A 22-year-old Scottish farmer has heavily criticised the SNP government's IT system failures for increasing debt and "destroying a way of life".
Writing in the Scottish Review as part of its Young Thinker of the Year, Helen Stewart said the Scottish government's computer system to manage EU grants is "faulty beyond function".
The system was created to enable the Scottish government to provide financial support to farmers and rural businesses in line with European Commission reforms.
Criticism of the system has been heavy in the farming industry. A Scottish farming leader has previously asked whether the government is "flogging a dead horse" by sticking with its IT system for delivering CAP support.
And farming union NFU Scotland said every farmer will remember 2016 as a year when the Scottish government's "flawed IT system failed to deliver" the subsidy CAP payments, "damaging" the rural economy.
Ms Stewart said the computer system "wasn't ready and wasn't working". "We eventually received a decreased payment, and this was just the start," she wrote.
"In 2015 there was a five-month late payment, again decreased – only 80%. In 2016, the payment was so late that the government issued a part payment loan to farmers.
"Overall the subsidy was almost a year late – and this trend is spiralling. Still the computer system is faulty beyond function."
'Dangerously out of sync'
She said the subsidy is now "dangerously out of sync" for Scottish farmers, and has driven farmers into the "hands of banks and the depths of debt".
"Last January due to this disruption my dad had a heart problem and that's when I decided to finish my studies and go back home. I knew the stress was bad when I visited my parents from university and I would hear my dad getting up to redo his budgets at 1.30 every morning," Ms Stewart added.
"There would be plan A, and plan B, and plan C, throughout the week. He said he couldn't look at the numbers by daylight. Yet, the sheep still have to be fed, vet bills still have to be paid, there is no telling the taxman that you're suddenly missing over half of your income.
"It hurt me to see my dad, after all of his hard work, being put in a position like this. We were constantly being told to get with the times and run the farm like a business. Yet what business does not know when, or even if, money is coming in?"
'Gross incompetence'
The young farmer said there is "painfully little media coverage" on the issue, and no investigations.
"Does it not concern you that our own government mismanaged this so drastically and that we don't really hear about it? The Common Agricultural Policy equals around 40% of EU funds: that's €58 billion a year," she added.
"To mismanage 40% of EU funds, surely that is gross incompetence? It certainly concerns me that our government can bring an industry to its knees through an organisational 'transitional' error. Yet there are no investigations; there is painfully little media coverage.
"The loss of the stability of farming is a loss in culture, a loss in mental well-being, a long-term, long-reaching loss. It hurts all the more when we feel it is a loss we bear in silence."
