Andrew Arbuckle: As the old man used to say, facts are chiels that winna ding

Mostly he was good company and over the years I learned a great from him but one aspect of the old man's method of dealing with an issue was to refer it to an old proverb or saying.

Many of these old saws were true but occasionally there would be a humdinger that just annoyed me. I thought of him this week as I walked past hedgerows bright red with rose hips and haws.

I am sure he could not have walked the same path without commenting "It's going to be a hard winter with all those berries on the bushes." I have never been able to cope with science fiction where people flit back and forth in time so I could never see how nature was predicting weather conditions some six months down the line.

I thought of another of his favourite yet somewhat dodgy sayings last week when the agricultural census figures came out last week. When he was faced with a batch of figures on a subject he would say "facts are chiels that winna ding" and that was that; brooking no doubt or raising no question in his mind. The facts were there and they were immutable.

In contrast, when I see statistics, they tend to raise more questions than they provide answers and it is well worth doing a little digging in the statistical undergrowth.

Commenting on the census figures, cabinet secretary Richard Lochhead reckoned "the figures show the first increase in cattle numbers in Scotland for the past five years and that is a good illustration of the optimism and resilience of rural communities".

Now as far as I am concerned it is good news that beef cattle numbers have ceased to fall but the fact is that a decade ago Scotland had 520,000 breeding cows in the beef sector and now it has less than 460,000 despite the slight increase of 6,612 in the past year. So the veneer of this year's improvement does not match the ten-year decline.

Further when checking out the "optimism and resilience of rural communities" in the sheep sector by looking at the numbers of ewes kept, it can be seen that in the last year the number of ewes fell once again; by 66,721 or 2.5 per cent to 2.64 million. In 2000, there were some 3.75 million breeding ewes in Scotland so I am not quite picking up on the optimism or the resilience.

There has also been a well-documented decade-long decline in the national pig herd and a less well acknowledged drop in the numbers of broilers produced in Scotland, causing an overall reduction in poultry numbers.

In fact, checking out the livestock figures from the census, the only livestock on farms to have increased in the past ten years have been horses for recreation.

In all this I am not critical of the political comment. Politicians are required to look on the bright side of life.The problem is we are now producing less and less from our farms.

Last week, the First Minister, when addressing delegates attending the Highland Cattle gathering in Stirling Castle, regaled these visitors from all over the world with the billions of pounds worth of exports from Scotland's food and drink industries.

I did not check on this particular occasion but the usual form when wanting to provide stunning figures is to include worldwide whisky sales and processed food figures into the overall bundle. These help camouflage any deficiencies.

My problem was I was reading a UK-based document published by Defra which showed that home-grown food in the UK now accounts for only 58.9 per cent of all food consumed in this country. That is the lowest figure in the past four decades and it is at least ten percentage points below the statistics of ten years ago.

Even when you cut out the food such as bananas and pineapples that we cannot produce in this country, UK farm businesses are now only supplying three quarters of the food the country consumes.

The statisticians behind the agricultural census figures state that the big reduction in home output came with breaking the link between subsidy and production.

The challenge for the politicians in Scotland, the UK and Europe will be getting a new support system which encourages farmers to produce and which gets under the wire of any World Trade Organisation requirements.

The old man who served up proverbs and aphorisms has nudged my elbow. "Just remember," he whispered, "the worth of a thing is best known by the want of it."

If it comes to food production, I'll agree with that.