By Andrew Arbuckle, the farming editor

GRAIN GROWERS who are still pondering what to sow in the spring of next year were yesterday given a strong piece of advice from a leading expert in the cereal industry.

“If you can grow anything else other than spring barley for malting then grow it,” said Dr David Cranstoun of the Scottish Agricultural College.

Dr Cranstoun, who retires this week after 30 years working with cereals for the SAC, said there was now a basic oversupply of malting barley being grown in Scotland and this removed most of the premium that would normally accompany the crop.

“Basically, we need to grow some 30,000 hectares less every year,” he said.

This was out of the average of around 230,000 hectares now being grown. Only the removal of that fraction would bring the supply/demand position back in favour of the grower.

Dr Cranstoun did not blame the malting profession for the current position. There was a basic over-supply in the main premium market for malt destined for the whisky industry.

With the whisky industry in the doldrums just now, its demand for malt has been quite flat at around 400,000 tonnes annually.

This left the balance of the malting grain for the competitive export market where the premium was quite low.

Dr Cranstoun said that in many ways maltsters had done a good job in getting rid of this surplus on to the export market.

What was needed more than anything else in the barley trade was an industry-wide agreement in early summer on just what the whisky industry required.

This would allow maltsters to set prices on that basis.

The current position whereby a percentage of the crop goes off-farm with no agreed price was unique to the cereal industry and did nothing to promote any feeling of a profitable long-term relationship.

He rejected any suggestion that growers were fed up with the way they were being treated by the trade and were ready to move out of barley production.

“I have heard this all before. Everyone goes around saying they are not going to grow any spring barley,” he stated.

“The more some farmers talk about this, the more others see it as an opportunity to grow more.”

He did not believe that the mild and open autumn just experienced had resulted in a massive increase of winter crop sown, thus leaving a smaller acreage for spring crops.

What may have happened is that the winter wheat acreage in Scotland has now swung back to levels experienced a few years ago.

That, however, still left more than the 200,000 hectares, which Dr Cranstoun reckoned was the maximum optimum area for malting barley.

Part of the problem with the present trade has been that growers, their agronomy advisers and the cereal plant breeders have all become better at their work.

“Twenty years ago, less than half the samples presented for malting were accepted. That figure is now up at 60%.

“If you add to that better yields, better husbandry resulting in less screenings and, indeed, better yield of spirit from the malt, then it is easy to see why there is over-production.”

When asked to look back over his 30-year tenure, Dr Cranstoun said the biggest factor in improving yield was the arrival of fungicides.

Thereafter, the cereal revolution involved everything from plant breeding through to improved fertiliser and pesticide control regimes.

This is likely to continue, as the first priority for the plant breeder will continue to be yield.

Any arrivals of new varieties showing high disease resistance do not have market appeal, he said.

While some of his scientific colleagues have lauded the arrival of biotechnology as providing a major leap forward, Dr Cranstoun did not agree.

“I am not confident that, in the short term, biotechnology will deliver what is being claimed in the near future.

“It is all right to look at the genetic map of a plant and decide what is needed but we also require to know the interactions within the genetic makeup.”

Dr Cranstoun, who was born in Washington DC where his father was a diplomat, will remain as a consultant to the SAC on a part-time basis, but indicated that he will be paying more attention to a small family estate on the outskirts of Lanark.