When, last year, the price of wheat started rising, Black Bob jumped at the first offer of £100 a tonne. What a success! That was up 25% on 2006. Ah, but it wasn't a success. It was a disaaaster!

Bob only harvested two tonnes to the acre and had to another to fulfil his contract. And by the time Bob bought, the price had risen. So, he got £200 for the wheat he grew and had to buy a tonne for £180.

This has been a very difficult winter. It has been too wet and too cold for some of the winter cereals. A lot of the boys have been using home-saved seed which is untreated for blue mould and blue mould just loves wet conditions. The result is that acres and acres of wheat are struggling with bald patches and many more acres are being ploughed up and reseeded with spring barley.

There is nothing good about that, but if a decent crop of barley can be grown and sold for malting, the farmers could still come out all right.

But not all of them. There is a small, sad group which is really worried.

Those have sold their wheat forward (that is, contracted to sell it at a fixed price at harvest time) just as Bob did last year ... they have promised to sell three tonnes to the acre at as much as £180 a tonne.

A number of them have had to redrill their wheat. So, what happens if they have to go out in today's frantic cereal markets and buy three tonnes to the acre to fulfil their contracts?

Strangely, that could work out this year. The price of wheat could fall by harvest time. In that case, they could buy cheap to fulfil their juicy contracts. But what is giving the boys sleepless nights is the thought that the price of wheat, which has gone up from £80 to £180 in two years, might go up again to £220. Or more. And all they've got to put against that is a crop of malting barley that was puddled-in in the rain in May instead of landing on a dry bed in March?

Do you remember Elisabeth? She's the shadowy figure who co-ordinates the Magpie Mafia in a big bit of central Scotland. That is the group which believes magpies scare away the songbirds from gardens, and uses Larsen traps to catch them. Those are two-chamber affairs. You put a calling bird into one chamber and when the wild magpies come round to kill it they are caught in the second chamber.

It is easy as pie as long as you can get a call bird.

And that is Elisabeth's role. Each spring she supplies a heap of call birds. She is able to do that because she has the madam of all call birds. She brings Matahari in each winter to her own aviary in the garage, and puts her out in the spring to start calling again.

Elisabeth rang last week, and you'll be pleased to hear that Matahari is still going strong at 13 years of age.

Elisabeth wanted me to warn of a change in the law which will make trapping crows more hazardous. From April 1, trappers have needed to register with the local police (ask for the wildlife officer).

He or she will allocate you a number and each trap must display that number at all times. If the trap is not in use the doors must be removed, not just tied back.

Using a trap without a number is breaking the law and could, in theory, lead to the loss of a farmer's single farm payment, and we could be talking anything up to hundreds of thousands of pounds here.

My, how the Farmer's freedom to do what he likes on his land has diminished in a few years. When I was a boy, the grieve here once shot 13 crows with a blast of his single-barrelled shotgun.

Now setting a trap to catch a crow could cost a fortune - even if you didn't catch it.

I don't suppose they would do it, but then again look at the case of my neighbour, Broonie. He was caught in breach of the suckler cow legislation. Under the rules, he had to keep at least one heifer among his cows.

But the clever men from the Department noticed that Broonie's heifer had calved. That, they said, made her a cow and, therefore, Broonie should have substituted another heifer. But Broonie, like every other farmer I know (and the Oxford Dictionary agrees), says a heifer is a heifer until she has had her second calf, so he thought he was all right.

For this heinous crime Broonie was not just disallowed his claim for the heifer but penalised a further nine claims. A loss, to the farmer of a modest 80 acres, of some £1400. And he had plenty of heifers he could have used as substitutes had he realised the Department had changed the meaning of the word.

Worse than that, the Department could have got that information, number and all, from their own records.

Broonie appealed. No. Rules, even verbally challenged rules, are rules. So best register your magpie traps.

Help may be at hand for Broonie, though. On June 2, the National Farmers Union of Scotland is taking on the Department in the land court. There may yet be justice for the farmer of Brownhill.

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