In May I wrote about the wettest spring I have ever experienced in over 40 years of farming.

Well, we have now had the wettest summer to follow with almost 1100mm of rain recorded at Drumbuie this year to date.

August was a dreadful month and much of our land is wetter now than it was during the infamous 1985 summer.

Store cattle have been in for nearly a month, as have cast cows and some of the calved heifers.

These are all groups that simply weren’t doing any good as grass growth stalled and the quality plummeted in July and August.

Self-evidently, you can’t finish animals on poor quality grass or silage. And you certainly can’t expect heifers calving at 23/24 months old to rear calves and reach their mature weight poaching fields looking for forage.

The majority of the rest of the suckler herds are scattered about hills, hill parks, rough fields and a few in drier fields – although I use the term ‘drier’ tentatively!

The animals which are back inside spent a grand total of 14 weeks at grass which will give you an indication of the likely cost of the winter of 2024/25!

Luckily the long-awaited ‘Indian Summer’ has arrived which has allowed a decent – and much needed – third cut of silage to be taken. It will also hopefully allow some remediation work to be done on poached fields before the winter.

Flat planing, Cambridge rolling, dung spreading and the last of the slurry spreading are all in the plans over the next week as Michael takes advantage of this welcome weather window.

Although it hasn’t felt like it, maybe we have been lucky when you look at the carnage in parts of Central/Eastern Europe in the last few days. 435mm of rain in 24 hours is biblical and the kind of deluge associated with Australian or Asian flooding, not Europe, but that is what’s happened.

Against this backdrop, it’s good to know that the Scottish Government is, as ever, ‘on the ball’ - they have cut funding for flood defence projects after the wettest summer on record in Scotland.

And if these catastrophic flooding events can occur in central Europe, why not here? But of course, a priority is only a priority in Scotland at a conference when ScotGov needs an announcement.

Unfortunately all these announcements, pledges and commitments are rarely translated into any kind of coherent public policy initiatives, or dare I say, actions, and we should know.

My views on the total lack of direction for Scottish agriculture are well documented, and of course, it’s easy to dismiss these views as the rants of an old cynic.

But it should be of huge concern to even the most fervent SNP supporter, indeed to every right-thinking individual with an interest in rural Scotland, when this despair is manifested through someone like Claire Simonetta from Mull.

I first met Claire four and a half years ago when she joined my Farmer Led Beef Group when she was neither old nor cynical.

Indeed, without her there wouldn’t have been a report later that year. Her knowledge, talent and enthusiasm were impressive and admirable in equal measure.

She agreed to join the pathetic, ineffectual ARIOB group to make a difference.

After three years of this charade her question to our Cabinet Secretary and her appalling policy officials is, ‘quo vadis?’ – where are you going?

Writing in this column two weeks ago she used words and phrases such as ‘disheartened’, ‘time that has been wasted going round in circles’, ‘too much time spent defending inaction’, ‘mass investment stagnation’ and finally, the most damning, ‘officials have dragged their heels and stifled the industry’s potential to prove itself’.

I told Claire back then that the group was no more than a fig leaf and so it has proved, but she and others were prepared to give of their time in the vain hope that someone in ScotGov might listen.

Of course, predictably that hasn’t happened and as co-chair of this irrelevant nonsense, Martin Kennedy and his ‘inner circle’ which I’m told now run NFUS are as culpable as ScotGov.

Quite why this sub-group of NFUS want to be so cosy with a failed, disgraced government I have no idea, but that’s exactly the situation.

Indeed, at a recent SAMW meeting which Martin Kennedy addressed, I hear stunned onlookers reacted with incredulity when they listened to him preaching about needing to be, ‘even closer to ScotGov’!

I’ve been criticised in the past for personal attacks on the NFUS president, but like my advice to Claire, all I can say is ‘I told you so’. I have no intention of further attacks on Martin and I wish him well in his new role, whatever that may be in early 2025!

Back in the real world, the inescapable economics of supply and demand continue to have the main influence on our futures. In a selfish way, maybe we should thank ScotGov and NFUS for being so cosy and hapless, much like DEFRA and the NFU south of the border, as they have succeeded in driving prices for beef and sheep to record, much needed, levels.

Why? Because they have displayed a lack of understanding of global food supply chains and created a policy vacuum for delivering any kind of meaningful strategy or defined goals for our industry to produce food.

Consequently, beef cattle and sheep numbers across Britain continue to fall as farmers vote with their feet, reducing numbers and causing supply to tighten.

And that isn’t going to change any time soon.