A CYNIC might say, with reference to this week's call from former Tory MEP Struan Stevenson for a hard reverse from Brexit, that his 15 years on the Brussels gravy train has made him soft, and unfit to appreciate the brave new world of international export derring-do that lies ahead for entrepreneurial Scottish food producers.

But Mr Stevenson is far from a lone voice in expressing the opinion that, whether Brexit is hard or soft, for many – perhaps even the majority of Scottish farmers – it is going to hurt, and however beneficial it may turn out to be in the long run, there will be casualties along the way.

The problem is, every week now, as the great ship Brexit ploughs onwards, the various icebergs ahead drift into clearer focus, but there is yet no sign of the welcoming shores of bureaucracy-free market-driven prosperity promised by the Leave campaign – although that may be how the view looks from the other side of the Atlantic, as President Trump munches on a hormone-reared beefsteak, and contemplates just how badly our Prime Minister needs to secure a headline-grabbing trade deal.

The farmer-levy funded AHDB this week battered one of the oft-repeated arguments in favour of a hard farming Brexit – that living subsidy-free has done New Zealand farmers no harm – with a barrage of brutal statistics.

First up, it noted that NZ was already devoted to meat exports when its economy reached an inflationary crisis point in 1984, forcing it to scrap the market supports and cheap farm financing that had been put in place to establish that export economy in the first place. By contrast, the UK, with 20 times the population, and a farming sector accounting for only 0.5% of GDP, still hasn't even got an actual surplus of meat with which to challenge the export market.

AHDB also observed that the NZ currency was devalued by a whopping 55% in the run up to its farming revolution, then by a further 20% when the axe dropped. NZ lamb's subsequent attractiveness to foreign buyers didn't come for free, and the country's bankruptcy statistics of that era tell their own tale.

What Scottish farming needs now is an end to the vague political talk of opportunity and high standards, and the start of a real, grown-up discussion of how national agricultural policy might now be coupled with achievable long term trade objectives to best protect our national food security, and with it the prosperity of our farmers, who badly need a sense that somewhere in this brave ship, someone has a treasure map.