MY story last week about the inflation of land prices has stirred Akki Manson to tell me some of the history of his farm.
Kilblean is just outside Oldmeldrum Toon and extends to some 400 acres of well-drained and quite heavy land. The first Manson arrived at Kilblean in 1806 and he paid £10 an acre for what was virtually bare land. That was an extraordinary price but that was an extraordinary time. It was in the middle of the Napoleonic Wars in which the great nations of Europe were tearing one another apart and would pay anything for food to feed their armies.
Wheat and corn prices were through the roof. A bit like today, farmland went at a premium.
And the first Manson didn't even get a house with his purchase, at least not one fit for a man who could afford to pay £4000 for a few acres of land. So he built four crofts to attract labour to his farm and a beautiful farmhouse designed by John Smith, the architect who along with Archibald Simpson was responsible for most of the fine granite buildings in Aberdeen.
The extraordinary thing in Akki's story is that, after all those improvements, when the farm was valued in 1936 on the occasion of his father taking over from his grandfather, it was worth £3600 or £9 an acre - 10% less than it had made 130 years earlier.
Who says the price of land just goes up and up?
It's not just land that's inflating. I've just had Mossie on the phone furious about inflation in the costs of growing grain. He's going to give up. The "Farm for Sale" sign is coming out again.
The thing which has set him off is that he has been offered fertiliser for next year's winter cereals at £460 a tonne - treble what he paid last year.
The cost of growing cereals, not including any overheads, is up from about £100 to more than £200 an acre.
"It's nae possible. We'll just need to sook the grun."
In case you're not familiar with the term, "sooking" is where a farmer takes crops off the land but neglects to put on any muck or other good fertilisers on to replace them. Sooking is a great short-term policy suitable for the last few years of a tenancy, for example. It was what the Farmer did before handing on the farm to Potions the son-in-law, but it is disaaaster for farming in the long run.
When I told Mossie he would need to eat and drink less to survive these tricky times, he was even more exasperated.
"How can I? Things are going to get even worse so, like the camel, I'm going to have to live off my hump. I have to build up my hump while I can."
It is worrying the way our input prices are shooting up, and those prices are nearly all down to oil. The fertilisers are just oil and so are much of the sprays, and diesel for the machinery is another large part of the cost.
And if Maitland Mackie wins that bet of $200 oil by 2009 and the price goes up another 74% in two years, these costs have a long way to go.
But Mossie is disingenuous in his fury. If costs are up £100 an acre and grain is up only £50 a tonne, good producers still win. In fact, Mossie grows four tonnes to the acre, so the extra cost per tonne produced is only £25, so he is going to be a lot better off. He looks a bit sheepish when I point that out.
"Aye, but we're reducing our yields to two-and-half tonnes to make the argument work better. That way it's costing an extra £40 a tonne to produce and your advantage is about aa awa."
And finally, I have had a couple of epistles from the Magpie Mafia. You will remember several years ago when I used to report regularly on the shadowy group of suburban Scots, who pooled their resources to fight with Larsen traps against the magpies that make life so difficult for their songbirds.
I got interested when I noticed one day that the garden at Little Ardo was quite quiet. We had several magpies nesting in our trees and we decided to get rid of them. They are just about impossible to shoot but we caught them easily using a calling bird and the garden has been orchestral ever since.
For some reason most of the Mafiosi were in the west, so I was pleased to receive the following, name withheld.
"I thought you might like to know that the Magpie Mafia is alive and well in West Lothian.
"By various means, a few of us who detest the damage done to the small bird population by magpies, have made contact with one another and call birds get swapped around as needed.
"I have been trapping for eight days and have caught 12 birds. I am still very careful with the trap positioning to make sure that my neighbour, who does not approve, isn't aware and we all live harmoniously."
You seek them here you seek them there but you're never sure in suburbia.
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