THIS is a scandal by the bureaucrats who administer what passes for agricultural policy. And they are doing it to Broonie, my boyhood friend who is the salt of the earth, the pride of the Aberdeenshire peasantry and just the sort of person their department should be helping.

All his days, the farmer of Browndykes' 75 acres has stuck to what he could manage and managed it well. He has 100 freerange hens laying delicious brown eggs, half an acre of the mealiest Golden Wonders, a few stores reared from calves and 23 cows.

It is hard work. It wouldn't be a living for everybody but Broonie has never been heard to complain except about the weather.

The problem is that as far as we farmers are concerned, a heifer has always remained a heifer until she has had a second calf. But for the purposes of this subsidy the department has redefined a heifer as a cow as soon as she has had one calf.

The men in suits didn't like the way Broonie claimed his suckler cow premium in 2003. He claimed for a heifer which had calved, so they disqualified her. For this alleged error Broonie was not docked one claim (pounds-140) but 10 claims (pounds-1400) as punishment.

That disproportionality is bad enough but it gets worse. As far as Scottish farmers are concerned, a heifer is still a heifer after she has had her first calf and the department is wrong.

We who still have a bit of the Scots language left in us are used to being misunderstood by the bureaucrats. And those of us who were brought up in the Doric are particularly vulnerable.

One old crofter who was being assessed for his mental capacity following a stroke was pronounced irreparably brain damaged on the basis of photograph recognition.

When shown a picture of a garden fork he said it was "a grape".

At least, that was what the ignorant speech therapist thought he said.

But Old Wullie didn't think it was a fruit. What he saw and what he said was "graip", which is the Doric word for what in the Thames Basin is called a "fork".

When first I heard of Broonie's troubles I thought it was just another case of penalising the Scots tongue.

I checked the cattle sales in the Scottish Farmer, the trade magazine. There are pages of evidence that Broonie was using the correct definition of a heifer.

There was a dozen sales of dairy cows with "milking heifers" on offer. How does the man from the department think these animals managed to produce milk without having a calf? And there were several beef cattle sales offering "heifers with calves at foot".

"Just a matter of language, " I thought. But not so.

I looked up the Concise Oxford Dictionary and there it is as plain as your nose.

The first meaning of heifer is "a young cow, esp. one that has not had more than one calf."Well Broonie's heifer had only just had its first calf.

No-one could possibly have thought Broonie was trying to cheat. The heifer was only four days calved on the vital date, so he could have "delayed" the birth. And Broonie had plenty of spare heifers.

He could have replaced his heifer if he had realised that Defra had its own definition of heifer.

It is surely not right that Defra can change the meanings of words and then use the confusion that causes to take money from a hardpressed smallholder.

And it is not just Broonie that has been caught. When I spoke to the farmers' union they told me that there are 259 others who have been penalised for the same "mistake".

The union people say they are on the case and they point out that the department already had within its databases the information, ear numbers and all, needed to substitute another maiden heifer for any that calved. An NFU spokesman told me, "The Executive says it has absolutely no discretion in applying EU rules. But surely common sense has to prevail in Brussels. The whole issue of the ludicrous penalty system is now being raised with the European Commission and NFU Scotland is being joined by farming unions across Europe who are also suffering this."

Have you been enjoying the fuss about 48-hour weeks?

The European parliament, which fortunately has very little power in the matter, has voted to stop British firms from exceeding an average of 48 hours work per week. Goodness knows, 48 hours is a long time, and I support their effort, but it will have a big effect on farmers.

For Potions, who does all the work on Little Ardo, 48 hours would be a pretty quiet week.

Unless there is something vital like a cattle show on he works all the time and there are plenty like him.

Of course, it isn't the selfemployed who are targeted. The only way Potions' farm works at all is because he works all the time. It is no great hardship. He's not asking anyone else to do it so why shouldn't he? It's the only hope for the continuation of my heritage.

The Europeans are worried about employees who may not be able to get a family life or to play football on Saturday afternoons because their job takes up 60 hours a week.

And we have a sad case in point in Buchan at the moment. One of our best agricultural engineering apprentices, with just six months to go before his time would have been out, has quit in favour of a job driving for an agricultural contractor.

His employer made it quite clear that the terms were 60 to 100 hours - and overtime was not voluntary.

You can't blame the apprentice for being tempted by up to pounds-800 a week.

Good news! The Farmer is putting on weight. He has to do an extra lap of the house every day as he recovers from getting his wallie knee. He keeps count by eating a raisin for every lap and he is up to 47 laps. That's a lot of raisins.

scandal@charlieallan. com