As the so often happens after a prolonged dry spell, once the rain finally comes it sometimes forgets how to stop.

This is our position in Western Ukraine now with intense rainstorms and some large damaging hail interspersed with hot humid ‘blighty’ weather.

That means blight pressure on our potatoes is very high and now active in susceptible varieties demanded by the market. A few of ‘Dr Dawson’s special blight cocktails’ are being used to halt it in its tracks!

We have almost finished our oilseed rape harvest now and despite some fields sustaining significant hail losses, we have had our best ever average yields of rape across more than 10,000ha.

But, as so often in farming – as in sport – it is a case of what might have been, with a significant cohort of fields well over the 4t/ha for the first time, but some crop lost to hail storms. Prices continue to rise on the back of drought, as predicted and the lost pods have proved to be precious.

Our biggest concern now is for wheat, with many fields now at or near field capacity after consistent rain for the last three weeks. Whilst Scottish growers are combining at moisture contents unheard of since 1984, we have swapped our usual harvest weather for a more Caledonian form.

Whilst these hot and humid conditions are ideal for potato blight, they are also a perfect storm for our other fungal nemesis, fusarium, on the heads of our wheat. Here, mycotoxins are a significant concern and our collaboration in an EU-wide fusarium project based in Vienna, but with partners as far away as Shanghai and Belfast, is highly appropriate.

Worldwide, this disease causes huge losses, not just in wheat but also in maize. Severe droughts in Serbia, in 2013, resulted in 70% of the maize crops being contaminated with aflatoxins and the use of this maize to feed dairy cattle led to the high levels of aflatoxin M1 found in milk, up to twice the EU legal limit.

Globally, every year there are several billion € losses to cereals and other crops through fungal infection, which cause harm to human health from mycotoxins produced by these fungal moulds. It is also a serious problem in China, hence the Shanghai involvement.

With downgrading of wheat harvest predictions throughout Europe and also in Australia, due to drought, the shortfall will not be helped if fusarium, or thin grains renders further grain unsaleable.

A further consequence of wet, warm weather is grain sprouting and pre-germination which has a significant impact on both our breadmaking quality and home-saved seed germination standards. Here, particular attention will need to be paid to next year’s seed quality and our investment in a new seed treating plant could not be more timely.

Late last week, the Ukrainian government issued warnings of limits and controls for breadmaking wheat due to drought lowering yield forecasts. Initially indicating a more stringent ban akin to 2010, this was later clarified to a less stringent regime but it made international wheat markets jumpy.

The export ban in 2010 caused food price spikes and led to the mayhem of the ‘Arab Spring’ and EU migration pressures.

Whilst ripened crops are at risk from the current weather, our root crops are loving it, albeit with the increased threat of cercospera in beet and blight in the tatties. I visited some beet that had been badly hit a month ago by hailstones the size of marrowfat peas which shredded the leaves like a 12-bore.

Looking at them last week, you would hardly know they had faced such an existential threat, with fresh bright green leaves capturing the sun’s photons in fine style.

On a recent visit to Sweden, I was staggered by the drought there, with raging forest fires, dried up marshes and dwarfed oats. The dwarfing effect of the drought, releasing the same active as Terpal into the oats’ metabolism, was severe.

Normally, Swedish oat crops are tall, luxuriant and at risk from lodging. These crops in mid-Sweden were the shortest I have ever seen, as the natural ethylene dwarfed the crops. Whatever the season brings next we know that they aren’t making average years anymore!Maybe they never did?

We are able to combat these weather related difficulties more readily with new technology and techniques.This is particularly critical in high value crops.

Potato growers had a unique opportunity to see new technologies on show at the largest field based potato demonstration in the UK, this week, at the James Hutton Institute with funding help from AHDB and SSCR. As usual it also provided a great forum for the whole industry to discuss the issues of the day in what continues to be a challenging season for potato growers.

There is a great temptation for some to try to lay these seasonal weather changes down to man-made climate change, which would be a false correlation and causation. What is true is that, despite the drought in two major grain growing areas of the world, this will likely still be the fourth or fifth largest global grain harvest ever!

That’s a testament to the resilience and pragmatism of the farming community. It is also a great testament to the proven positive yield effects of increased atmospheric CO2.

As I have noted for a number of years in this column, farming – particularly the livestock sector – is coming under increasing legislative pressure on greenhouse gas emissions. This pressure is more intense in Scotland than south of the Border at the moment.

This comes despite recent reductions in global satellite temperature measurements, which are at odds with some ‘climate models’. It’s not long ago that climate alarmists were predicting a run of damp cold summers for the UK, but obviously 2018 is not one of them!

Nevertheless, it is important not to confuse annual weather events with climate, which needs to be measured over several decades. Just like Brexit, according to a recent C4 interview with Jacob Rees-Mogg, where he claimed it would take up to 50 years to see the benefit. An example of handwashing of which Pilate would have been proud!

Interestingly, Mogg’s investment management group, which he co-founded and is a leading partner in, has just opened up offices in Dublin. This is in order to offer clients an avoidance of the problems, including ‘Irish domiciled access to EU markets’ caused in the event of a hard Brexit, as the Mogg founded group states in its prospectus.

Highly convivial for his clients but rather less so for UK farming and other businesses in the event of a hard, or the increasing possibility of a ‘No-deal Brexit’ after Barnier rejected the Chequers Agreement. In a ‘No Deal’ scenario agricultural and other exports would simply grind to a halt as former non-EU bilateral trade agreements have long since lapsed.

Recent failed global discussions on EU meat import quota allocation highlighted that Brexit is more than just an EU-UK issue to agree upon. No wonder Davis resigned.

What is often forgotten and needs to be championed harder by the industry is the massive role it plays in global carbon capture. More so since the advent of minimum tillage and GM crops.

Recent information shows that as well as Trump’s campaign and that of Brexit funding, NGO anti-GMO campaigns also benefitted from a Russian financial influence, in order to damage US agricultural interests.

The European Court of Justice decision on Crispr technology (gene editing) is another luddite step. That’s particularly interesting in light of the new EU-US soya bean deal, the vast majority of which is, of course, GM – such hypocrisy by the EU.

There is, of course, a very easy solution to these emissions and GM ‘problems’ ... we should just stop eating!

That the relatively small shortfall from last year’s record harvest, helped by CO2 emissions, has had such a large effect on grain prices, shows that the balance between global supply and demand is tighter than some grain buyers would have us farmers believe – which we can only hope translates into firmer prices.