Farming Stalwarts: John Cameron

John Cameron is probably one of the few farmers who is universally known across Scotland.

The farming champion is widely respected for a 40-year career in roles which included a five-year presidency of NFU Scotland, chairmanship of the Scottish Beef Cattle Association and an eight-year stint as chairman of the European Sheepmeat Advisory Committee.

For much of that time he was referred to as Europe’s biggest sheep farmer, and when he wasn’t busy with politics, running eight different farming units or commuting to Brussels, he chaired British Rail’s Scottish Regional Board and often drove the company trains.

John Cameron is a man with sharp political instinct, the charisma to get grassroots producers on board and while at one time he farmed 37,000 acres with beef, sheep and arable interests, his focus has never left the beleaguered hill producer in the less favoured areas where his father’s family farmed for generations.

His political career was launched when he was appointed NFUS Hill Farming Committee chairman in the 1970s and the rise to the role of national president was fast.

What marked him out was his insistence that the civil servants, rule-writers and great and good of Westminster and Brussels should all experience the practical implementation of their policies and edicts. And so he would transport them by tractor and trailer eight miles into the hills of north-west Scotland then deliver his demands, always ending with the question: “Do you understand now what I want? If not you can walk home”.

It was a performance which consistently achieved results, not least an exceptionally advantageous EU Sheepmeat Regime and Less Favoured Area payments which underpinned production on some of Scotland’s most challenging terrain.

But not every victim survived unscathed. A former Secretary General of COPA, the international farmers’ pressure group in Brussels, lost a leather buckled shoe in the mud on one of Mr Cameron’s day-long expeditions, and was reportedly seen hobbling back to a trailer sobbing and wet. The subsequent large drams of whisky and generous hospitality tended to soften the physical discomfort and end the experience on a high note.

There’s an element of the rabble-rouser in John Cameron, too. It was he who came out of semi-retirement to lead 1000 Scottish farmers in a protest at Stranraer docks when imports of Irish beef threatened their livelihoods, and he who successfully negotiated the return of six containers of beef back home across the Irish Sea that same evening.

But just as his call to arms could inspire some of the smallest livestock producers in the country, so did he negotiate with the most formidable politicians of his generation. He had several spats with Margaret Thatcher when she was Prime Minister, and found they shared some common values.

“You had to stand up for yourself, and she’d respect you if you contradicted her,” he remembers. “She certainly wasn’t a push-over, but once we had won our argument her government was a strong supporter of the less favoured areas.” Indeed, letters from the former prime minister are among his most treasured possessions.

These days John has downsized his farming operation, selling off five of the units which were scattered across Scotland, and setting aside a £1m fund for the Cameron Travel Scholarship Trust for the benefit of young agricultural students and pupils of Dollar Academy.

After an entire lifetime managing stock, he says the decision to semi-retire was a surprisingly quick and easy one.

“I’d been gathering sheep on a freezing wet day and was soaked to my backside in the truck coming off the hill and suddenly thought: Why am I here?” he recalls.

But he is still left running the substantial Fife farm of Balbuthie and a neighbouring unit. And he continues to buy lambs every year from Oban Mart where he is still given a hero’s welcome.

The scrapbooks he occasionally pores over offer an insight into his dominating role on Scottish farming over four decades, but while John may now be 70, he’s adamant the pages are not yet complete. It’s not so long, after all, since NFU Scotland was plunged into crisis with the resignation of a president and chief executive and a poll of farmers for a national farming magazine voted overwhelmingly for John Cameron to take the helm. On that occasion he graciously declined, but that twinkle in his eye and his restless energy and passion for the industry means we haven’t heard the last of the Grand Old Man of Scottish farming. Not by a long way.

See more Farming Stalwarts by clicking here.

Farming Stalwarts is a monthly series celebrating men and women who have devoted their working lives to farming and the countryside