This movement is growing as the Agricultural Holdings Bill is being discussed in the Scottish parliament. Recently the government enacted the Land Reform Bill, which grants crofting [small farming] communities the right to buy their land.

This struggle by working farmers is meeting resistance from the wealthy landed families in Scotland, who have maintained one of the most concentrated patterns of land ownership in the world. Only 1,252 people own 66 percent of all private land here. Some 47 percent of the country is owned by individuals whose estates are at least 5,000 acres.

Support for land reform reflects the deep desire of many in Scotland for redress in the archaic land ownership system. The land question is deeply tied into the national oppression of the country. Both the rising sentiment against the national oppression of Scotland and the crisis facing working farmers are bringing the question of land ownership to the fore.

Many farmers are struggling for survival, with the price farmers can sell their products having fallen below the cost of production. According to Scottish government figures, for example, the average net income of all cereal farms in Scotland last year was £743 (£1=US$1.50), with 61 percent of small cereal farms, and 42 percent of all farms losing money.

To press their campaign for the right to buy, tenants have set up the Scottish Tenant Farmers Action Group (STFAG). Malcolm McCall is one of four tenant farmers on the Sutherland Estate, the fourth largest estate in Scotland. In an interview, he said that the organization was set up in February in response to the new bill, and represents the first time tenant farmers have had an independent voice of their own.  
 
Growing support
The group has 350 members and is growing, McCall said. It is based mostly in the Highlands but has support in other parts of the country as well. The STFAG is organizing meetings around the country and winning press coverage on the situation facing tenant farmers.

McCall and other farmers are called "secure tenants" because they are able to pass down to family members the land they rent. Many secure tenants farm land that has been worked by their families for three or four generations. Some have been in the same family for 400 years. "The input to the land has been by them. Who really owns the land?" McCall asked.

McCall took over the farm from his father in 1965. He has 600 breeding ewes and 100 suckling cows, which he sells as store to other farmers to finish.  
 
Long history of landlord domination
The estate is dominated by a 100-foot statue of the 1st Duke of Sutherland, George Granville-Leveson Gower, which looks down on the lands and villages below. According to the inscription, the monument was erected by "a mourning and grateful tenantry [to]...a judicious, kind and liberal landlord...[who would] open his hands to the distress of the widow, the sick, and the traveller."

The Sutherland Estate extends more than 123,500 acres and is still run by the duke’s descendants. In the 19th century the owners forcibly evicted thousands of tenant farmers to make way for the more profitable raising of sheep and deer. McCall’s farmhouse, like other buildings in the area, has the Sutherland coat of arms above the door.

Stuart Black farms with his wife and daughter on the Seafield Estate, the second largest in Scotland. "As my wife and I get older, we may want to sublet the farm but stay on in the house," Black explained. "At the moment we would have to go cap in hand to the estate to ask for their agreement to this, and more than likely the idea would simply be dismissed." The right to buy would strengthen their hand. "The system as it currently stands creates a culture of social subservience in this area that I would dearly love to see changed."

About 50 percent of the tenant farmers are members of the National Farmers Union of Scotland (NFUS), the main farming organization in the country. Many, like McCall, who is president of the NFUS’s Sutherland branch, concluded that another kind of organization is necessary to put forward the interests of tenant farmers today. Many tenant farmers "think that the NFUS is more of a landlords’ organization. It isn’t a union like a trade union. It is more of an amalgamation," said McCall.

After the Land Reform Bill was published, there was a move by some tenant farmers to push for a right to buy outright, rather than waiting for the landlord to offer it for sale. In response, the NFUS organized a referendum of its membership on the question. Almost 60 percent of secure farm tenants voted for the right to buy.  
 
Discussion in farmers’ organization
The NFUS’s official position is in favor of tenant farmers getting the first chance to buy land offered for sale and against the right to buy whether or not the landlord wants to sell. In response to the activity in favor of the right to buy, it has organized meetings around the country to put forward its view to tenant farmers.

Ross Finnie, the Environment and Rural Development Minister for the Scottish Executive, the government body, also has ruled out including the right to buy in the new legislation.

A document produced by the tenant farmers’ organization presents the views of farmers such as Duncan McAlister, from the island of Bute. Ninety-five percent of Bute is owned by Bute Estates, "so the chances of anyone being able to buy their own farm on the island are slim," he points out, echoing a major concern of STFAG. Twenty-five percent of estates over 1,000 acres have been owned by the same families for over 400 years, so many tenants would never be able to exercise a preemptive right to buy the land.

For McAlister the "real value" of the right to buy the land they farm "lies in the effect it would have on the balance of power between landlord and tenant." Many others make the same point: the landowner could not be so dismissive in their relations if they knew the farmer could buy the land from them.  
 
Restrictions on tenancy
At present, secure tenancy agreements can be very restrictive. "A lot of small tenant farmers are struggling, and living in miserable housing because the landowner won’t fix the houses up," McCall explained. Any improvements to the land or buildings have to be agreed to by the landowner and the value of a tenant’s investment is written down by the landowner over 10 years or so.

If the tenant ends the tenancy--either by leaving the industry or because there isn’t anyone to take over when they retire--all buildings and improvements revert to the landowner, regardless of the investment made by the tenant. "A farmer’s family can have worked a small farm for 100 years and he can still go out with nothing," McCall said.

The governments of Scotland and the United Kingdom have both told farmers that the way to survive the economic crisis is to diversify their production. But in the case of secure tenant farmers, McCall points out, "the landowner has power of veto" over what they do, whether setting up a turf farm, as he has considered, or renting out spare housing on a farm, as other farmers interviewed would like to do.

McCall said his tenancy also explicitly prohibits him from taking a job off the farm to get extra income, something not uncommon for tenancies. Landowners have a certain interest in whether secure tenants survive. "You don’t get secure tenancies now, because landowners are desperate to get tenants out," he said. "Land is worth 50 percent less with a tenant on it." Most landowners now impose limited duration tenancies.

McCall contrasts the situation facing tenant farmers to that of crofters, who over the years have engaged in struggles to gain security on the land they work. Since 1976 they have had the uncontested right to buy their own crofts. McCall said most crofters at a nearby community had bought their crofts under the 1976 legislation, built new houses, and are doing much better than many tenant farmers.  
 
Landowners’ counteroffensive
Meanwhile, landowners have launched a countercampaign against giving tenant farmers any right to buy. Robert Balfour, convener of the Scottish Landowners Federation, described the proposed preemptive right to buy as "a virulent virus which is already eating away at our existing landlord/tenant sector." He claims there is "a huge fear among owners of land that this was just the first step towards tenants having an absolute right to buy."

Landowners have threatened to stop renting land on any terms if the proposals go ahead. "But what will they do with it?" asks McCall. "You can’t switch the land off until you want to use it again."

In some cases tenants have been removed from farms and replaced by contract farming firms. "Moray Estates bought out five tenants and got in a contract firm to work the land. But they got £59 per [metric ton] cereals that it cost £65 per [metric ton] to grow, so they can’t make money."

Landowners have also threatened to take the Scottish Executive to the European Court of Human Rights if the legislation is passed. McCall said that tenant farmers would welcome going to court because of "the abuses we’ve seen of people’s human rights." Whatever happens with the current legislation, McCall sees the dynamic of the new tenant farmers’ organization will continue.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home