I WAS going to say that it's not often that the farming community could have given some advice to the Prime Minister - but I guess there's likely to be a lot of people out there who would argue that the world might be a better place if we could do this on a daily basis.

But we could definitely have tipped him off that if he wanted to get some sort of agreement on his plans for a radical reform of the EU before the end of 2017 when he has promised to hold a referendum on Britain's EU membership, then he should have started the process quite some time ago.

As it stands he found out last week that there will be no guarantee that the EU's other 27 member states will have ratified his proposed reforms by the time of the vote - most likely to be taken when the UK holds the presidency in the second half of 2017.

So the EU hokey cokey referendum will, as is traditional, see the in/out bit taking place before the shake it all about bit - rather than the other way round.

Setting himself a deadline which was little more than a couple of short years away would certainly have been recognised as a ridiculously optimistic target by most folk in the farming world, given that he wanted to have completed the promised re-negotiation of the terms of Britain's membership before the referendum took place.

If it took what felt like a couple of centuries (although I'm told it was actually only about four years) to reach some sort of agreement on the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy, it was never going to be an overnight job to reach agreement on a fundamental reform of the underlying principles of the European Union, now was it?

But, with the minds of Europe's leaders focused on other issues, Cameron's announcement at last week's EU summit meeting and his canvassing on the moves required to prevent a "Brexit" were dismissed by some as little more than a commercial break during the proceedings which concentrated on the immigration crisis, terrorism and the ramification of the on-going Greek debt disaster.

This doesn't bode too well for farming - especially as, during a brief visit to the Royal Highland show, Defra Secretary of State, Liz Truss, maintained point-blank that these very reforms which David Cameron was going to secure amounted to the magic wand which would ensure that the UK electorate would vote wholeheartedly to stay within Europe.

Now her total rejection of any other scenario wasn't just the usual show of a politician body-swerving an awkward issue - she had the same question put to her five times but each time she just flatly refused to accept that there was any need to even consider a "plan B" for farming in case Britain voted for "out".

But now that Cameron's magic bullet looks like it has been fired too late to hit the target before the referendum, we should at least be asking ourselves what life would be like outside the EU.

With the UK Government having made its opposition to farm support pretty plain over the years then I guess we could wave bye-bye to anything like the CAP.

Good riddance to that you might say and you might point the finger towards New Zealand where the dropping of farm support led to a massive improvement in efficiency and production levels.

But the shock waves took some time to settle - and it took years to get the New Zealand industry back on track - plus we're in a slightly different position and although we'd all love production to cover our costs we're pretty much trapped in a market where that's not likely to happen any day soon.

Scotland's rural affairs secretary, Richard Lochhead might have sounded a bit Star Warsy when he spoke about EU membership being our only shield against swinging cuts proposed by Whitehall, but his claim that alarm bells should be ringing in every farm and croft in Scotland weren't too wide of the mark.

I guess one thing that would tempt some of us to go for quitting the EU might be getting rid of the endless red tape produced by Brussels which stops and hinders us from getting on with the job we want to do.

But, while it's a nice thought, being perched on the edge of Europe, if we wanted to continue to trade with them we'd still need to jump through all the same hoops - whilst not having even the remotest chance of influencing how these policies were developed.

And Norway, which is in that sort of position, said recently that it has no option but to implement more than 10,000 EU legal acts to sell into its major market - however it is has no involvement in EU negotiations about those rules.

Even if we did manage to maintain actual trade with Europe we could still be faced with what has been called the "worst of all worlds' - where we still compete against EU imports, but where our EU competitors are still getting considerable subsidies and farm support.

However, it's interesting to see just how little politicians seem to learn from previous experience - especially as the lack of "plan B" was constantly used to prod those wanting independence from the UK during last year's Scottish referendum.

During the independence debate, most Scottish farmers certainly seemed to make their opinion that continued EU membership was a crucial to their business interests abundantly clear.

But of course it wasn't only farmers who were fervent flag-wavers for EU membership during the independence debate - and it's already been indicated that a vote to leave would represent a line in the sand as far as Scotland's relationship with the rest of the UK is concerned.

So, unlike the song, it's not as simple as saying in/out, in/out that's what it's all about.