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I take your point, but I go back to a point that I made. If we just gave you the rural support plan and told you to get on with it, and then said, “By the way, you have to do all these things,” you would say, “But those things do not tie in together,” because we would not have gone through the process that we are going through.

You say that I am proud of ARIOB. What matters is not that I am proud of it but that it works. I assure you that there are some very robust discussions happening there. It has very good representation of farmers of all sorts—from arable, pork and crofting to upland and other livestock farming. They are all in there, along with others, including the RSPB. Everyone is represented there. However, as soon as you bring such a diverse group of people into one room, things will take time, because they are not all going to agree. We were never all going to agree on everything that we are trying to get out of this.

The rural support plan is the completion of all those things. Rhoda Grant made a point about putting the cart before the horse, but I do not think that that is the case. I think we need to build what we want and then, once we have all that together, that becomes the rural support plan that will allow us to go forward into the future. It will be what it is, and if changes are required, we will be able to make them as we develop. Things will change—we have seen that. The war in Ukraine shows us that things can change very quickly—we know that.

We had to have flexibility but we also had to work with the industry. This is about more than just ARIOB. You will all be aware that I have had a letter from Donna Smith. She has come back to us—very late in the day—to say that she has a whole list of questions for us. I have written to her to say that we will answer those questions but also to ask her to come in and speak to me. I want us to sit down and have a conversation about her concerns so that we can try to find the solutions that will allow us to make progress, because the crofting community is as big a part of the conversation as anyone else. For example, I think that Donald MacKinnon has been a member of ARIOB from day 1. He has taken part in the policy development process.

I am trying to make the point that, although you talked about ARIOB being a clique, I promise you that it is not. It consists of a broad range of people with a wide range of views, who are all pitching in with ideas, advice and arguments about how to proceed. The rural support plan will be the document that comes out of all that scrutinising and all those discussions. We hope to have one of the best support plans available, which, as well as allowing us to achieve our objectives, will allow the farming community to continue to produce food.

I did not say that it was a mess; I said that it was messy. Let us be clear about that.

I am trying to think of the right way to phrase this. The 70:30 split is kind of where we are already. The 30 per cent is the greening element and the 70 per cent is the base payment. The decision was taken to keep within those spheres at this stage. That does not mean that they will stay that way, but that is where the split is to allow us to transition.

To answer the first question, the 2024 act will be implemented this year. We will use both acts as we introduce new legislation. If it is a legacy matter, the 2020 act will be used; if we introduce new provisions, the 2024 act will be used. That will be the process.

Everybody recognises that coming out of the EU was a fundamental shift for all of us, because we had worked with the common agricultural policy for the period of our membership and we are now working with a completely new system. That shift has had to be made in conjunction with the industry, the sectors that are affected and the Government to allow everyone to get into the position that we are now in. We are now in a fairly positive place in that we are delivering on the objectives of the policies that the Government has set and on the farming industry’s requirements. The issue is how we will work as a community to deliver the outcomes. I hope that that answers your question.

Are you talking about the provisions in our current work to transition from the legacy to the current position?

At this stage, I am going to say no. We are bringing in the policy that we currently have, but I am not ruling out the potential for changes once we start to see how it functions.

The Government will decide the way forward, but it will be based on all the information, advice and help that we are given by the industry, by non-governmental organisations and by everybody else who is part of that conversation.

EFA is the ecological—sorry, but I have lost the term myself.

EFA means ecological focus area. There are particular plants that encourage pollinators, and there are beetle banks, hedgerows and buffer zones. Amy Geddes is working on her soil by looking at what it is currently doing and what more it could do. It is brilliant stuff. Some fantastic work is already happening, like the work that Tom Bowser is doing at Argaty.

Those things that people are already doing are the kind of things that we want other people to think about as they consider whether they could adopt a similar approach and what the outcomes would be for them. The people who are in the lead and already doing that work could probably indicate what that might mean for others, but every farm is going to be different and every farmer has to take their own personal view on what will work for them. We have had conversations here before about how each farm is different because Scotland is a diverse place, and farms are also diverse within areas.

The measures will not be prescriptive. People will be able to look at what is available and decide how it will work for them and help them to achieve what we are asking them to do.

That is what we are working on right now with the development of the whole-farm plan. I know that it is difficult because everyone is busy, but we are asking people to take a wee step back and think about what that looks like for them and how they can make it work in their operation.

I fully understand that people might not want to do that because they feel that they are doing too much already and because they have always had the single farm payment, but we have made it clear from the outset that that will not be the case and that it will not be business as usual. We are going to ask people to do more.

The process that we are in now and all the discussions that we have had today are part of that process, and we are relaying those conversations to the industry so that people absolutely get the direction of travel and know that we will be asking them to start thinking about doing those things in the longer term and working out what that looks like for them.