but it is absolutely essential that we get this baseline. Andrew has mentioned agri-calc, which is the SA Squadron College calculator, which is what we use and what a lot of Scottish farmers use. It is good as far as it goes. It shows the emissions side of the equation. What it does not show is the sequestration side of the equation. You know how much you are pumping out what you have to go at, but you do not know how much you are managing to sequester on the farm. What we need is a universally acceptable Scottish model, a computer-based assessment that you can do on-farm with an adviser—it probably takes an adviser to do it—that shows where you stand at the moment. Probably an add-on to that would be a good idea if you did what Dee has been talking about, a natural capital inventory. That is a sort of balance sheet. What I am talking about is more a sort of profit and loss where you are on a year-by-year basis. We need quite a lot more work on that. Andrew is probably a better place than me to say, but there may be a lot of research already and science going into that, but we definitely lead urgently. We need something so that we are all starting from the same point. We really know what we have got to do if we are going to achieve those targets by 2030 of nature positive and carbon net zero. We have a soil carbon module in AgriCalc. We have delayed the wholesale roll-out of that, because it is a significant subject of interest. We know that, if we do not get it right, we will get crucified. That is why I made that comment earlier on about the fact that, when people start using it in a lot of cases, they will be slightly disappointed with what they find, because the assumption is that they have all got more than enough carbon locked up in their soils to offset all their emissions. In most cases, on average, it is mid-teens to 20s. The baseline is absolutely important. AgriCalc at SCC Consulting is a significant piece of work. It draws in research colleagues from wider SRU. The team is growing. I would say a couple of things. One, it is a calculator, it is a model. Therefore, there is always a balance to be struck between the accuracy of the result and the usability of the tool. We can give you a much more detailed result if you want, but it will be far less user-friendly, so we are trying to strike the balance. Our emphasis is probably more on the accuracy than the usability, but we are putting much more. We are overhauling the user interface at the moment. The second thing is a farm-scale tool. It is designed to help farmers to understand where they are at and to make recommendations as to where they can go. It is not designed to model the entire country as one and reach big, broad conclusions about the whole country. If everyone piles in and uses it, we will certainly get much more accurate results. Thousands of farmers have used it today. We have no doubt that something like the national test programme that was announced by the Cabinet Secretary a month or so ago will drive further use of this tool. However, to reiterate, the soil sequestration module is there. There will be a full-scale roll-out of that in 2022, but we know that we need to get it right. Soil carbon modelling is extremely complicated, and a very small error in input values can have a massive impact on the farm carbon footprint, so we really need to get it both as accurate as we can and as user-friendly as we can. One of the ways that will achieve that is by linking agriculture to other data sets that sit out there, such as cattle tracing and various other things, so that we automate the data flow and thereby minimise the risk of input error. We need this uniform methodology. One of the challenges in moving anything forward is everyone agreeing that that is the correct methodology. I agree with Michael. I think that we need to—it is not just about carbon, it is about wildlife and biodiversity, and it is about natural capital. I think that we need to value that. Putting a value on things, as I said at the beginning, makes people respect them, because suddenly they have a value, and I am not going to go and cut that tree down because it has a value. I think that that is important. Unfortunately, as humans, we only really understand capital values, but at least it puts a value and we respect it. Other examples of things such as people can manage their wood from the baseline data. By managing your woods well, you will be sequestering more carbon and have more biodiversity and wildlife and biodiversity. People will be moving at different speeds. The other bit that I wanted to touch on is that additionality is another factor. There are people out there who are already doing fantastic jobs. I am sure that a lot of Michael's nature-friendly farmers are doing a brilliant job, and they have taken their farm from somewhere average to somewhere very good in terms of biodiversity and wildlife and natural capital. I do not think that they should be left behind, because they are already doing good things. We have to have a mechanism that picks up the good work that people have already done, and it also encourages those behind to improve the needs to cover both, because it would be terrible to penalise people who are already doing a good job. We used agriculture a couple of years ago and I was very disappointed that it did not include sequestration of any sort. We have planted 35,000 broadleaf trees on the farm and they were not included. Soil sequestration was not included. All the savings that we had made in cutting down on our anthalmyntics and antibiotics and so on were not included because they were not considered to be significant. My concern, as Dee just mentioned, is that if we focus too much on baselines, the people who have been abusing their land and environment are the major beneficiaries, and those who have been healing the land and improving the environment are the least beneficiaries of an incentive scheme. We have to be very careful. I would rather see benchmarking as opposed to baselining. I have heard the word collaborative a few times now. That is perhaps in a different context. One of the issues that often comes up when I speak to farmers is the issues around new and more advanced machinery being incredibly weighty, if that is a correct term. Also, when they are adapting or converting to hydrogen, that can add significant extra tonnage for the physical adaptations. Where we are advancing on greener and smarter machinery, we could be causing significant soil disruption. If you work collaboratively with other industries to help to inform those innovative ideas to limit, or at least to ensure, that those types of unintended consequences are considered, what are you going to do with them, Dee? That is a good question. I mean, so what we try and do, so everything, so I can only speak personally, I guess, on this and for wildlife estates members as well, but typically what we do is we just experiment with stuff and we see what works and what doesn't. Like all of this, it is not an exact science, it is a bit of a learning curve. For us, funnily enough, we are talking about compaction and heavy equipment. We are looking at making our fields smaller, having more hedgerows around them and using smaller equipment. I have worked out that this is not the case for all farming, by the way, but in a lot of livestock farming, often you do not need or sheep farming like I do, you do not need big bits of equipment, you can do it with small bits of equipment and actually you probably get more, it is less impactful on the planet if you do use small bits of equipment, if you see what I mean. That is only, sorry, it is probably not a good answer, but that is my own experience on it. Just to say that the hydrogen kit that I have seen fitted on tractors, I saw it just a few weeks ago up in Aberdeenshire, was not particularly large. I cannot say that every single kit will be the same as that, but certainly I would not particularly be concerned about the impact given what proportion of the total weight of that equipment it was. I think that there has definitely been a disconnect between the desire to maximise the top line and push for yield and output and simplification of farms and, on the other side, more resilient farms, slightly inverted commas messier farms, more hedges, more margins, all that kind of stuff. There is definitely something there, but I think that in an arable setting, there has certainly been a high degree of innovation and maybe bolting a few more bits of kit onto one tractor and doing one pass through the field versus multiple passes. I am not an expert on soil compaction, but there will be trade-offs in both of those scenarios. However, what we need to do is move to systems that are more resilient, so at the start I spoke about what the regenerative agriculture group is doing around cover crops and all sorts of other things that can minimise soil erosion and keep the ground in better condition. I think that we definitely need to be looking at more innovative ways to manage our soils, rather than saying, well, we are just going to run the largest bit of kit that we can over at once, because as the climate gets more extreme, the risks to soil grow very significantly. Thank you. Any further questions, Karen? No, I will move on to questions from Jenny Minto. Thank you, convener, and thank you, panel. I found this really informative, so thank you very much for your time. I was struck when Andrew mentioned the Danish example and experiences from his colleague from Denmark. It brought to mind a visit that I had to Sweden, where again there was very much emphasis on local produce in supermarkets, so tying into Dr Allan's question. There was a farmer there who had his cattle, he had a butcher, he was supplying the school, so a lot of local connections. I am just interested in the panel's thoughts about links with schools, links with your own communities, how we keep the produce local but still go out to a wider market. I am very aware of representing a constituency that is rural, remote, rural and islands, how your ways of working can be replicated in areas such as that, because I think that it is fair to say that one size does not necessarily fit all, but you can take benefits, because I know that the farmer, Michael Llysmore, is doing a lot of regenerative work as well. It is how we can ensure that your messages get out, and maybe people do not take them all lock, stock and barrel, they take bits, elements that will work in their areas. I am not terribly sure when my question is there, but I would certainly like to get your thoughts, please. I think that there are very good points that you have brought up there. We need to change attitudes, and they are changing. I think that Covid has made a big difference, because people have started buying locally, wanting locally produced, and then there is the whole environmental part of it. We need to understand the true value of food production, so locally produced, healthy and low environmental impact will not off-shoring your CO2 by buying something from somewhere else. I think that education of people is key, but people are beginning to get that message. For example, at home, through the Scottish Land Matching Service, I have set up a joint venture with a French gentleman who lives in Scotland. He was at pillars of Hercules down in Fife, and he grows vegetables, and we do vegetable boxes now. It is something that we have started, and we have only got four small polytunals. There are huge opportunities to produce locally, and we have set up a little shop that is only open once a weekend. Then I suddenly thought that I can probably sell my lamb and my venison and other things through that shop and make a lot more money per lamb than sending it off somewhere. I think that there is a real opportunity if we get people's heads around it, and they understand the true cost of production. I read a stat somewhere that the carrot produced 50 years ago was x times more healthy than the carrot today had more nutrients in it. When you look at delivering really good quality food, it is not expensive when you take into account what the nutrients value you are getting out of it. I think that there is a huge opportunity there. The other thing with it is that it gets people out and about. They go for a walk and they come out and see those places rather than just go into a supermarket or whatever. I do think that there is a really big opportunity around that, definitely. Thank you. I would like to come in. Going to Norway a few years ago, one of the things that I was most struck by was the effort and the investment that was put into the equivalent of open farm Sunday or Royal Highland Education Trust. It was exponentially larger than here. It was massive. Every single local community had somebody whose responsibility it was to keep that going in the farming community. I know that people involved in open farm Sunday and Rett do a great job, but we are nowhere near the scale that we need to re-engage people with what goes on in farms, estates and crofts. The other thing that I would say is that I am not sure how to do that, but we have to try to change the narrative about farming in a lot of the media because it is really alienating the constant headlines about farmers being criminally responsible for climate change. It is counterproductive. I am not disagreeing with some of the science full stop behind it, but you are never going to get anyone on side if the headlines are constantly negative. I find a lot of farmers who have just shut down to the entire change agenda, never mind climate change, have changed full stop because they feel constantly under attack. I think that we have all got a collective obligation to do more to put out there both the good and the bad in a balanced way. Thank you, Andrew, for that. I think that you have made a very important point there. Have you got anything to add to what has been made in connection to what I was asking? Thank you, Jenny. Yes, I have. If I can go first, David. We are on the case. We are plumbed into nourish Scotland. We are very attuned to... Oh dear, can you still hear me? I know you can, David. Can everybody else? Yes, we can hear you. Oh, good. Sorry, Adam. We lost the picture. We think that it is very much a direction of travel, isn't it? We have an immense amount to do to catch up, but my vice-chair was Lyn Casorth of Lyn Brett Croft. You probably have heard of Lyn Brett Croft, and that is their business model. They have got food clubs, they supply local people with eggs and with beef. It is this whole provenance. People are much more concerned about where their food comes from and that they are telling their story in ways that people want to hear. I think that we are going to see so much more of it. I think that the kind of message I and we within the network are trying to get out to people who have maybe larger land holdings, why don't you give these guys a chance? I have got 300 acres here. We have heard about those farms in five members of our steering group. They have got thousands of acres, some of them. If you can make even five or ten acres available to people with the kind of mindset that you are talking about, we will see a nasance of this kind of local food opportunity, reducing food miles and giving Scottish people affordable, nutrient dense food, which is, after all, a basic human right. Thank you, Michael, for that. If I may just to very quick supplementary, you mentioned hedgerow creation. I was thinking back to when I was growing up and we would go for walks and the way that you got round farms was walking along the side of a hedge. We haven't really touched very much on biodiversity, so I am interested to know your thoughts about how we encourage hedgerow back. I would love that. I am an absolute hedgerow nerd. Since I plant 1,000 metres of new hedge personally here every year, so I have to double fence the stuff and plant seven plants per metre, so if you can walk that out, there are 7,000 plants that I personally stick in the ground every year. It's a real wow situation. I can't tell you how exciting it is to stand aside hedgers that we planted. We've been there 13 years. We bought it 13 years ago. Hedgers, now I'm six foot four. They are twice my height. They're bursting with berries and they're full of birds and bees and butterflies and they're great shelter for wildlife. They're great for biodiversity. They're great in terms of the wind here in the south-west of Scotland blows, you can imagine. I think maybe it's as much as it blows up at this morning, so they're great shelter for livestock. They would do an immense amount to question more carbon. I don't have the research to hand, but I think there is research that says that hedges request twice as much carbon as woodland. That's a pretty powerful statistic, probably because of the density of hedges. CPRE in England have got a major hedgerow increase programme. It would be wonderful if we could do something in Scotland that would make so much difference to the appearance of the landscape because what we need urgently is transformational change on a landscape scale. All four of us talking to you today are keen to see as these dots joined up to see much more collaboration between farmers, landowners, land managers, the public sector and the private sector, all with a shared vision of a beautiful, bountiful Scotland that we can achieve if we all work together. Jenny, if you don't mind, I'm going to butt in there. I'm a bit of a hedge fan as well, and I'm involved in laying hedges and whatever in the past. We're talking about an emergency here. Still, sadly, whilst the vast majority of farmers are great custodians, we still have farmers who are set on ripping out hedges to make easier for big machinery to get into, cut grass or whatever, and we see it on a daily basis. It's now the time for the Government to take action and put in new legislation to stop that happening because the financial penalties in the moving hedges don't appear to make any difference. Is there an argument? This will be controversial. I will repeat that it's a small minority of farmers that are continuing this, but given the biodiversity and climate change emergency, should we see the rapid introduction of legislation that stops the destruction of habitats, whether it's hedges or whether it's ponds or whatever? Michael, if you carry on from where you were, what's your position on legislation to ensure that we don't see the removal of habitats? Right, thank you, convener. The network doesn't shy away from controversy. We take your position on this. For goodness sake, we're in a bad place here, and we've got to get ourselves in a better place pretty damn quick. I think that there is a case for legislation if it comes to that, to stop people from destroying what little we have got left, frankly. There have been cases of farmers removing dikes and things. These dikes have been there for hundreds of years. They are part of our national heritage. To destroy them is vandalism, frankly, and hedges come in under that category, too. If it comes to that, then something to stop that is something that we and I, certainly personally, would very much support. However, as I've said at the outset, what we're trying to do here is to get into the mindset of those people and showing them that they're wrong to do that. That's the wrong thing. It doesn't help their businesses. It's actually a bad business decision to remove a hedge, because you're focusing, as we've said, at length this morning, on the top line, on the yield, and not the bottom line—the profitability—what's left in terms of value to your business. Your contribution, as a custodian of the countryside, whether you're a tenant or a landowner, is a custodian of our planet, because there ain't no planet B. We've only got nine years or whatever it is to turn the situation and make us carbon—getting on the right track so that we're on the uptick towards carbon, and that's what we're supposed to do. Can I ask David the same question? You picked up on your point about baselining, and baselining is probably not the way to go forward, because it could potentially—the funding could go to people who have just not done the right thing in the past, and it doesn't recognise those who have paid particular attention to the role that biodiversity plays in agriculture. What's your opinion on how we tackle the continuing, on a very small scale, but removal of dikes and hedges and whatever? How would you like to see that approached in the very short term given that we're on a biodiversity emergency? Well, as you know, Finlay, we come from an area that has the highest and most intensive dairy sectors in the UK, and the dairies are big. The average dairy size in this part of the world is over 400 cows now, and very few of them get outside. All those things are joined together. We're always moving towards higher technology. I was talking to the tractor supplier the other day, and he was saying that the tractor nowadays is a £60,000 piece of equipment with £60,000 of technology on it. When you're spending £100,000 or £200,000 on a piece of technology, you have to make it work. We're moving into scale. Scale is very important here, because scale brings economies, and that allows cheap food to be produced. Cheap food is the objective of all Governments and supermarkets. We've got the price driver driving scale, which drives technology, which drives the need for bigger fields, and that tears out the hedges. We can't put a £200,000 tractor in a 10-acre field—it just doesn't work. You just look around here and you see hedges coming out, you see wetland habitats being drained and filled in, and it's happening now. How do you get away from that? It has to be stopped. We're in an emergency. That is an emergency. We've got a treaty light emergency. Andrew says that we have to be careful not to get too dependent on Government action, but how else do you stop that, because it's being driven by the economy, is being driven by the economic factors. Everything is joined up. It comes back from the customer, the supermarket, the farmer and the technologies that he has to employ to deliver what is required. The only way that you're going to stop it is through legislation. I would like to go back to some of the things that I said at the start about Lime, which I was on a farm recently. There was a massive hedge on that farm, and the farmer was really proud of it, but one of the other people there was talking about messy hedges. You hear that a lot of times when people are talking about landscape features. There's nothing better than a nice, neat farm. We've really got a job here to change what is valued, to change the language that we use, because that messy farm is the one that's potentially got more space for biodiversity. That nice, neat, rationalised agricultural unit that can take massive tractor is a factory in the countryside. It's doing a very good job, and it's being driven by economics. It's responding to signals that market and government policy have given it for years. Alongside those harder things such as regulation, we also need to change the lexicon that we use here. That's really, really important. We're going to talk about resilience and margin, rather than performance and output. Oh, sorry, I didn't hear you calling me in. Apologies, apologies. Yeah, just on the hedges thing, well, on most things, I'm a great believer in the carrot and the stick. I think that people are motivated. They don't want to do wrong, and they don't want to get penalised. But ultimately, if they see a benefit for doing it, I think that is what helps. So I'm all in favour of legislation, but I think we need to take people on our journey with us, and we need to encourage them to do the right thing. I think some sort of a carrot always helps that. Going to the point about people pulling out hedges, because they've got big kit and so on, and they can't get them into the fields and they need to produce cheap food. To me, it's not cheap if you pulled out a hedge. I think we need to get away from this whole mindset that it's cheap. Cheap, we need to factor in the whole cost of producing that food. If there's environmental damage, it's suddenly very expensive food, and we need to learn and respect food. If it was more expensive, people would probably not waste it, and so on. We really need to get people to respect the fact that good-quality food will cost a price, but it will be nutritious for you and you won't need to waste any of it. I think that's a really important message, too. Thank you. That's really useful. A lot of the policies that we've discussed are about local procurement, local food production, reducing food miles and so on. We have the Good Food Nation bill coming up, which is pretty empty, but there is scope for it to hopefully deliver some of the expectations of stakeholders. Do we need more funding at local level to drive local policies? More funding devolved to local authorities and public bodies to address the priorities, for example in the Highlands or Dumfries and Galloway, the Scottish Borders. Do we need to change the method of funding to ensure that our aspirations for reducing food miles are addressed? Andrew, can I ask you to comment, please? I think that the bringing together of people that has already been spoken in these one to few groups is evidence that, if you bring together people with a common interest close to where they are, you are going to get a high degree of buy-in. I can't speak to the efficiencies of channeling more funding through more regional or local groups, but I certainly know that when we engage people on a subject, if we make it local and we make it relevant and we have their peers around them, then we get more traction. Something broadcast from the centre will tend to attract, by often, a particular type of person in a particular type of situation. More local procurement, more local initiatives are certainly something that we are seeing and we are involved in a number of them. There are groups such as Opportunity North East and South East Scotland Enterprise that are certainly putting a lot of effort in this area at the moment, and we are involved in number of them as well. I think that a lot of improvements will be made by more market-driven things. Local abattoirs have been talked about before, so we are not moving stuff a long way to go through the food chain and local markets. The other thing is that the Government can be involved in picking up on a point that was made earlier about Denmark. Why not force supermarkets to buy quite a big percentage of their stuff that is locally produced and throwing a real curveball in there? We have gone for a minimum price in alcohol. Why not go for a minimum price for the prices that supermarkets have to pay to the local suppliers as well? Those sort of things would have a direct impact and benefit. I am going to move to Rachael Hamilton for a question. It is to ask the panel whether they believe that the £51 million allocated from next spring over the next three years from spring for the national test programme will be enough to ensure that farmers and crofters and land managers have the ability to transition and increase biodiversity and reduce emissions. Andrew, would you like to come in on that first? I think that it is a very welcome start. The observation that I have made to people is that the ecosystem to support that transition needs time to grow as well. There are lots of networks out there—the nature friendly farming network. There are organisations like mine that can support that. However, that change of focus will take a bit of time. We are in the process of recruiting people with different skillsets in order to support that. I think that it is a good start. I think that it is part of the journey. I am not sure that I would necessarily advocate two, three, four or five times more money going straight away because everyone needs time to get their head around what that looks like. The support structures need time to be realigned and start supporting that work. A step in the right direction, absolutely. However, I have no doubt that more will be needed in the fullness of time. Will SAC be the recipient of that money that would then advise farmers how to move forward to meet net zero? I think that there is a lot of detail still to be worked out in there. We would be one party in this. We would certainly not be the only people advising on this. I have no doubt that lots of other groups will be involved in that, but we will be an active and constructive partner for anything that we are asked to get involved with. Is there anybody else who would like to comment on that? Jim Fairlie has a question. Oh, I see Michael Clark's indication. Michael, would you like to come in? Rachel, to answer your question, no, I don't think that it is enough. It's a lot of money, isn't it? It's a question of how it's distributed. If we want to boost biodiversity, we need a direct and close link to biodiversity in terms of the way in which the money is spent. The most recent scheme had some pretty tenuous links to some of the objectives. The capital grant scheme that was available was things like that you can get a cattle handling system because that might make you more efficient. The link is obviously a health and safety basis for that, but I'm not sure that public money that helps a business for only business-related objectives is the best way to spend public money in this emergency when we are looking to address a biodiversity and climate change crisis. If I could say I'm half of the network, if you have any influence in how that money is spent, then please, if we could make sure that it goes towards measures that have a close and direct link to boosting biodiversity. Otherwise, we just think that we're going to get there. We're not going to make the targets that we are setting ourselves. David, do you want to come in the back of that question? Well, thanks. The problem that we faced when we were applying for our EECS was that we didn't understand that we were willing enough—we're farmers. We're trained as farmers. We think that farming we're willing to convert to a more biodiverse way of farming, but there's so limited support. Help us to do the right things. As Michael just said, we need to be doing the right things rather than doing what we think is right, and they can be quite different. So we need support, we need help, we need an infrastructure to give us the right advice at the right time. Thank you. I'm now going to move on to Jim and then Ariane. Thanks, convener. I have to say, guys, that I have loved this conversation today, but somebody who has just come out of farming into politics, I should maybe be back out in the field. I love the warm fuzzy glow that we've got, that we're all talking about the really good things we could do and all the rest of it, but having been through this process for over 20 years, we're trying to link public procurement to local food networks. We coined the phrase bi-locality local almost 20 years ago. It's great and I get it, I really do. Public procurement spend in Scotland is worth between £150 million to £180 million, half of which is spent on Scottish produce. The Scottish farm budget at the moment is about £540 million. The Scottish Government has a fixed budget, which will be determined by what the UK agricultural policy then turns out to be going forward. Supermarket sales of food alone in this country are £12 billion. If you add the pub and restaurant sector, there's another £10 billion being spent there. I love what we're talking about. I'd love to see it happen, but the reality of those figures demonstrates that we're actually just tinkering around the edges. Where do you see us getting this into the mainstream? Michael, I'll see you nodding your head. I sure had the answer, Jim. I'm nodding because I agree with you. I agree with your analysis. It is very difficult, isn't it? My past life, you know, I've been involved with big business that has supplied catering sector and I suppose supplied not actually supplied supermarkets, but I think the answer is there's a change. Things have changed. In the industry in which you've recently left and which I'm very privileged to be part of and I'll hang on to as long as I can until they carry me out in a box, there are new people coming through. There are new entrants and what we've got to make sure is that these guys and a lot of them are women because women are driving a lot of this nature-friendly farming change in the industry. It's an interesting kind of analysis, I suppose, of itself, but they want to do this kind of thing. They are mothers, they take their children to school, they're going to ask why are they not buying more local produce, so I think the public sector needs to set a better example and that will feed through into the schools when people will start to ask these questions about where does the food come from? Is it coming from Scottish farmers? Are they local? I think there is a movement towards this, but what we've got to also make sure is that this corporate invasion, which we've touched on into the countryside, driven by the carbon credits they think they can get by buying up farms and planting up nutrients in the wrong places for the wrong reasons, doesn't exclude, and that's a big risk that's happening at the moment, exclude these new entrants. You were like I was all those years ago, the opportunity to get in and really take the risk and grow vegetables, produce meat, hopefully with a better local avatar and network if we can manage to get that in, but I think we will find from a bottom-up approach rather than the top-down approach here, if you can support it, that this is much more likely to happen. I hope I might, but if you look back in 10 years' time, we will see that there will be a ground swell of this kind of thing, many more lindwreck crofts and these sort of places across Scotland supplying local people who want to buy local food, because they are interested in where it comes from and how it's been produced. Can I ask David to comment and then Dee? Yeah, we process all our milk pretty well on the farm here in the ice cream and cheese. The cheese really gives us access to a UK market and with the reason we've gone down the cheese route was to get access to a UK market because we can sell online and we can deliver next day anywhere in the UK. The local people do buy our cheese, there's no question, but it's never going to be because it's artisan at small scales. It's about scale. Unless the price on the shelf of local food is close to the large-scale products that are being presented, certainly in these poorer areas, such as the Fruits and Galloway and Highlands and Islands, people aren't going to buy it because they don't have the budget. Our meat, even the lambs and cattle from the farm, go through butchers to the central belt and London. Probably 75 per cent of what we produce on the farm goes inside the M25. Is that local? I don't know. It's UK. It's competing with probably French, so that must be good, but to be able to get your product on to the shelf and compete with the big guys, and the supermarkets won't touch us because we're too expensive, then you have to have a processor who is dealing with that at scale because artisan food is just too expensive. I don't know if that helps at all, Jim. Just reconfirms my fears that this is an uphill battle, particularly given the fact that supermarkets will determine what we're going to have. They give us all the promises that, yes, we're all about giving people choice, and they will give people choice, but people will make a six-second decision when they walk into a supermarket from the time they look at it and the time they put it in their basket, and the first thing they'll look at is price. We have to absolutely change the culture before we're going to get this wonderful warm feeling that we've got in here out into the public domain. I'm not saying that to be negative, I'm saying that's the challenge that we face. I'm also going to come back very quickly in one point that Finlay made earlier on. We've got to give proper recognition to the farmers who are doing it to a level just now, which is already—what you call regenerative is not, it's old-fashioned farming. I planted 2,500 metres of hedging because I wanted shelter belts. It's—their stuff has already been done, and we need to take cognisance of that rather than starting at the bottom and trying to bring everything up. The ones that are at the bottom should be brought up to the level of where we currently are on the baseline of whatever of an area, because one size doesn't fit all. Whether you're living in the west or you're living in the south or you're living in Fife or Persia, there will be a baseline for that area. Was it like in that area? And then how do we bring everybody else to that standard as we go up? It's hugely complicated, but I'm thoroughly enjoying the conversation. Can I come in? My response to the supermarkets, yes, absolutely. The supermarkets want to put on the shelf the products that give them the most profit margin—that's the bottom line—but it's interesting because we've seen a change in the dairy industry recently where one of the supermarket chains and others are following suit and a milk processor have insisted. This is a result of deep discomfort with their customers on how bull calves were being treated on dairy farms. They are now insisting that their suppliers do not cull bull calves on farm. All bull calves have to be raised to at least eight weeks, which gives them value and therefore means that they will enter the food chain, otherwise they cannot supply them with milk. That has come about from pressure from the customer, which relates back to probably vegan activism and the BBC's panorama programme, The Dark Side of Dairy, a couple of years ago. It's not all supermarket. I'll be very brief, and this is something that I wanted to ask you earlier on. What kind of bull are you using? You're keeping the calves on the cow, so what kind of bull are you using? That was the nice and shocked Arianne. I think that I've probably got a question that will procure a very short answer, but I'd love to know whether any of the witnesses have looked at the draft national planning framework that was published earlier this month. If so, if you have any thoughts about how well it will deliver on the stated purpose to manage the development and use of land and the long-term public interest and its status aims to tackle and adapt climate change and restore biodiversity loss, I believe that farming to some degree is missing from the picture. If you have had a chance to look at it, it is a bit of a tome, and if you haven't had a look at it, I'd love to hear from you in the future about your perspectives on it. Thank you for the heads up. We'll get on to that. It's not something that you immediately think of, is it, when you're thinking about the future for the farming industry, but we're very plumbed into regional land use partnerships. That's what we hold on to in terms of the discussion that we've been having this morning about trees in the right place for the right reasons and farming and how does it fit. So thank you for that. Yes, farming is going to have to, I think, probably up its game to properly stand its corner in what is becoming an increasingly interesting debate, isn't it, about the future of land use in Scotland. Land use is really at the key of all that we've been talking about, isn't it? Land rights and responsibility statement, all that stuff, very much on our radar. Thank you for the heads up. That'll be on our radar, too. We'll make sure that we respond to that, too. And finally, as a convener, I always get the privilege of the last question, well, generally. Currently, we've got a consultation out on the replacement for CAP. It was launched in August and it's expected to be published in the spring in 2022. Johnny Hoff, then, if you've quite rightly said it's a defining moment for the future of Scottish agriculture, and business, as usual, cannot be an option, but we need something that where farmers and crofters, regardless of size or type, will play their role in food production, but also their part in climate change and biodiversity emergencies. We've just heard the eye-watering figures from Jim Fairlie on the value of the food and drink industry, and we're just touching the edges when it comes to funding. So finally, and I'm going to go to everybody, can you give me your hopes, your aspirations and your fears over what the future agricultural rural support might be to replace CAP? I will start with Andrew, then Michael D and then finish with David. My hope would be that we send clear, consistent and sufficiently ambitious signals to all the parties that need to get them, whether that be farmers and crofters, supermarkets, policy makers, whoever. My fear is that in our natural human desire to protect one another, we don't base up to the fact that this requires a degree of disruption in order to be achieved, and therefore the sector cannot stay as it is and it cannot transition over decades and decades and decades. This needs to be more rapid, so we've got to be careful that we don't kill the sector with kindness here. There needs to be a balanced struck. Thank you, convener, for listening to us today. We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity here, don't we? Johnnie is quite right to flag that up. What we need is transformational change at a landscape scale. Individual farm is changing, which is what we're trying to achieve is like postage stamps stuck across the countryside. We need to get ways of farmers to collaborate here. We all need to pull together on that. We would like to see support, as I've said this morning, for things such as agroforestry, for agroecology, for some of the specific suggestions that I've made. We mustn't shy away, must we, from a degree of turnover in this industry? I'm the old guy here. There are other younger options that are much available in the network, so I can assure you that. We need to get young blood in. If that means that people who can't really get their heads around the new mindset that we need—the fact of basics that James talked about—the way that we used to do it, the way that we look at the countryside in a holistic way and can't get their minds around that, they need to be encouraged, probably, to move aside and let new blood come in and get the picture, because they are the people who are going to inherit the situation that we are all desperately trying to sort. My hope for the new cap would be that it's much more focused on net biodiversity gain and sustainability. We do need to remember that we still have to produce food for a nation, but we need to do it sustainably. In my opinion, that can be done. I think that we need to have the funding that reflects that. My fear would be—sorry, my other thing is that that starts soon. I don't want to wait years for that to go in. I think that we need to start the changes for that quickly, even if it's incremental changes over the next two or three years, to get us ready for the quicker, the better, as I see it. My fear is that there will be no or little change from the existing system, and the can gets kicked down the road, because I think that that would be really detrimental to the climate change crisis. I've probably touched on it already. We have a crisis. We need change in the industry, and everyone's talked about that already. The industry is not going to be happy to change, but it's going to have to be forced to change. I agree with Dee or Michael, who said that there are cards and sticks, and that they can be used to incentivise change or to incentivise people to get out who are not going to change. The incentive has to come initially through Government, because nothing else is going to change quickly enough. Here is the opportunity. Government has to be brave, has to be proactive and has to implement unpleasant change in our industry. Thank you very much, and that brings us to the conclusion. I would like to thank you all very much for your very useful, interesting and thought-provoking contributions. I share the views of the committee that has been very useful this morning. Once again, I apologise for the glitches that we had and thank you for your patience. We certainly ran over time with you, and we could probably speak for another hour. Thank you all very much, and I draw this meeting to a close.