Andrew Arbuckle: Bills and snow are quick to arrive and slow to clear up

Satirist Jonathan Swift, a man with a fertile imagination, once wrote about the inhabitants of two adjoining countries who were differentiated by the way they broke open their boiled eggs.

The residents of one country ate their boiled eggs by cracking open the big end, while their neighbours preferred their egg the other way around.

Up until quite recently, there was a method that could have similarly divided the farming population - that being their approach to opening their mail.

Some used to open the letters that were obviously bills and keep the ones that were likely to contain cheques or other bits of good news till last.

Others tended to get to the good news first. In this division, the third category of the junk mail always fell straight into the recycling bin.

Personally, I used to be a bit of "keep the good news till last person", but I did have spells when the bills were best left unopened.

However, now the game has been diminished by the modern importance of payments going electronically into bank accounts leaving the recipient to remember the various passwords before checking to see if the cash has come through.

I raise the issue just now because while cash flows in farming have always been vitally important, with many specialised units having just one "harvest per year" or one period of the year when income was shown on the books.

With the horrendous weather of the past three months, many carefully constructed cashflows were blown off course.

I am sure that the next set of figures showing bank borrowing by the farming industry will produce a new peak and that is without adding in trade debt, with supply merchants finding it harder to get payments.

Add to this the fact that the attitude taken by banks to anyone going over the agreed financial line has changed dramatically.

It used to be a chat in the local banker's office, and even if it seemed you were seated on a chair with a shoogly leg and the spotlight pointed directly into your eyes it was at least face-to-face.

But now in the world of faceless bankers, anyone over the limit often just receives notice that a severe financial penalty has been imposed and a written threat relating to future borrowing ability.

Despite their profession's own failings in recent times, bankers have little sympathy with an account that has gone beyond agreed limits.

During the worst of the winter weather, when livestock farmers were having to buy more feed and forage supplies and every rural dweller started to face the surge in fuel prices, the news that the government was trying to advance Less Favoured Area Support Scheme (LFASS) payments was very welcome.

As one hill farmer mentioned to me at the time: "The bills are coming in faster than the snow. There's a fair drift of them on the desk."

The cabinet secretary did qualify his announcement by pointing out that the advance in LFASS payments all depended on farm inspections being carried out prior to payment and this would be no easy task given the weather and the areas where the inspections were required.

Now it transpires that more than a quarter of those farming in LFASS areas are still waiting for this cash.

The Scottish Government announced late last week that it was "using all available resources" to deal with the situation. It also promised that 90 per cent of payments would be in farmers' hands by the last Friday in March.

This is not only important to farmers waiting for the payments, it is also important to a government about to enter an election period. I have no doubt there were a few straight comments from the cabinet secretary to his civil servants on the issue.

But perhaps the better idea is the one put forward by NFU Scotland: new president Nigel Miller suggested that in future the EU should waive the necessity for full on-farm inspections if there has been a severe spell of weather and that part payments should be allowed until such time as inspectors can access farms.

It seems far too sensible to be permitted, but then those making such a decision are not waiting for a cheque either in the post or down the electronic channels.