Many farmers spend a lot of their time moaning about the weather - and for good reason.

The weather often has the biggest influence on farm profits, and is completely out of the control of the farmer.

Droughts may not feature often in the British climate, but they are regular occurrences in other parts of the world like Australia, India and Africa, and they can lead to widespread famine and death.

Currently most of California is experiencing "extreme to exceptional drought" and the crisis is now entering its fourth year. It's reckoned the disaster could cost the Californian economy $2.7bn this year.

Elsewhere floods, extreme tropical storms and harsh winters all take their tolls on farmers around the world. The British climate is far from perfect, but at least we don't have to suffer such extremes. Whenever I travel to countries with hotter, drier climates I am always struck on my return home by how verdant Britain is.

For the first time in many years, last summer turned out to be a near-perfect growing season for most of Scotland's farmers. That led to bumper crops of quality silage, heavier crop yields and cattle and sheep putting on more weight than usual after grazing an abundance of lush grass all season.

Things are quite different this year after a cold, wet and late spring. That has prompted calls from the Scottish Crofting Federation to consider making emergency payments to crofters in the Highlands and Islands to compensate them for the cost of purchasing additional, expensive fodder to keep their animals indoors longer than usual as a result of a lack of grass growth due to low temperatures and waterlogged fields.

Further north, Orcadian farmers are also badly affected and some have been forced to sell cattle earlier than usual because they had run out of winter feed and turning them out-of-doors would have trampled the waterlogged pastures into a sea of mud. A lot of the older farmers in Orkney can't remember a worse year and say that although 1979 was very bad, at least it turned wet later in the year so they were able to sow their barley in the spring, but this year there were few chances for that.

Mind you, things are seldom as bad in farming as they look. Mother Nature often balances things out, and has programmed most living organisms with "compensatory growth". That allows livestock and crops to grow faster when conditions improve, helping to make up for lost growth. It's a feature of nature that is regularly exploited by livestock farmers.

Beef farmers often let younger animals have a period of reduced growth rates, particularly during the winter months, by feeding them cheaper diets. Such "store" cattle may look thin and under-nourished in the spring, but they will grow faster at grass than better-fed, sleeker beasts. That's one of the reasons that farmers looking to buy store cattle in the spring traditionally like to buy "harder done" beasts that will "go on and thrive". It's the same when buying store lambs in the autumn for fattening - those off the hardest, highest hills may be small and lean, but they fatten in no time once dosed for stomach worms and put on better grazing.

One of the problems many experienced at last autumn's sales was that buyers paid less per kilogram of live-weight for their store cattle, partly because their capacity for compensatory growth had been reduced as a consequence of them having grown out so well during the ideal grazing season.

It's much the same with crops, that can also catch up when growing conditions improve. A classic example of that occurred last week when "cauliflower creak" - an eerie sound which drifts across the fields of Cornwall and Lincolnshire, was at its loudest for a quarter of a century.

The creak, a loud squeaking noise heard across cauliflower farms, is caused by a sudden growth or "flush" of the vegetable. The plants grew by three centimetres-a-day last week and that caused their florets to rub together and create the sound.

The cauliflower creak was louder than usual because a sudden increase in day and night temperatures, combined with high humidity followed the coldest June for 24 years, and caused a particularly rapid spurt of growth from the crop.

This season's cauliflowers are expected to be sweeter tasting, due to them having grown so quickly and their "flesh" being younger.