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The farming community absolutely accepts that it has a massive role to play in this—nobody denies that. However, it seems to me that, given the scale of the challenges that we face, the things that the farming community will do within the confines of the funding that will be available to them will not be nearly enough. You talked about private equity coming into the landscape-style approach and the gains that we have to make. Is there a need to shift some of the focus away from the funding for agriculture and look at how we will do it on a much bigger scale?

I have a wee supplementary question in this section.

You talked about research on soil, and I will find more out about the stuff that you have been looking at. I echo my colleagues in saying that this has been a fascinating evidence session.

Farmers will take up whatever we ask them to, if they believe and trust in it, but we hear a lot from the farming community that different science with different requirements is being thrown at them. How do we get a set of scientific data that farmers can put their trust in and buy into so that we achieve these outcomes?

You mentioned whether supermarkets should put a premium on that type of food. We have been down that road before. Generally, these things are brought in as incentives, but they become sticks to beat people with at a later date. Given that we are in a cost of living crisis, people will not be able to afford to pay that premium, so that funding will have to come from different sources, will it not?

I return to what Ross Lilley said about dovetailing. Like Rachael Hamilton, I like that analogy. As we heard from Martin Kennedy last week, we must remember that the bill that we are scrutinising and talking about today is an agriculture bill. It is there to support agriculture to produce food and to create resilience in the food system. Does it seem to you that we are trying to do too much with one bill and with a limited pot of money?

Okay. Thank you.

Does that not highlight the complexity of the situation? We are trying to get farmers to buy in to woodland creation and to have timber as part of their ability to make a living off the land, but that will contribute to a decrease in the number of wading birds. If we are going to do that properly, we do not want wholesale hill planting; we want that to be done in stands that will create shelter belts and environments for wildlife, but the same environment will create a breeding ground for predators that will wipe out the ground nesters.

However, that leads to Scotland being in danger of losing the value of its natural capital to big organisations that do not live here. That might be a bigger question than the ones that you are here to talk about today, but the process is going through my mind as we speak.

I have a brief question for Ross Lilley. You said that the Government does not have the level of data that it needs. As a farmer, I used to have a crop plan every year and I knew what was going into every single field and what I was going to do in that field, based on the soil analysis that I had done and what I was looking to achieve. Is there not a way that you or the data gatherers could speak to the farming community? A vast amount of that field-level detail is already available—we just have to tap into it and speak to the farmers to get it.

I want to go back to the point that Ross Lilley has just made about intensification, if that is okay. We are talking about a whole-farming approach—that is, one that goes across the industry—but it is a fact that, if you take just two farms, the climate and biodiversity challenges that each faces will be different. Indeed, there will be different climate and biodiversity challenges on just one farm alone, never mind the challenges facing a full-scale system.

I am going to talk predominantly about semi-upland, upland and hill farming. If we are saying that intensification is part of the issue with regard to biodiversity loss, I would just point out that you cannot get farming that is more about landscape than those kinds of farming. Why, therefore, are we seeing the same drop in numbers in upland farms as we are in the big, intensive arable farms?

I am glad to hear you say that you do not want there to be no livestock in those areas—I should declare an interest as a hill sheep and cattle farmer and a shepherd for 30 years.

Has any consideration been given to predation of wading and ground-nesting birds? I have experience of what happens to lapwings, curlews, redshanks, golden plovers and so on when there is an influx of ravens. I used to have to mark where the nests were as I drove round my lambing fields but, by the time I had come out of all that, raven numbers had exploded and there was literally no point in doing that work, because there were no full nests. Have you considered what predation has done? I know that RSPB Scotland will deny that it happens but, anecdotally, I have witnessed the huge effect that it has had.