Agriculture / A great bunch of folk to work for’ – Graham Fraser reflects on more than four decades in local agriculture
Photo: SAC
AFTER 44 years helping Shetland’s crofters and farmers navigate the changing face of agriculture, Graham Fraser is hanging up his clipboard, writes Sarah Cooper.
Fraser, who joined the Northwest Scottish Agricultural College (now SAC Consulting, part of Scotland’s Rural College) in 1981, celebrated his retirement last month with colleagues, while more than a dozen others contributed to a 13-page e-card marking his long career.
Prior to coming up for the job, he had never been to Shetland before.
“I was offered the job and told to report to Aberdeen on the 3rd of August that year, I’d heard a rumour I might be ending up in Shetland, but nobody had told me officially,” he recalls.
“So, I went in and was told, ‘and you know you’re going to Shetland’.
“I said nobody had told me that – and it was just ‘well you are!’”
Originally he didn’t expect to be up here for very long, but that became a 40-plus year stint – including a short four-and-a-half-year spell in Orkney.
“At my first review they asked if I was happy to stay, and I said I would. I ended up spending six-and-a-half years before going to Orkney for four-and-a-half. Then I came back to Shetland just before the Braer incident in 1993.”
That oil tanker disaster, he said, was one of the busiest and most challenging times in his career.
“That was six months of my life taken up by doing claims. The Braer Oil Compensation Fund basically funded almost anything that we said was needed, which put us in a very awkward position.”
He explained: “It affected crofts in the South Mainland, Burra and Trondra. We were told to move livestock away from the coast, which meant concentrating them in smaller areas, and that caused damage to pasture that had to be reseeded.
“In hindsight, moving them probably did more harm than good, and then it was trying to recover from that damage that folk needed compensation for.”
Fraser started as a trainee adviser in 1981 and later became senior consultant and office manager, helping crofters with everything from feed advice to croft registration. He has seen plenty of changes throughout his career, the main one being the adoption of computers and technology.
“When I came up here, the council had just launched a ten-year plan for developing agriculture. Folk had to apply for loans, which meant putting together budgets and cashflows, all by hand.
“The office in Aberdeen had just got a desktop computer, a Commodore Pet. We commandeered it because we had a big list of budgets to do. We had to write the spreadsheet ourselves, but it meant Lerwick effectively became the first computerised office in the agricultural college at that time.”
Now, everything from croft mapping to subsidy claims to livestock sales is done digitally. “More and more over the years it’s been paperwork and form filling,” he recalls with a laugh.
“In recent years, the sales here have started doing online bidding. It’s helped regularise the markets, prices are more consistent now, where before it was very up and down,” he said.
Still, not all change has been easy, as he explains: “Folk trying to make a living out of agriculture have had to keep getting bigger, taking over neighbouring crofts. The smaller ones are more of a lifestyle now — keeping folk tied to the land rather than making a living.”
Fraser has watched Shetland’s agricultural landscape evolve dramatically.
“When I came here first there were 17 or 18 dairies selling milk locally. When the law changed so it had to be pasteurised, some gave up, and others carried on with small-scale pasteurisers. But over time the numbers just kept coming down.
“I remember when it came down to half a dozen and I thought it was a massive reduction, but nationally it was almost the same proportion. Dairies everywhere were getting bigger, whereas in Shetland the land restricts how big you can get.”
He’s also been involved in keeping Shetland’s high animal health status intact.
“Our single point of entry helps avoid diseases,” he explains. “I was involved in the early days when the health schemes were developed.
“It’s not that many years since there was an outbreak of scab and they had to dip about 10,000 sheep to get rid of it. Keeping scab out is a big welfare benefit.
“Another disease we’ve managed to stay clear of is enzootic abortion of ewes (EAE) — it’s a really nasty disease. Once it gets in, you can have a significant proportion, 10 to 25 percent, of ewes aborting every year. To stay free of that is tremendous.”
Although officially retiring, Fraser won’t be gone for long.
“They’re already applying to get me back one day a week,” he laughs. “Because of all the croft regulation and registration work, I’ve become a bit of a guru on crofting matters in the northwest region.”
Asked about his highlights, Fraser remembered one of the first farm visits he went on as a trainee.
“The senior consultant took me to the Nicolsons at Breckon. We were invited in for lunch, soup and bannocks, and at the end, Jimmy Nicolson pulled half a sheep’s head out of the pot and started picking at the meat.
“I’m sure he did it just to shock us. That’s always stuck vividly in my memory.”
Looking back on his career, he finished saying: “I’ve really enjoyed my work with SAC. They’re a great bunch of folk to work for and with.”
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