IT really was a different world back then. Privately-owned cars were a rarity. In Glasgow, which had launched its horse-drawn tram system only 21 years earlier, in August 1872, more than 3,500 Clydesdale horses were used to haul people and goods around. Within the city centre, there were no fewer than 70 byres containing dairy cows.

There was, in other words, a lot of livestock within the middle of Glasgow alone for The Scottish Farmer to write about when it was launched at its office in Hope Street in January 1893. It was a sound location, too, being next door to the Corn Exchange, where a high volume of agricultural dealings were carried out each day.

One hundred and twenty five years later, the newspaper is still with us – an “incredible” anniversary, in the words of Fergus Ewing, Cabinet secretary for the rural economy. Thought to be one of the oldest farming newspapers anywhere in the world, it has a current circulation in excess of 15,000. It is based in Glasgow, and has long been part of the Herald and Times Group, publishers of The Herald, Sunday Herald and Evening Times. And its editor – remarkably, only the sixth in all those decades – is Ken Fletcher, a 41-year veteran, who took over as editor last May, from his brother Alasdair, who had himself occupied the chair for 23 years.

Ken Fletcher says the newspaper was established in an era marked by Victorian values, austere living and a strict Presbyterian outlook, but also one in which there was a strong sense of national identity. “It came about thanks to the efforts of a few of the leading people of the time, some of whom are still well-known today. They got together and decided that the existing farming publication, something called the North British Agriculturist, the leading farming newspaper of the day, was not really the kind of thing to be selling to the people of Scotland.”

Among the people who launched the new newspaper was Campbell MacPherson Grant, a Shetland-pony enthusiast and one of the Grants who founded the Grants whisky business. Another was Patrick Hunter, from Errol, Perthshire, the chairman of the General Accident assurance company. Some of the others were involved in pedigree Clydesdale horses, a big business at that time.

“Back at the start,” says Fletcher, “it helped the newspaper that it was next door to the Corn Exchange, where a lot of the big players in the industry met every week to trade corn, and I would guess they got a lot of inside information from being so close to the market-place.”

The first print-run was 12,000. The inaugural edition had on its front page adverts for a stock sale of Aberdeen Angus cattle, staged in Perth by MacDonald, Fraser and Co. There were adverts for dairy equipment, for turnip-cutting carts, and for Kerr’s Choice Seed Potatoes, the forerunner of today’s Kerr’s Pink. And though it had not attracted a great deal of advertising, the editorial team, led by Archibald McNeilage, secretary of the Clydesdale Horse Society, managed to sell out every copy of the 20-page newcomer. Such slender advertising would be a fact of life for The Scottish Farmer for its first five years, by which point it was able to hold its own in a bitter feud with the North British Agriculturist.

In an article Fletcher has written to mark the125th anniversary, he lists several of the notable occurrences it has reported over the years. In 1895, for example, it discussed a novel nuisance to farmers: balloonists and parachutists who, it admonished, had “no respect for crops or fences”. The following year saw signs that the age of the horse was drawing to a close, when students at the Glasgow Technical College visited Edinburgh to see, at first hand, a working demonstration of a steam plough, drawn by an 11-tonne Robey 16-horsepower traction engine, on John Dobbie’s Compend Farm, at Millerhill. In 1898 the newspaper observed that there were “too many agricultural shows” – 307 in England, 180 in Scotland and 13 in Ireland – and that they “absorbed valuable time and energy that might better be spent on ordinary farming operations with more certainty of profit.” The first international sheep dog trials took place at Gullane, in East Lothian, in 1906. Six years later, three key events occurred: the advent of the Board of Agriculture for Scotland, of the Land Court (to settle disputes between landlords and tenants) and of the National Insurance Act, a forerunner of the state pension scheme.

Then, as now, The Scottish Farmer has kept an enthusiastic and knowledgeable eye on the farming industry north of the Border. “Agriculture,” Fletcher says, “is a strange beast in that you have to understand it to be able to write about it, and there aren’t very many people who have had nothing to do with agriculture who have lasted the pace. There have been some very successful people, don’t get me wrong, but it is an industry that can wear you down a little bit; it’s an industry of routine, for a start. But there’s always something happening, as it’s also quite a lively industry. There’s a wee saying to the effect that Scottish agriculture is like a village: everybody knows what everybody else is doing.”

Fittingly, Fletcher and his brother have a small farm in Renfrewshire; it grows hay to sell, and also has some sheep and cattle. While working at the nespaper he has seen it move with the times, becoming part of a multi-media environment, its website offering such things as e-edition apps to fit with its readers’ needs.

The industry has changed considerably, too. “It’s getting ever more technical,” he says. “It’s not just a case of, you have an animal that calves a calf, and you keep it then sell it. In between times there are regulations that have come into place that ensure that every animal is probably better tracked throughout its lifetime than any person in the UK. You can find out where every single farm animal is in the UK at any one time. I defy the authorities to do that with any person.”

Brexit, he adds, is the key conundrum facing the industry. “Agriculture depends heavily on subsidy payments which come out of the EU. Increasingly there has been a change of emphasis – they are not just paying you to keep livestock, they are paying you to grow crops. And as they are paying you to look after the environment, almost every subsidy payment now is tied in some way to some sort of environmental audit. That seems increasingly to be the way that [UK environment secretary] Michael Gove wants to take the UK when it comes out of Europe. But there’s a fine line between being able to look after the environment in a way that is best for everyone, and being able to produce food for everyone. The big fear for farmers is that they’ll be tied into so many adds-ons to get the subsidy payments that probably it might not even be worthwhile for them.”

A key development in the industry is automation and robotics. “Twenty years ago you’d have said they could not invent a machine that could milk a cow. Now there are between 300 and 400 farms in UK that rely solely on a robot milker to milk the cows. The technology is increasing at such a rate that who knows where we’ll be in 10 years’ time? The current rate of change is absolutely phenomenal. The next big thing will probably be using a drone to target-spray weeds in a crop. You’re only then spraying the particular part of the crop that needs to be sprayed, rather than the blanket approach which is the case at the minute.”

Machines, however, can only do so much. Soft-fruit growers – “a huge industry in Scotland” – are, Fletcher says, “really worried about the loss of labour [stemming from Britain leaving the EU], as there is no machine that can pick a raspberry or strawberry without making pulp out of it. That’s where the big worry lies in the fruit sector and the vegetable sector – to be able to harvest their crops effectively so that they can produce premium products which they can sell to such places as Aldi and Tesco.

“One of our columnists is a big fruit-grower on the east coast. He employs 250 people in the summer to pick his fruit crop, but 99 per cent of them were from abroad. And he’s looking at the edge of a cliff as far as his labour is concerned to pick his crop this year.”