Scottish farmers count the cost of Storm Babet floods

Farmers in parts of Scotland hit by devastating floods during Storm Babet say they are starting to count the cost of the damage.

Angus and Aberdeenshire were badly hit during the extreme weather from Thursday to Saturday.

NFU Scotland said crops had been destroyed and the industry was trying to assess the full extent of losses.

One farmer told BBC Scotland News how he had to rescue sheep in the early hours of the morning.

Neil MacLeod is the farm manager at Southesk Farms in Angus.

He said: "It started for me about three o'clock in the morning when I had a phone call alerting me to the fact that a small number of sheep in a field were up to their shoulders in water.

"When I went in to get the sheep I would have been up to my waist at that point.

"The river burst its banks, part of the estate here was flooded by half past four. Everything was water basically. It's a mess."

He continued: "We have crops under water, it's October so for the last eight weeks we have been sowing our autumn crops, there's still potatoes to be lifted.

"We will have to start again with some I'm sure. The finances don't stack up when you have to do it all again, that's for sure.

"But we learned from what happened last November, that we needed to change what we were storing. So we didn't have very much grain, we had moved seed, moved fertiliser.

"There will be a lot of time and labour required to put right some of what has been damaged."

He added: "It happened in 2015 and we were told then it was a one-in-200-year event, it happened last year, and this I would say is the worst damage we've had in terms of the ferociousness of the water speed.

"You can't prevent this, it's just learning from it.

"There might have to be an acceptance that some of these areas we can't farm any longer."

The RSABI farming charity (originally founded as the Royal Scottish Agricultural Benevolent Institution) said it had a £100,000 Flooding Crisis Fund aimed at helping Scottish farming and crofting families who have been seriously affected by flooding.

Payments of up to £1,000 per business are available.

Andrew Connon is vice president of NFU Scotland, and also runs a farm near Ellon in Aberdeenshire.

"South Aberdeenshire and down into Angus have been the most badly affected," he said.

"Huge losses of crops, flood embankments washed away, potato stores flooded. We hear of farmers with their potato stores having 4ft (1.2m) of water in them.

"Crops sown for next year's harvest, a lot of them have been destroyed too. We've heard of sheep washed away."

He said the industry was trying to assess just how bad the impact was.

"We need to call on government and retailers to try and help out with this somewhere along the line," Mr Connon explained.

"To try and recover from this financially as well as the mental health impact for farmers and growers is huge."