IT'S hard to believe that it is mid-December with the kind of weather we are having as it has been amazingly mild and some days extraordinarily wet as the dreadful pictures on the news, particularly of Cumbria and Lancashire last week so vividly captured.

The misery of householders and businesses will no doubt have been mirrored by hundreds of farmers who will have lost stock, crops, fences and equipment in the wake of storm Desmond.

Our fields near the Nith looked like lochs and those are the driest ones!

Outwintered cattle have been totally miserable for days, so much so that we brought some of them in to shelter at Drumbuie to give them a dry bed for the first time in six weeks.

I'm not really sure how tupping will have gone in the midst of this constant deluge. Although there has been plenty of grass in the fields, they are absolutely sodden. Any repeats amongst the ewes certainly didn't need a crayon to mark them they were filthy to the shoulders.

How all this will impact on conception rates or lambing percentages I have no idea, but I can't imagine it will be positive. Again, it's further uncertainty in the sheep sector, which pretty much sums up the 2015 season. Prime lamb prices continue to track about 15% lower than 2014 and show no real sign of improving.

The ongoing problems in the UK multiple retail sector, coupled with a weak euro, refuse to go away and I guess until these big issues are resolved the job won't really improve, at least that's what we are constantly being told.

I wonder how long this can go on though.

When the returns become so poor that there isn't a living in the job any more, something has to give and we are surely getting close to that now. Some in the dairy sector are already there and there appears to be no respite in sight.

But what will actually happen in reality? Steel producers close mills; oil producers shut down oil wells (in fact entire oilfields); factories close; businesses close, it happens all the time and especially at the moment with commodity prices across almost every industry through the floor.

I would love to predict that 2016 will be a better year than 2015 for farming, but I really can't see how - unless, of course, as Harold MacMillan famously said when asked what was most likely to blow governments off course he replied 'events dear boy, events'.

Oil has lost 20% of its value in the last two weeks and is now under $40/barrel - as low as it was at the time of the global financial crash in 2008. This will lead to further massive job losses in the North Sea and in most oil producing oil countries around the world.

Prices for precious and base metals like gold, silver, platinum, aluminium, nickel, copper, lead, tin, zinc (the list is endless) are disastrous, with global mining giants in real trouble paying off hundreds of thousands of employees around the world. For example, nickel was worth $24/per lb a year ago and this week it is worth $4/per lb!!

Many agricultural commodity prices (as we know to our cost) are also on the floor. The most spectacular of these, I guess, being some dairy products.

So, the macro picture we are trading in is awful and many face the most difficult challenges we have witnessed since 2008. It may even be worse, because in 2008 most businesses had some reserves 'tucked away under the bed', but they are long gone.

Nearer home (although I'm fed up mentioning it), I was absolutely stunned and appalled to receive a letter from the chief agricultural officer in the Scottish Government, David Barnes, last week, about our long awaited BPS payment.

When I opened the mail I thought here we go at least some concrete information about the quantum or timing of the payments. For the first time, some real facts amongst the constant drivel and smoke and mirrors this scheme has come to represent.

But no, it was a letter telling me absolutely nothing, which I'm sure you all enjoyed reading as well. Basically, he has no idea of when or how much we can expect but in a letter probably costing a six-figure sum to send out trying to justify serial incompetence yet again. If you've nothing to say, why not say nothing instead of wasting our time and taxpayers' money.

Would Richard Lochhead not have been better sending us all gift vouchers for £20 each instead of that rubbish? At least that way we could have bought a bottle of something and forgot the mess he has put us in.

The worst thing about it, is that it outlines perfectly - if we didn't know already - that both he and his officials are totally oblivious to the situation our industry is in and the global threat that exists which will make recovery a long slow process. It is quite extraordinary and displays a level of arrogance amongst officials and incompetence from a minister that you would find hard to match.

We really are into Margaret Beckett territory!

Meanwhile, the SNP's environment and rural affairs spokesman in Westminster, a guy called Calum Kerr, told MPs the other day that climate change could put Scotland's 'very nationhood at threat'. He told MPs that haggis contains sheep lungs and, with rising temperatures, more lungs would be discarded due to lungworm infections.

So the climate change deal from Paris would be good news for Scotland's sheep farmers and our national dish on Burns night! Mr Kerr might like to know that, whatever the temperature, to get lungs from sheep you need sheep in the first place and the way his colleagues that run agriculture in Scotland are going who knows how many sheep will actually be around in a couple of years never mind global warming.

He may have been trying to be funny, but I, for one, have a serious sense of humour failure at the moment when it comes to politicians and their handling of our industry.

Anyway back to global 'events'. The scale of the problems on global commodity markets is such that there is no doubt that something has to give. There is no way that oil and mining commodity prices can remain at their present level (or lower as many predict) for the whole of 2016 without some major world event taking place.

A country bankrupt (or several, actually), serious civil unrest, or war as livelihoods in these producing nations are decimated, mean something will change - and it won't be pretty. That or some major weather events even more dramatic than the destruction we have seen recently on our shores which will reduce production of some commodity or other and they will need us again believe me.

But, against a backdrop of a climate we can't control, despite all the hot air produced in Paris last week, and a major global crisis in commodity prices, I guess for the moment we are in the lap of the Gods.

So, head down, batten down the hatches and hang on for dear life is my advice for 2016. But above all, with all the turmoil in the world, stay safe.