FARMING unions both north and south of the Border yesterday called on grain merchants to understand the difficulties this harvest had thrown up with regard to the quality of the grain produced.
The move was made against the background of many, if not almost every, farmer having problems hitting the quality written into contracts, problems ranging from not hitting specific weights, skinning, splitting and in a number of cases not hitting the contract tonnage through low yields being harvested.
Andrew Moir for NFU Scotland said there was recognition that a contract was a contract but “all we are asking for is a little bit of commonsense and trying to work together”.
His counterpart in England, Andrew Watts, said: “We are challenging merchants and processors to help them by being much more transparent about the way in which claims are calculated.”
With many of the problems related to low specific weights, Watts said there needed to be more explanations on how fallbacks were applied on a scale that multiplied the penalty as weight reduced.
“With the right information, and without the element of surprise, better transparency of the evidence for claims in the wheat sector will help to maintain improving relationships within supply chain,” he said.
On yields, Moir believed the overall reduction in the Scottish cereal tonnage would work out at about 20 per cent but he added that some growers, including himself, had taken “big big hits” with some of their crops.