A Farmer's View

The Scottish farmer Andrew Robertson’s talk on the Aquarius meeting in Sweden

Although the water related problems across Aquarius are all different the problems farmers face all seem to be quite similar. The reasons we farm is the love of it, we enjoy producing crops and rearing animals. It is a good life but a hard one. We are always fighting with the weather and we know more than most people that nature always wins. We want to be sustainable, good to the environment and water. We don’t deliberately destroy the landscape or the environment because we want to continue long term. But the main reason we do it is to make profit, we need to make money to survive.

Agriculture is dealing in a world market these days, prices are very volatile. There is no point in pushing my costs of production up or stopping me producing and then importing food from Brazil or elsewhere.

Unfortunately, as farmers we are also water managers. Rain falls on our land, we need water for crops and animals either natural or man made irrigation, land also floods and can be used for water storage.

We realise everything we do, growing crops and raising animals has an influence on water and some things create more problems than others.

We want to reduce this and be sustainable and continue in the future. This is where the Aquarius project is designed to help.

How do we achieve this?  Easy with the win win situations. If you can help us to reduce the costs of production, fertiliser and water are very expensive inputs, and maintain yields then great.

We need help to embrace modern technology, precision farming, better targeting of inputs like fertiliser and water. We need more up to date research on crop needs and how to prevent leaching and this has to get back to farmer level.

Unfortunately, that win win eureka moment has not been reached in a lot of cases. Farmers are more sceptical about creating wetlands, buffer strips and flood plains. Why?

Governments' long term thinking is 5 years, we intend staying a lot longer. Once things are changed they become permanent.

We need proper compensation over a longer period of time before we will get involved.

We also need joined up thinking, no point in giving us payments to create buffer strips and then make the land ineligible for SFP.

No point in flooding my land and still developing on the flood plain farther down the system. We need consistency from all agencies we deal with.

We need to be involved from the start, we too have a great knowledge. It might not always be correct but is yours?

We do want to be involved and help but we have to make a profit to continue. For us survival is the most important issue.