Farmer's Diary Every farmer from the Western Isles to eastern Siberia is ploughing up another parkie. With the prices of grain having doubled in a year, you can't afford to be growing setaside or grass for livestock that just loses money.

The boys are getting excited. Optimism is rising. Wise men are saying that with the living standards shooting up, especially in India, China and Russia, the time is coming, at last, when British farmers will be able to make money out of producing food.

Naïve people are starting to believe them.

The Farmer is not naïve. Certainly, the rise in grain prices has been a boost for those who grow a lot of grain. The difference between £70 a tonne and £160 a tonne is the difference between a niggling loss and a good profit for all but the worst farmers.

However, the market doesn't work like that. Almost nobody got the top prices you read about. The Red Rooster got close, selling wheat at £165 but he didn't sell it all at that.

And at least one of the country's top growers is said to have sold his entire crop early on at £80.

It looked a good price in June but it looks like a disaster in January.

The other downside of the rising price of grain is that by far the majority of grain sold by Scottish farmers is bought by other Scottish farmers. The grain growers sell mostly to livestock farmers who feed it to hens, pigs and cows.

Mossie put me right on that when I tried to congratulate him on the fortune he had made off his 600 acres of cereals last year.

"It's nae use tae me," he said tetchily. "I'm just gaun tae lose anither fortune feeding the lot to pigs."

His pigs are losing £20 each at the moment. In fact, meat producers of all kinds are in trouble, and the trouble will get much worse if the price of grain stays high.

A shortage of British beef is looming.

Meanwhile, we had another virgin birth on the 27th. Either that or Noel was two months premature.

Potions was astonished when he went out in the morning and saw this little black Simmental bull calf, licked clean, bright eyed, hot nosed and eager, sitting up in the straw.

When I was making the decisions at Little Ardo and paying the interest on the overdraft, it would have been no surprise. My fences were always a bit suspect. Sometimes they could keep cows and bulls apart but it was common enough for a bull to jump a fence, and eager young heifers were always doing it and paying the price of a night out with the boys.

But Potions' fences are secure prisons. And the bulls were not let out of their pens until April.

Noel's mother wasn't the sort a bull would jump a dyke for anyway. She is an old dairy nurse cow who had wisely got herself pregnant and so survived the cull when her two foster calves were weaned.

She is definitely mutton dressed as an auld ewe.

And there is only one neighbouring bull nowadays. That's Hairy Sandy's Aberdeen Angus and he's sore made to get his leg over a bump in the road let alone Potions' fences.

Hairy Sandy is a very jolly chap with plenty to be jolly about. He is something quite big in the oil, but his wife, Lorna, is definitely his Breadwinner. She's a rig superintendent and earns as much as a small country. She tells me they are even making money from livestock.

She'll sell you an ordinary female alpaca for £2000 and a good one for £5000.

But not even Sandy can have all the luck. About the New Year he was caught short in Docklands, the field he has sown with docks to qualify for some daft government subsidy. There is no paper in Docklands, of course, so, as one does, he reached out behind him for a handful of vegetation. That should have been fine but as he said in his delightful Shetland brogue, "Mi hend must have been stronger dan me erse for it was a hendful of nettles dat I got".

There but for the grace of God ...

Email noel@charlieallan.com