Opinion: Farming should learn from Scotch’s glowing example
© Barmalini/Adobe Stock I recently visited the island of Arran for the first time and enjoyed a whisky tasting at the wonderful Lochranza Distillery.
The three hours spent with Scott (our guide) provided a journey through the story of the business, starting with the new-make spirit – the first to be made from barley grown on the island.
The tour continued to a well-aged 20-year-old malt, containing spirit tucked away in casks from the first flow in 1995, which, priced per bottle, would’ve made a tonne of fertiliser seem reasonable.
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Whisky epitomises Scotland as much as Rabbie Burns or Haggis. It’s a massive success, owing to the purity and abundance of water and top-quality home-grown barley, which produces the best malts in the world.
The demand for the product is mind-boggling: 36 bottles (70cl) are exported to 166 markets around the world every second, to a worth of £3.8bn per year.
This makes up 75% of Scottish food and drink exports and 21% of the UK’s. The 134 distilleries operating across Scotland are an absolute economic powerhouse for the country’s rural economy.
So, what is the key to its success? Scotch is the drink of choice for high-value markets, where image and status drive sales. It’s the heritage and the story that follows every bottle, no matter where on the globe it is finally poured.
Now we have left the protective trading bubble of the EU, what can we learn from the success of Scottish whisky on the world market?
Last week the UK government confirmed another free-trade deal, this time with New Zealand, further confirming the direction in which Boris Johnson’s government is taking us.
Over a very short period, we have become a newbie on the world market, no longer required to solely produce food for our home market, but encouraged to now export high-value product elsewhere.
It could be argued that the years of heavily subsidised production, pushing prices below farmers’ costs of production, has not been to our benefit.
The new age of trading on the world stage may better reward our brand.
It has therefore been extremely disappointing to see our assurance bodies, across the UK, fail to utilise the opportunities.
Instead, they have spent this transition period in a silo, listening to the same voices and creating their own spin to determine that UK farming is superior, but spending little resource to actually prove it.
Any hopes that farm assurance standards would protect our farming sector seem forlorn. Look no further than our cereal markets, where assured grain has to compete with unregulated imports.
Other sectors have also left assurance behind, with many dairy processors requiring their own standards to gain market premium.
Allowing an animal to become assured by briefly moving it to an assured farm to gain the rubber stamp completely undermines the entire premise.
Our highly inflated assurance schemes have become nothing more than policing of minimum requirements at primary producers’ expense, with little or no market reward.
The failure of assurance schemes to adapt to the political environment and champion agriculture will, at the expense of the industry, be its failure.
I firmly believe we need to invest in standards that focus on leveraging farming in a way to seek reward from new high-value markets which seek the heritage, story and values which follow our product.