THE BILLS are coming home to roost – and it doesn't make good reading for the rest of the year. All we can hope for is an easy harvest to reduce the pain.

With the pundits re-forecasting ever larger fuel bills for the rest of the year, farmers will be facing an uphill struggle this back and winter. That will be especially so for dairy farmers who rely heavily on lighting and refrigeration for their business, both of which are essential.

While 50p per litre is helping and certainly sounds notionally much better than a year ago, the fact is energy, feed and fertiliser costs have gone through the roof. And there's little prospect of anything being any better any time soon.

Where's the recommendations from the special committee that was set up to look at food security in Scotland (yet another 'committee'!)? Because, once these bills settle into the framework of each farming business' annual accounts, then the nation's food supply really will be in danger. Anecdotally, we hear that near empty supermarket shelves for the likes of milk, bread and other staples are becoming ever more common. And those that remain plentiful enough, have rapidly risen in price.

It's time that government – here and in Westminster – got its head around the fact that the days of cheap food are over. The cost of transport is now prohibitive to quite a lot of those potential 'imports' – especially from the other side of the earth – and that is if you can get the shipping to transport it because that is suffering in the same way that farming is ... ie, facing huge fuel bills and a shortage of labour.

Another big debate is: 'What's happening with potatoes?' They are still a very cheap and readily available staple food, so why are so many still going for stock feed and being sold to retailers at bargain prices?

Maybe it is time for a marketing spend to make the Great British Public aware of the humble and belly-filling spud (oh, but farmers voted to get rid of British Potatoes, didn't they!?). Prices remain lowly to the producer, but have risen a fair bit in the shops – time for the cake to be sliced more evenly methinks?

The thing is, the Scottish tattie crop might be looking fair to middling, but the big acres further south have been severely hit by drought and facing irrigation bans. In some places, they are looking at a 50% normal crop, so it's almost gearing up to be like 1976 all over again!

So far, most of Scotland has been lucky with the weather – barring some parts of the North and North-west – and that will have kept costs down. The harvest is running quite smoothly and it will need to finish that way if rising costs and reducing prices will conspire to take the wind out of what looks, at the moment, to be at least a break-even crop.