So, a lucky quarter of us are going to get just over two thirds of our support payments in December while, for the majority, our support is likely to hit the bank in January - while some poor souls will have to wait until the end of March before they get even their first morsel of cheer.

And when you consider that many of us are likely to face a cut of up to 40%off the top line - even before the seven per cent exchange rate dunt -what's likely to go into the bank more than defeats my mental arithmetic.

I guess no one is really surprised that the payments won't be arriving bang on time - but, by doing their damndest to keep our expectations high right up until they pulled the rug out from under our feet mid-week, the Scottish Government didn't do themselves a lot of favours.

If they'd said back in March that it could well be a year before we saw any of our new support cash then we'd probably be giving them a great big pat on the back for the chunk we're going to be getting. But instead most of us can only see another 10 weeks of cold turkey ahead.

You've got to ask, though, how did we come to be so deeply mired in this sort of dependency culture?

On the grain side at least, I got a bit of an indication last month when we were still busy sowing wheat.

Now, only a couple of years ago much was being made about how grain yields had stagnated in the UK and other areas of Europe - and there was much discussion as to what was responsible for this plateau in production.

I remember hearing at some grain conference or other that it was partly down to the regulatory system which we work under - but there was also a hint that we as growers weren't paying enough attention to detail.

This was a couple of years ago and I remember one brave soul in the audience did actually ask why we would want to produce more, given that we were getting fairly reasonable prices at the time, however no one really picked him up on that point.

I guess we all believed - the speakers included - that we had moved into a new era of grain prices and that there would be no going back to the sub-£100 a tonne prices which we had waved goodbye to during the years of the American mid-west droughts.

Roll forward to today and, lo and behold we're hearing predictions of record grain yields for the second year in a row. True, in some way which defied all expectations, the weather might have played a key role in achieving these increases - but it certainly looks like we've struggled our way up the mountain on the other side of the yield plateau.

Sadly though, the view from atop this new peak isn't a particularly cheery one - with depressed prices all round and the certainty that, without some drastic weather event someplace in the world, they're going to be depressed for the foreseeable future.

But the obvious message here has been slow to sink in. Last month I was trying to get a word on the phone with a grain economist who had been speaking at a conference I'd missed when, as mentioned above, I was busy sowing wheat.

I guess in common with everyone else who enjoys the patchy nature of rural mobile coverage, I find that it usually pays to carry out such conversations on the landline in the farm kitchen or office. But the usual round of me being in when he was out and vice versa led to the chap eventually getting hold of me on the mobile as I was drilling wheat.

Nearing the end of the field I asked him if he could hold on for a few seconds, while explaining that I was busy sowing wheat, and adding in a jokey sort of way "unless you don't think that's a good idea".

There was a wee pregnant pause on the other end of the 'phone and then:

"Well, no it probably isn't - and it certainly isn't if you're on marginal ground," came the reply as the driller's power harrow attempted to clatter yet another stone out the side of the somewhat claggy field.

The subsequent end-rig conversation revolved around just how good farmers are at responding to higher grain prices - but just how bad we are at responding to low ones.

While it takes little in the way of imagination to stuff extra grain in when it looks like the price is on the up - and that goes for farmers around the globe, not just in our own neck of the woods - it only takes the blink of an eye for the elementary laws of supply and demand to catch up with this approach.

But, of course, once we're tied into producing more, even if the price and the margins drop, in our short-sighted way all we can think to do is to produce even more in a blind attempt to keep some income coming in.

And we carry right on doing this, even when it's extremely obvious that we're falling well short of covering the costs of growing the stuff - and so we get into a sort of "last man standing" belt-tightening exercise until enough people have fallen out to let the price go up again.

True, the world population is expanding - and at an alarming rate. But if the past couple of years have shown anything then it's that, given a little help from mother nature around the globe, we still seem to have the capacity to increase production fast enough to outstrip demand.