FARMER FOCUS: CAP plans penalise hilly fields

Happy new year. Let’s hope it continues to be a happy one for us farmers, but I have to admit to a bit of trepidation for the coming year because of all the uncertainty there is here in Scotland.
Will we or won’t we vote for independence this autumn?
I haven’t even dared look at the Scottish government website that estimates our level of support following CAP reform for fear it will turn my hair grey – erm I mean white. I thought we were supposed to be in a common market, but how can we have a system where each country in Britain and Europe as a whole can decide whether we should have zero or 15% modulation?
I am privileged to go shooting on occasions at this time of year, and the other day I was standing in a beautifully flat field that seemed to extend beyond the horizon waiting for a probably wise pheasant to fly over me. Contrast this to another stand on another day surrounded by the same crop, but in a very steep field. Weirdly it seems though that in future both of these fields will be classed the same in terms of their status for support.
Now if I were to farm the latter field, which happens to be more like ours, I need a John Deere Hillmaster combine (other makes are available) that costs an awful lot more than a conventional one. Now trust me on this, I have done the sums, and I reckon it is costing over 90p/t more for Mr Steep to own that combine than Mr Flat. Mr Flat and Mr Steep happen to have exactly the same area of land and volume of crop, but Mr Flat is going to get richer than Mr Steep every year for the foreseeable future just because he happens to have flat land.
The gap between the rich and the poor has just got wider. Is that what Scottish rural affairs secretary Richard Lochhead wanted with his proposal that there should only be two land types in Scotland? I suggest the future should be more complex than that, but all his army of inspectors would need to do is arrive on an arable farm and see if the word Hillmaster was printed on the side of the combine.
Neil Thomson farms 607ha in partnership with his father and brother from Caverton Mill, Kelso, on the Scottish Borders, growing combinable crops and brassicas. Some of the mainly medium loam is let for potatoes, and the farm also has cattle and sheep