They feel unloved. They're angry. And they have very big tractors

The Herald Scotland

6 hours ago

'What's the most valuable cup you've got in here, then?' I venture to ask him. 'What do you think it is?' he replies a little enigmatically. My eyes alight on a large gold cup that looks much grander and elegant than anything you'll see being handed out to winning football teams. He doesn't quite say 'you've chosen wisely,' but I know that's what he's thinking.
'How much do you think it's worth?' he asks me. 'Maybe 25 grand,' say I. He's shaking his head. 'Add a zero and bit more on top,' he says. 'You're joking,' say I. 'Nope: £320,000.' It's called the Paisley Perpetual Gold Challenge Cup and it will go to the beast of the tournament. There's also a lovely, unadorned gold cup that was gifted by HM Queen Elizabeth (God rest her wee soul).
But it's the tractors and the combine harvesters I've mainly come here for. At an agricultural exhibition last year I'd noticed entire squadrons of these metal amazons lined up in military formation as though set for battle. I hadn't realised how big their tractors had become and resolved to attend this Royal Highland Show to see them close up. You could chib castles with these machines and I've always wanted to drive one.
Charlie Webber is the High Horsepower Product Tractor Product Specialist for CNS, one of the UK's top tractor outfits. It more or less means he's responsible for the big chaps.
'What are these coming in at, Charlie?' We're standing beside a gorgeous big red tractor that comes with its own ladders to access the cockpit. 'That one's about £400k,' he says. If you fitted it with machine guns, there's not much that would stop it, I'm thinking.
He tells me the market's 'steady' right now, though there are still post-Covid challenges.
'People who are re-investing in their equipment are finding it a little more challenging to get a return on what they're producing,' he says. 'With inflation, everything's got more expensive.'
They're beasts of burden though, which pay for themselves after several years of hard labour in all weathers. They literally and figuratively drive a farm's economy: rock solid investment vehicles, if you like.
I've still retained my childhood fascination for them, though and so has Mr Webber. When you see one of these as a child you thrill to them and it never really leaves you. Same with the combine harvesters, especially when you see them threshing the barley and oats and spitting it out their chimneys.
The Morris family (Image: Newsquest)
'If you're born on a farm or near a farm, your earliest memory is when you're sat inside one as a child as it works the fields,' he says. 'They're built for next-level comfort too because at the height of the seasons you'll be doing 16-hour days.'
Neil Redpath's family firm have been making tyres to the agricultural industry for 45 years and I'm asking him why the tractors are getting so big. 'Basically, there aren't people putting their bums on the seats,' he says.
'Once, you might have had four tractors, now you have two doing the work of four, so they have to be bigger. That tractor has to do so many more different jobs, when once you'd have a separate one to do the spraying. There are fewer people wanting to work the hours.
'Covid was a watershed, but it's been happening since before then. More than 80% of people who leave us do so because we work Saturday mornings, 8 until noon, even though we pay double time plus 37 quid for coming out on a Saturday. They tell us it interrupts their weekends, especially if they've been out late the night before.' I'm thinking the social life in Scotland's more remote places must be a bit more jaggy and jumpy than I'd previously thought.
'Our main challenge as a tyre firm is to get all that power into the ground without the tyre collapsing. These machines have grown in tonnage and we need to calculate exactly what pressure you need to carry that piece of equipment.'
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Then I spot a lad called Harrison Morris whose T-shirt, I've decided, wins best in show. The wee man's a wheelchair-user and his shirt bears the legend: 'Everything hurts and I'm dying'. He's down from Shetland with his family, including his grandpa, Bill and mum, dad and sister: Steve, Louise and Neveah. Bill, a retired chef, has been coming here for many years. 'It's the best show in Scotland,' he says.
The Royal Highland Show has been going for more than 200 years. It's one of those events you've heard about often and meant to visit, but never quite got round to. Plus, being full of farmers and country types, you might struggle to acclimatise. What hits you first is the scale of this event. This showground, beside Edinburgh Airport, becomes not a circus or a village but a small township. Today, there are easily more than 50,000 which will build to almost 200,000 when it finishes tomorrow.
More than 1,000 retail and hospitality units provide the esoteric weft and warp of rural life: their hardy, utilitarian apparel; their no-messing-about food: the glamping-pods and wooden tents. It's not your world, but you fall into step with it. And then there's the accents and dialects: the whas, the yins, the kens and the whitaboots that a persistent Glaswegian needs to hear once in a while as a release from our pure glo'al mono-verse.
You need also to be reminded that around 80% of Scotland's land-mass is put to agricultural production and that you're not living in an urban townscape, but in a rural realm with the odd concrete settlement here and there. More than 70,000 Scottish jobs are directly sustained by Scotland's rural economy and around 350,000 others are dependent on it. Agriculture is the third largest employer in rural Scotland behind the public sector and the service sector. And right now, it's a community that feels unloved and under-appreciated.
They remain angry at last year's inheritance tax rises, which they feel represented a cheap early broadside by a feckless Labour administration to soften up its core supporters, knowing they'd be taking an axe to social the social welfare budget a few months later.
The trophy room (Image: Newsquest)
The farmers have feared cuts in their livestock numbers ever since the Scottish Greens began throwing their weight around at Holyrood. The Greens hate everything to do with farming: the machinery, the red meat and the greenhouse emissions from coos' arses. A rule of thumb operates in Scotland though: if the Greens are against you then you must be doing something right.
The UK's National Climate Change Committee has been pushing for a reduction in livestock numbers leading to fears among meat farmers that lower quality American beef producers will exploit this under the new trade deal. In this setting, Keir Starmer is perceived as a weak leader eager to do anything to please an excitable American president.
Scottish Secretary Ian Murray is making an appearance at the UK Government's tented enclosure so I join in a mini agricultural media huddle gathered around him. Glen Barclay of the Scottish Farmer (supporting farmers in Scotland since 1893, by the way) kindly suggests a question I might ask to make it look as though I'm fully conversant with these issues.
Mr Murray seems to be enjoying himself and looks relaxed. He even extends me an invitation to join him later in a dram at a Scotch Whisky Society event, which I must refuse. He bats away all the questions rather easily with variations on the theme of 'The UK Government won't be altering its inheritance tax provisions for anyone, but we've had friendly discussions with the National Farmers Union to show that we're at least listening to them.'
I can't keep away from those tractors, though and Charlie Webber hesitantly permits me to climb inside one. It's got a big bouncy seat and there's plenty of room for your sausage rolls and ginger. Gordon the photographer sees my guard is down and begins snapping away with his vulpine grin, but I'm not giving one single flying f***.