The Crofter Magazine
The Crofter Magazine, known to its readers as The Crofter, is the magazine of the Scottish Crofting Federation, the organisation that represents crofting communities across the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Listed in this directory from Broadford, on the Isle of Skye, it belongs not to the commercial magazine market but to a different and older British tradition: the membership journal. Its readers are, in the main, the members of the federation itself, and its purpose is practical as much as editorial. It carries useful resources and information for people who hold, work or hope to enter a croft, and it connects a scattered readership of small-scale landholders, food producers and rural households who may live many miles from their nearest neighbour, let alone from the federation's staff.
That function matters because crofting is not simply a job title. It is a distinctive system of landholding, a way of life and, for many of the communities where it survives, a cultural inheritance. A magazine that serves crofters therefore has to speak about policy, land, livestock, food, housing, environment and community in the same breath, because in crofting life those subjects are not separate.
The publisher: the Scottish Crofting Federation
The Scottish Crofting Federation describes its mission as safeguarding and promoting the rights, livelihoods and culture of crofters and their communities. It is a charity, established and run by crofters, and it presents itself as the only organisation lobbying exclusively for the interests of crofters. It also describes its membership in another striking way, as the largest association of small-scale food producers in the United Kingdom, a reminder that thousands of individual crofts, each small in itself, add up to a significant part of Scotland's food-producing landscape.
The federation engages with agencies and government at local, national and international level to influence policy on rural issues. The subjects named in that work include sustaining rural populations, food production and environmental protection. Alongside campaigning, it provides a network of support to established, new and aspiring crofters through training, mentoring and the sharing of experience. The magazine sits inside that mixture of representation and support. It is one of the channels through which a member-led organisation talks to its own members, reports what it is doing on their behalf and passes on information they can use.
The federation has not always carried its present name. It was formerly the Scottish Crofting Foundation, and before that the Scottish Crofters Union. That earlier union was formed in November 1985, an event later accounts describe as the culmination of long-standing efforts by the crofting community to create a representative organisation embracing the crofting counties. The present federation, and its magazine with it, therefore stands in a line of organised crofter representation that reaches back through that 1985 relaunch to the land campaigns of the nineteenth century.
What crofting is
To understand the magazine, a reader outside Scotland may first need to understand the croft. A croft is a relatively small agricultural landholding, averaging about five hectares, often with a share in a common grazing. Crofts associated with a particular common grazing are usually clustered together in settlements known in crofting communities as townships. A croft is not, as is sometimes assumed, simply a cottage. It is the landholding itself, which may or may not have buildings or a house associated with it, and the crofter is its tenant or, increasingly in some cases, its owner-occupier.
According to figures published by the Crofting Commission, there are around 21,000 crofts, covering more than 750,000 hectares of land, with about 30,000 people living in crofting households. Most crofts are rented, with a smaller proportion owned. Crofting is a system of landholding unique to the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, and it has been governed by its own legislation since 1886, regulated in its modern form by the Crofting Commission, which is based in Inverness. Those bald facts explain the tone a crofters' magazine must strike. Land law, tenancy, succession, residency and land use are not abstract topics for its readers; they are the legal framework of home and livelihood.
The historical background
The legislation of 1886 did not arrive by accident. Through the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century, during the period known as the Highland Clearances, many Highland communities were moved from inland glens to small, often marginal coastal plots, where families were expected to support themselves from poor soil alongside other work such as fishing. For decades crofters had little legal security. In the 1880s, resistance on Skye and elsewhere, associated with the Highland Land League and a campaign of rent strikes, pressed the issue at Westminster. The Crofters' Holdings (Scotland) Act of 1886 gave crofting families security of tenure, fair rents and the right to pass a tenancy on through generations, and it remains foundational to crofting law.
Later legislation consolidated and refined the system, notably in the Crofters (Scotland) Act 1993, and since 1976 crofters have had the right to buy their croft outright. This history is part of the living context of The Crofter. A membership magazine for crofters is read by people for whom questions of who may hold land, on what terms, and whether young people can obtain a croft at all, carry historical weight as well as present-day practical importance. When the federation campaigns on modernising crofting law, on croft house grants and loans, or on making publicly owned land available to new entrants, as it was doing in the period when Russell Smith succeeded Fiona Mandeville as chair, it is continuing arguments that are well over a century old.
A benefit of membership
The Crofter is listed by the federation among the benefits of membership, alongside monthly e-newsletters, a members' support service, training opportunities, events, access to a network of contacts and assistance for those wanting to enter crofting. Members could also receive a free initial consultation with selected solicitors and a discount on crofting-related work, help to promote a croft tourism business on the federation website and the opportunity to market produce under the Scottish Crofting Produce label. In that list, the magazine's role becomes clear. It is not a stand-alone commercial product competing on a newsagent's shelf. It is part of a package of representation, advice and identity that membership buys.
The federation's own administrative descriptions underline the physical reality of that role. Organising the distribution of The Crofter, described as the federation's membership journal, appears among the duties attached to its membership support work, alongside maintaining the membership database, producing the monthly e-newsletter and maintaining a register of vacant crofts for distribution to members. For a readership spread across the Highlands, the islands and beyond, getting a printed journal out is a logistical act of community maintenance in itself. Young crofter members and overseas members receive a digital edition, a practical adaptation for readers for whom post to remote addresses, or to another country altogether, is not the simplest route.
Policy, land use and agriculture
The editorial territory set out for the magazine covers crofting policy, land use, agriculture and crofting community life. Policy coverage in this context has a very specific meaning. It includes the federation's engagement with Scottish and United Kingdom government, the working of crofting legislation and regulation, and the support schemes on which small producers depend. The federation's published priorities over the years give a sense of the agenda such a magazine must track: the modernisation of crofting law, croft house support, new-entrant schemes, woodland crofts and a national development plan for crofting.
Land use and agriculture bring the focus back to the holding itself. Crofting's extensive land management methods have created and preserved habitats for species now rare elsewhere in the United Kingdom, and much of the country's High Nature Value farming is found in the crofting areas. Continuing crofting land use is recognised as having an important role in maintaining and increasing biodiversity. At the same time, crofting provides sustainable livelihoods, local produce and a secure homestead in some of the remotest and most fragile rural communities in western Europe. A magazine for crofters therefore moves naturally between the practicalities of working marginal land and the larger environmental value now attributed to that work.
The federation has also taken public positions that illustrate the breadth of its remit, including opposition to Highly Protected Marine Areas on the grounds of their impact on crofting communities, and involvement in efforts to encourage the United Kingdom government to recognise crofters as an indigenous people of Scotland. Whether a reader agrees with a particular position or not, these are the kinds of questions a crofting journal exists to air for its own community.
The Scottish Crofting Produce mark
One concrete scheme that connects the federation, its members and the wider public is the Scottish Crofting Produce mark, introduced in 2008. The mark identifies products produced by a croft, or a similar small agri-business, located in the Highlands or the Islands of Scotland. Only businesses that qualify and are members of the federation may place the mark on their products, and the federation has stated its intention to support standards of quality, cleanliness and traceability, as well as ensuring that animals are healthy and reasonably treated.
For the magazine, such a scheme is natural editorial material and natural member information at the same time. It raises practical questions for producers about eligibility and standards, and a larger question for crofting as a whole: how small producers on marginal land present the value of what they make to consumers who may know little about crofting. The federation's answers have emphasised that joining voices together helps highlight what crofting accomplishes, and that each croft has its own story and produce to show. A membership journal is one of the places where that collective voice is formed.
Community and culture
Crofting has sustained rural communities in areas where population is fragile and services are distant. Its benefits to a local community extend beyond the produce sold from a holding. Small-scale systems of the kind practised by crofters offer an alternative model to industrial agriculture, keeping people, skills and cultural heritage in places that might otherwise empty. The federation explicitly links its work to safeguarding crofting's cultural heritage as well as its livelihoods, and it supports its community through training, mentoring and the sharing of experience between established, new and aspiring crofters.
That sharing of experience is, in journal form, the essence of The Crofter. In a dispersed community, a magazine can do what a township's common grazing once did in a different register: bring individual households into a shared conversation. Readers can learn how another crofter has approached a problem, follow a campaign that affects all crofts, or simply see their own way of life taken seriously in print. The interview record of the federation's own volunteers captures that ethos. Fiona Mandeville, who chaired the federation and also edited its periodical, described an organisation run largely by volunteers and funded mainly by membership subscriptions and project grants. The magazine, in other words, has been produced from inside the community it serves, not imposed on it from outside.
Place in Scottish rural publishing
Scotland has a long tradition of organisational journals serving defined rural communities, from farming unions to breed societies. The Crofter belongs to that tradition, but its community is defined by a legal and cultural system found nowhere else in Britain. That gives the magazine a distinctiveness that a general farming title cannot replicate. Its subject is not agriculture in general but a particular tenure, a particular landscape and a particular set of communities in the Highlands and Islands.
From its Broadford listing in this directory to the federation's work across all the crofting counties, the magazine's geography is part of its meaning. It speaks for townships in Skye, the Hebrides, Sutherland, Caithness, Argyll, Orkney and Shetland, and for crofters who have moved further afield and receive it digitally. In doing so, it helps hold together a federation whose members share a legal status and a history, even where the sea separates their homes by many miles.
Why the magazine matters
The importance of The Crofter is best measured not in newsstand sales, which are not its model, but in function. It is a membership journal for the only organisation dedicated solely to representing crofters, in a sector where law, land and community are inseparable. It supports the federation's wider offer of representation, training, advice and networking, and it gives crofters a regular, shared source of useful resources and information.
For readers outside crofting, the magazine also offers a window onto a part of Scottish life that is often picturesque in other people's imaginations and demanding in reality. Behind the townships and common grazings lie questions of succession, new entrants, housing, biodiversity, food production and the survival of remote communities. The Crofter exists to address those questions for the people who live them, in the Highlands and Islands and wherever its members now read it.
