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Daily newspaper’s former farming editor dies aged 77

VicRA former farming journalist who was renowned for his grasp of the EU’s complex Common Agricultural Policy has died aged 77.

Vic Robertson, left, was farming editor of The Scotsman during the 1970s and early 1980s and also worked for his hometown paper, Aberdeen daily The Press & Journal.

Vic, who died last month, was described in his Scotsman obituary as “an old school journalist who always delivered his copy on time to his employers.”

Writer Andrew Arbuckle noted: “Some of Vic’s best work came when he was farming editor for The Scotsman at a time European Union Common Agricultural Policies were at their most convoluted and obscure.”

“While colleagues on the press bench would scratch their heads in despair as some Brussels-based bureaucrat talked about “green pounds”, “Monetary Compensatory Allowances” and other inventions of the CAP, Vic, with a cigarette to hand, would furiously type away.

“He could, a colleague used to note enviously, “separate the wheat from the chaff”.

Vic originally trained as a chemist before being bitten by the journalistic bug and he went to work for a weekly title in the South West of Scotland to learn the trade.

After a couple of years he joined the farming desk at the Press & Journal, reporting on bull sales and agricultural shows.

In 1968 he moved south where Vic became a press officer for the National Farmers Union and did PR for a major food company.

But he headed back to Scotland after the post of agricultural editor of The Scotsman came up, remaining with the title for more than a decade.

Vic was eventually tempted back into the world of PR with the Meat and Livestock Commission in its role promoting red meat produced in the UK.

But reporting remained his first love and thereafter he worked as a freelance journalist until his retirement in 2010.

Vic was elected chairman of the British Guild of Agricultural Journalists in 1996 and after his term of office he continued to be a strong supporter of the organisation.

He leaves a son, Martin, who overcame the impact of a major road traffic accident in 1989 to go into academia, latterly as an associate professor at Edinburgh Napier University.