SRUC's Rural Policy Centre delves into the world of crofting and common grazings with Janette Sutherland and Siobhan Macdonald of SAC Consulting.

For more information, check out the policy spotlight on 'Common Grazings in the Age of Conditionality'.

To register for an upcoming CPG on Crofting meeting, visit the Scottish Parliament website.

To speak with an SAC consultant about your croft, check out our website and reach out to us to have a chat.

Crofting and Common Grazings with Siobhan Macdonald and Janette Sutherland

Welcome to another episode of The SRUC podcast. My name is Michelle Flynn, and I'm the communications officer at the Rural Policy Centre at SRUC.

In this episode, we're going to delve into the world of crofting and specifically common grazings. I'm joined today by Siobhan MacDonald and Jeanette Sutherland of SAC Consulting, SAC's consulting arm.

Jeanette has recently published a Policy Spotlight called “Common Grazings in the Age of Conditionality”, and you can find a link to this document in today's show notes.

Let's begin. Welcome, Siobhan and Jeanette. Can we start just by introducing ourselves, please?

Hello, my name is Siobhan Macdonald and I'm an agricultural advisor working mostly in Wester Ross in the North West of Scotland.

Hello, my name is Jeanette Sutherland. I'm also now agriculture advisor, based in the Isle of Skye, and a lot of my clients have common grazings and this is why it's such an important topic to me.

We'll begin with an easy one for you. Siobhan, could you give us a brief description of the world of crofting? And what are common grazings?

Thank you for the easy question.

Crofts are very particular to the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, and many people think of Croft as being a house or a small area of land like a smallholding. Crofts are unique. They are regulated by the Crofting Commission. They are only a croft, a true croft, if they're on a register held by the Commission. So only found in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland.

Many crofts have access to a common grazing so they have areas of inby usually quite small, maybe a few hectares, and then access onto a common. So common grazings are quite unique. Although there are lots of commons across the UK, those in the highlands and islands of Scotland associated with crofting come under particular rules.

Why are they important? Why do we need to have careful consideration when it comes to common grazings?

Common grazings make up about 10% of the agricultural land of Scotland, so that's a fair chunk. They tend to be found in areas of peatland, moorland hills, machair areas of high nature value farming.

Beautiful landscapes, quite iconic. The things that people think of when they think of Scottish landscapes tend to be on common grazings.

And they're also managed in common. There's a communal way of working which is quite unique. They cover areas which, as well as having beautiful landscapes, also tend to have peatlands, woodland, macher crops. So very important from a biodiversity point of view as well as a cultural and landscape point of view.

Super. And so in terms of Scottish agricultural support payments, I know there's some changes happening there. Will that affect crofters and common grazings too?

Yes, they will. Changes are happening over the next few years. Scottish Government have a Vision for Agriculture they are working on at the moment and their vision is to improve the sustainability of Scotland's agriculture. So they've started now with a few changes so that farmers and crofters can get used to the idea of what's ahead.

So in future there will be four different tiers of payment, starting with a base payment and then becoming increasingly complicated with some conditionality attached.

And can you explain to us what you mean by conditionality?

Conditionality is where the payments that crofters or farmers will receive is on condition of carrying out certain actions, so some of these actions might be data gathering and some of these actions might be for performing actions which help.

Climate change mitigation, for instance. So at the moment Scottish Government are trialling some of these actions and the trials that they're doing are on improving soils and fertiliser use and improving animal health and welfare.

Do you see these changes to agricultural policy affecting crofters and common grazing specifically?

That's a very good question. Common grazings are quite quirky and they don't fit easily into the policy and financial support for farms and just for Crofts.

Just because of the way that they're run, there are 1000 common grazings across Scotland and if there are 10 crofters each using these common grazings then you can see that's a lot of people who are affected.

Whether crofters are claiming financial support or not, they're in charge of some iconic areas and areas with lots of biodiversity, so I think it's really important that we look after them in any new regime that comes out.

The way that common grazings work is that they have a committee and the committee is generally led by a clerk, and the committee has responsibility for making sure that the common grazings work correctly and they work to a set of regulations.

If we have new policies coming out and new agricultural support then we have to find ways to make it easier for committees and graziers on the common grazings to fit into that.

Certainly in the last agricultural policy common grazings perhaps weren't considered right at the start, and so that meant that we ended up with some very unusual rules and quite a lot of crofters are put at a disadvantage because of that.

Jeanette, would you like to expand on that?

Yes, I'm happy to because it was something that took up quite a lot of our time maybe a decade ago and I'm keen that we don't recreate this problem.

So let's use this as an example of where it goes wrong and I think this is a classic example of when co-design fails because there wasn't proper communication between crofting stakeholders, the policy people and the implementation people. The system of common grazings averaging - when the regions happened - at the last minute it became very clear that people had been talking at cross purposes because the crofters think of their individual shares as distinct from everyone else. But the computer system needed them to be seen at the field level, which were often thousands of hectares in size.

So crofters who use common grazings are the only agricultural businesses that their payment is dependent on the activity of their neighbours in the past. And it's these quirks that we need to work at an early stage for this reform to ensure that we don't perpetuate the mistakes of the past or sadly create new ones if conditionality isn't designed with a menu that takes in the reality of common grazings and has a list of options, that means that common grazings can easily access them. And then take on the bigger challenges of the climate biodiversity crisi.

So let's come to you, Jeanette.

Could you define for us the ways in which crofters and those associated with common grazings would have specific transaction costs that would differ from farmers?

Yes, happy to now. Transaction costs might sound like a terrible bit of jargon. Basically it's the total cost of making a transaction.

So if it's OK, I'll use an example of an environmental scheme. If you were a hill farmer wanting to apply for an environmental scheme, you'd be looking at your own flock of sheep. Maybe your herd of cattle and trying to work out how you could adjust those numbers to fit with the grazing regime that would benefit the habitats on that area of land.

So you basically have to work out what the habitat needs, what your agricultural business needs, and that's all that you need to do.

If we think of an example of a common grazing first of all there could be numerous sheep flocks that are managed by individual people.

They’re worked commonly but they all have their own flock marks. They maybe all have their own tupping policy. There could be numerous cattle herds again will have their own tags. Different management systems, even if they are doing communal working, like sharing a bull.

So to decide to go into an environmental scheme, there's a lot more discussions to be done about it because it's not just one herd or flock you're affecting, you're affecting maybe thirty.

So there's that level of complexity and then you've got to have everyone agreeing. And then there's obviously maybe some dispute, some communications that needs to happen about that.

And then on top of that, because it's regulated by the Crofting Commission, there's extra hoops that they need to jump through with getting signatures of the majority of the shareholders that are resident before they can go into the scheme.

As Siobhan’s alluded to very clearly, there's loads of biodiversity and a lot of common grazings, but there's a very low uptake on environmental schemes and part of the answer to that is these higher transaction costs that common grazings have to do to take part in the same schemes that farmers have with no extra support.

That makes sense. So if you had a magic wand and you could create the perfect common grazing policy or what, the solution would be, what would you come up with?

I think what's really important is that we consider that common grazings are a feature of crofting, and that they're not a bug, so they need to be considered at the very first stage.

We shouldn't be trying to make a farm policy and retrofit into common grazings. What we want to be really looking at is also the strong benefits that they provide already.

I think in some ways common grazings have struggled because that they've existed so long, many of them are, you know, 100 plus years old. And I think you often don't recognise the value of the community co-operation and cross-working because they've always been there. In the document I've suggested is that when we're looking at a new policy, I think we need to think about common grazings and look through their key features and benefits and where they can help Scottish Government meets its aspirations with the biodiversity crisis, with the climate crisis and align a menu of conditional options that actually suit common grazings and actually support the these extra transaction costs.

For example, a very quick one is one I've suggested is that if they've got a bank account that's registered with the Rural Payment Service that that gets supported, and if anyone who's tried to get an account set up for common grazings with big banks using telephone banking and then trying to change signatories when the committee changes, you can see that this is an awful lot of frustration and it's where government policy is asking two different things.

What we want is we want the aspirations of common grazings and the for the support to be aligned so that it doesn't feel like a common grazings committee is being pulled in lots of different directions by different parts of the government.

So if you could give me a magic wand, that's what I'd like you to do for me, Michelle.

I'm sure many would ask why, you know, if there's such a small number of crofters in, in terms of looking at Scotland's whole agricultural policy, why should they have special treatment? Why should we be looking at this subject in such detail?

No, that is an interesting question. But I think what we're missing by focusing on that question, the current system is actually like tying one arm behind common grazing smacks to helping to work with Scottish Government to meet their aspirations of fighting the biodiversity crisis and fighting climate change.

And I think lot of the time people forget the extra complexities that are put on. If you're crofter with the common grazings, you'll have your own single application form for your own business.

If you're involved in an EC scheme, there will also be a separate agricultural business that is in the name of the common grazings, so there's an awful lot of extra work these areas, as Siobhan alluded to, really well, are so important because of their biodiversity importance. They're so important from a social point of view.

Supporting communities and having local communities managing land is a real aspiration and you can see that by the push for community buy-outs but I feel that common grazings have kind of been overlooked by the value that they actually have. Local communities are already managing vast areas of land that are got many environmental designations on them.

And I think the other concern is when common grazings aren't fully in the conversation is that you often are on policy calls and people say, oh, we could have a small farmer scheme and I have got no issue with small scale systems but not all crofters are working at a small scale.

Some of my clients are managing vast areas of common grazings that take particular skill and many days to gather in the sheep or work the cattle on them because of their extensive nature.

By losing the common grazings as a key feature of crofting, then actually the policy is maybe sometimes designed that it would suit a smallholder, but that is not the challenges that are facing either crofters who use common grazings or actually the challenges that we as a nation have with things like the biodiversity crisis or the climate crisis.

OK, Siobhan, we're, we're coming here to the end of our conversation now. Have you got any final thoughts you'd like to add?

Agricultural transformation of policy is in its infancy and it's really important that we start thinking about common grazings now and how they fit into the new world, because they have so much to offer, it would be a tragedy if we didn't manage to find a solution to enhance them and to make the best use of all the biodiversity and climate change mitigation aspects that they have.

Super, thank you. And Jeanette finally, how can we keep this important conversation going? What are the next steps?

Thanks, Michelle. So I hope that this conversation has sparked listeners’ curiosity and that they'll visit the Policy Spoltlight and have a read of it. I'm looking forward to presenting this at the next Cross Party Group on Crofting and I'm really keen to hear other stakeholders’ views so that we can make sure that it is a genuine example of co-design. So that at this early stage, both sides whether that’s those that are working common grazings and those that are trying to design the policy and then implement the policy, are clear about their shared aspirations, but also the constraints that both sides face. Because I think when that is clearly understood really successful policy can come out of it, but when that, as the previous example that we discussed showed, when those when things are misaligned then it means that actually not only is is it a personal loss for crofters who are using common grazings, but much bigger is that it is an actual loss for the nation because then they're not able to use these important areas of land that are managed by communities to meet the broader nations aspirations of, like I said before, fighting the biodiversity crisis and fighting the climate change crisis.

Thank you both. I've really enjoyed our chat today.

Thank you very much for having us.

Thank you.