Supermarket food shortages continue to be in the mainstream news, mainly as a result of them feeding greedy shareholders rather than giving British farmers a fair price for their produce.

So it’s interesting to read how the Scottish government plans to implement its “Vision for Agriculture.”

As far as I see, none of the measures farmers are expected to take in order to secure support will help to generate greater self-sufficiency for the country’s food supplies.

See also: Ukraine export disruption creates gap in UK millet market

To simply greenwash all our produce and export our environmental footprint is, in my view, morally corrupt.

Policymakers need to open their eyes and take a good look around at our green and pleasant land and compare it with the plastic-clad areas of Almeria in southern Spain, where the bulk of our tomatoes are grown.

February was an unusually busy month, with a plethora of meetings, updates and training courses.

Despite the relatively dry weather – we recorded just over 50mm of rainfall for January and February combined – conditions are not quite good enough to contemplate drilling spring crops yet.

A keen northerly airflow is keeping a lid on temperatures.

The focus has been on completing ploughing for spring crops and applying nitrogen and sulphur liquid fertiliser to winter oilseed rape, winter barley, second wheats and, finally, first wheats.

Oilseed rape crops are starting to move with the increase in day length. Hopefully, they will grow away from the pigeons, which have been quite persistent at times this winter.

It has been notable how much effort has been made by other local growers to keep them off their crops – probably spurred on by the increased value in the crop.

After six seasons we have said goodbye to our last Lexion 770, replacing it with a third Lexion 8700 equipped with a 12.3m Convio-Flex header and a 7XL unloading auger.

The final piece of harvest equipment is now in place to follow our 12m controlled traffic system. The 7XL spout enables unloading on the tramlines, eliminating the need for grain trailers to drive on the cropped area of the field.