'Farming is the core' - two Scottish farmers reflect ahead of the Royal Highland Show

Sandilands farm in Lanarkshire is where Jimmy Warnock has spent all his life. The veteran farmer, who is the current chair of the Royal Highland and Agricultural Society, grew up on the farm in the late forties and fifties and remembers walking to school on the dyke to avoid snowdrifts and an annual traditional shoot of white hares every January.

Warnock went on to inherit the farm, becoming a successful dairy farmer. But it his achievements in education which saw him awarded an MBE in 2015.

He has been instrumental in the work of the Royal Highland Educational Trust, which was set up in 1999 to engage with generations of children who were losing sight of where their food was coming from.

The scheme has blossomed from a single school farm visit to around 70,000 children a year engaging with agriculture. A group of Beavers are due for a tour of Warnock’s farm that night, he says.

Holyrood is at Sandilands to get Warnock’s take on the changing face of farming and to meet Carol-Anne, his daughter, who works the farm with him.

The pair have already finished a busy morning of sheep shearing and have stopped for lunch.

Sandilands is a 500-acre farm over three steadings, and has been primarily a dairy farm for decades, but as Holyrood is ushered into a living room, it is clear that sheep are now more of a focus. Pictures of ewes adorn the wall in between the family portraits.

The switch happened in 2016, and reflects the influence of the new generation, Carol-Anne.

“When I left school at 15, I had no brains, so my father said to me if you milk cows, you’ll not get up to any mischief,” Jimmy recalls with a smile.

“I’ve milked cows for 55 years and not got up to any mischief. Then I had three daughters, and none of them were keen on milking cows, so we decided that we’d change from dairy to beef.”

As soon as the Royal Highland Show directors got wind of the fact Jimmy was no longer busy with milking every morning and evening, “they had the arm up my back to get round to the job of chair. That was it. So now I get up to mischief I never got up to in my teens”.

He is clearly still impressively fit, playing an active role in the day-to-day running of the farm and recovering from a 20-mile charity walk only days before. 

“I’m 72, and the saying with farmers is that they don’t retire, they rust away,” he says. “Unfortunately, as you get older, the rust gets faster. You’re not as fast as you were when you were young, but I’m clipping sheep up here today.”

Carol-Anne chips in: “He’s not rusting very quickly, to be honest.”

“I use WD40. Everybody else uses Brut,” he grins.

Despite the family connection, Carol-Anne has had a more modern route into farming. As a child she would feed the calves after school, and take on other tasks when her mum wasn’t well. 

“I was never a fan of the milking. I was always much more a sheep person,” she says.

After school she enrolled at the Auchincruive campus of the Scottish Rural College in Ayr to study agriculture. By the time she graduated, it was called applied bioscience. 

The family had felt it important for her to pick up scientific qualifications at a time when agriculture was “going through a torrid time”. 

The industry had just recovered from the BSE epidemic, only to experience the foot and mouth outbreak. 

She went on to work at the Department of Agriculture for 12 years but left after the focus shifted to IT systems.

It was the practical side of farming that attracted her to return to the family farm after a stint working for Scotland’s Rural College.

Having experienced so many different farms through her positions, Carol-Anne recognises a trend of farmers finding successions difficult.

“It’s a trust issue,” she says. “You work hard to build up something and you don’t want to see it thrown away.”

It is perhaps no surprise that so many are handed on to family members. 

But farming as an industry faces fresh challenges, too, with IT failures causing delays to CAP subsidy payments and the uncertainty of Brexit. Jimmy says he doesn’t understand why some farmers backed leaving the European Union with its 350 million-strong customer base.  

“We’re in limbo, no one knows what’s happening,” he says. “No matter which politician you speak to, they haven’t a clue. It’s breeding uncertainty among the community.”

Leaving will also exacerbate existing labour issues, he predicts.

“I’m speaking to children, as I said, secondary schools now, and … you know what? There’s not a lot of enthusiasm. Why? Because there is long hours, seven days a week, 365 days a year, no holidays and minimal pay.”

Carol-Anne points out that the nation’s diet itself has changed, where foods that cater for the modern palate are unable to be grown in Scotland.

“The biggest problem is we have a population that doesn’t appreciate or have an understanding of how their food is developed,” she says.

“They’ve got different tastes developing. They are less reliant on the food you’ve always produced. That’s why people are starting to look at different avenues. There’s folk going into deer.”

Dairy farming has been one of the most high-profile casualties of the modern market in recent years. The industry became “price takers instead of price makers”, according to Jimmy, to the point that when he left it, farmers were selling milk at 10 to 12 pence a litre when it cost them 26 to 28 pence to produce. 

“When I was a boy growing up, when we produced milk we went with a horse and cart to the town or village to sell it,” he remembers.

“At that stage everybody was a dairy farmer. All the farms on both sides of this road from Lanark to here were all dairy farmers. We were the second last one, and there’s only one left milking cows now, and he’s not milking many at all. I don’t know if he’s making any money at it either.

“Do I feel sad? Yes, I do. It was part of the landscape.”

Dairy farming not only provided a regular source of income, he adds, but also a sense of community. 

“It tied the family in the farm to the work of the farm. We had houses here that workers were in. 

“So in this farm when I was growing up, my father had four sons, we had two young boys from Rigside as well that helped out, we had two horsemen and two dairymen. Today, there’s only Carol-Anne and I, with 100 acres more.”

Carol-Anne suggests it is understandable why agriculture now has a reputation for poor mental health, “because people are working on their own”.

She is clearly aware that she will end up working Sandilands on her own, too, talking about the practical and structural changes needed to make the farm easier to be “a one person operation”.

But as an incident at the start of the year revealed, solitary work can also be dangerous. 

“We had been drawing lambs down here for the market and we had some up at the other farm, so we went on the bike to go and get them and it just so happened that the trailer detached from the bike and I went head first into the road. 

“I broke my cheekbone and broke my jaw. I was in hospital for just about the whole month of January. It does make you wonder. These instances can happen when you’re on the farm yourself.

Luckily, my dad was with me and could instigate the emergency process and get me to safety but people are by themselves, you know.”

The hard work and isolation also mean farmers find it much harder to engage with things like government consultations than lobby groups do, she warns. Measuring the environmental benefits that now instruct levels of subsidy, too, is a challenge.

“What I would say [to politicians] is: ‘Open your ears, make sure you visit every group and get every angle before you make a decision on which way you want agriculture to go in the future.’”
“I think it’s important for politicians to realise that farming is an integral part of Scotland’s economy,” adds Jimmy. 

“It spreads out from giving you population in the rural areas, environmental benefits, food and tourism. Without the farming fraternity there to look after those angles, all these others would disappear. There needs to be an infrastructure out there to keep people producing food. 

“As I tell the children when they come, there is no country better suited to produce quality food than the UK, and Scotland in particular. We don’t have the extremes of snow or cold like Eastern Europe, we don’t have the heat, with its mosquitos and malaria. It’s a good balance. That way your stock, the food you produce, whether its grain, beef, sheep, pigs, poultry, whatever, they are in a healthier environment than anywhere else. That’s a big plus.

“Farming is the core.”