Well, with the catchy weather, the apparent lack of lorries, dithering amongst buyers over the fate of over contract barley and this year’s yields, I don’t suppose we’re alone in having grain stowed away in almost every available watertight (hopefully!) corner.

So, I suppose in a week which saw little in the way of decent harvest weather and continued machinations on the political front, there was at least a small whiff of good news in the fact that SQC has granted us all a derogation to use our temporary grain stores for an additional month, taking us up to the end of November.

I guess the cattle will be hoping their courts won’t be piled high with grain for that length of time – and I suspect that the dogs would like to be back in their kennels by then as well?

To be fair, though, while there is always a feeling that you seem to be stuck in a queue as long as the line of lorries parked up outside the malting for an early morning delivery when it comes to getting grain away, we did actually get a lot moved early on with pretty much all our contract malting barley lifted by the end of August.

While the temptation to blame traders and grain merchants for screwing the price down at harvest is equally as strong, the industry’s collective desperation to get grain off the farm at this time of year probably isn’t the sort of marketing strategy which does much to help maintain the price.

Storage, of course, doesn’t come cheap – and while anyone with surplus shed space might score this year, the incentives offered by buyers for providing extended storage are usually unlikely to cover much in the way of additional building costs. There are also additional risks associated with this as well – not just of physical deterioration but also of price drops if a forward buying contract hasn’t been entered into.

We’re not like some Australian growers I was speaking to who said they simply dug a hole in the ground and buried their grain in years of abundance to be dug up as feed for their stock during the next drought. Mind you, while we often bemoan our lot I wouldn’t swap with them for this easy storage solution when you factor in the dry conditions and drought which is currently running in some of the eastern states.

On the home front, drought certainly hasn’t been a problem this year, with rain drumming on the window as I write. We’ve still got a field of wheat and the tail end of a field of brackled oats, which was refusing to go through the combine on Sunday night, to finish. But I guess we’re not as bad as folks in some parts of the country.

I’m pretty sure we were well finished cutting by this time last year – and while back then we were complaining about the less than exciting yields after last year’s dry summer, I suspect there might be quite a few people reflecting that it’s a lot less hassle to sell 2.5 tonnes an acre at £200 a tonne than it is to harvest, process and load 3.5 tonnes at £140.

But away from harvest and the combining, it has been a pretty tumultuous spell within Scottish farming since I wrote my last column.

Not only do we find Parliament closed for business and parliamentarians in an uproar, but we also saw election promises of more additional support money being thrown in our direction than we have probably ever encountered in the past.

In the midst of an already highly-charged and volatile situation this week, we saw yet another event which is likely to see farming opinion split and create the sort of division which will run through the entire industry, setting neighbours against neighbour and even creating turmoil between friends and which could well be cause of blazing arguments within families.

But I’m not talking about how the £160m of convergence cash promised by the Chancellor in last week’s spending round should be shared out within the industry – although the scope for contentious argument on the subject is almost limitless.

Nor am I looking at how the additional £52m likely to be coming our way following the findings of Lord Bew’s review – which was quickly grasped and further promised by Prime Minister Boris Johnson on a visit to Watson family’s farm, in Aberdeenshire, last week – will be doled out either.

And for once I’m not even speaking about the increasingly fractious arguments growing in the Leave/Remain camps over Brexit – or the increasingly noticeable tendency towards the more insidious deal/no deal argument which has spread well beyond the Palace of Westminster.

No, what I’m talking about is the huge gulf which has seen opinion split following the official unveiling of the new Land Rover Defender to an eager public earlier this week.

With the farming community rating high in the list of devoted fans for the formerly utilitarian vehicle, it was always going to be difficult to please this sector, whilst pandering to more affluent urban buyers who both expected and demanded a more refined vehicle, regardless of just how capable it might be.

The company claims that the move away from the ladder frame chassis and solid axle format which had underwritten all previous models will do nothing to diminish the capabilities of the new variant – whilst improving some of the more tractor-like handling aspects of previous marques. Many adherents will mourn the loss of these features and the reliance on high-tech electronic wizardry instead.

While the new model has retained a brutishness which might distance it somewhat from the ‘Posh Spice’-styling in the Evoque when it was released a few years ago and which has bled into most of the other models in the range, the fact that it does seem to have been styled might put off many of the hard-core followers of the original model.

For, from the original 1947 Series 1 right through to the last of the old-style Defenders to roll off the production line three years ago, the shape and looks always seemed to follow a function-driven evolution over the years which could only have been drawn up by pipe-smoking engineers in worn tweed jackets, rather than by the aspirations of a hipster designer in skinny chinos as he supped on a decaf, soya latte with an extra shot and caramel drizzle.

However, regardless of whether you happen to find the face, the specs and the technology of the new Defender to your liking or not, at well over forty grand I wouldn’t imagine that too many will be being purchased to serve as farm trucks on the back of this year’s harvest when they finally hit the market next year.

(For more on the new Land Rover Defender, see page 56).