THE Farmer has had a row from the Elder Investment. The good girl, who stuck in at school and got a degree from Heriot Watt University before marrying Potions and eventually following in the Farmer's footsteps at Little Ardo, is furious.

She is insulted by the government's plan to break the link between the family land and food production, and she does not like the way the Farmer is accepting it.

Since Hitler's war the great British public have depended on their government to provide them with cheap food. One of their main ways of securing that has been to subsidise food production by British farmers.

The more food farmers produced the more subsidy they got. The farmers responded so well that we got close to self-sufficiency despite the tiny fraction of the population still left on the land.

We farmers were proud of ourselves. Now it is all change. The government is going to get cheap food for its people by buying abroad.

They are still going to support people who occupy farms, but they are breaking the link between food production and subsidy.

The Elder Investment will get her single farm payment whether she grows food or not. She and Potions can become simple pensioners, watching the weeds grow from their rocking chairs on the boardwalk.

But that is not what they want. The Elder Investment is following in a proud tradition.

Her great, great, greatgrandfather showed the champion shorthorn bull at the Ebrieside show in 1861.

She will inherit the silver medal if she can find it when the Farmer takes his place in the Old Kirkyard.

Her great, great-uncle Dod patented a mechanical neep hasher/spreader in 1906 when most of his fellow peasants couldn't see past a graip and a barrow.

Her father once weaned an average of 10.4 piglets per sow on the Roadnite system of farrowing sows outside in arks. Among the Allans there is even a progenitor who was hanged for sheep stealing.

With a pedigree like that you don't want to become a country pensioner.

They have promised to modulate the SFP into a series of subsidies, which will help sustain the peasantry, but won't be related directly to food production.

The Elder Investment is busy claiming the first bit of that at the moment.

What worries her is that the government is going to spend just as much money on the land as before but that it will not help produce cheap food, or help her and Potions to do what they want to do at Little Ardo. They want to build a profitable business here - a business that is not dependent upon subsidies.

They can get subsidies of up to three-quarters of the cost of putting up signs and improving pathways to help ramblers to enjoy the farm. Fine, but where is the sustainable profit in that? Unless they start charging for access, signposts and stiles end up costing the farmer money.

Potions fancies accepting the government's offer of pounds-600 to harvest 10 acres in the oldfashioned way. But it will cost him perhaps an extra pounds-4000 to employ scythers, bandsmen, stookers, forkers and builders to get in his 10 acres traditionally.

As well as stirring the hearts of old farmers like me, the traditional bit of his harvest will benefit wildlife. The rats will enjoy the return of the stackyard. The crows will enjoy unlimited grain into November. But where's the profit?

Is Potions to charge visitors to witness his struggles with nature and the Health & Safety Executive?

Potions will be able to get a subsidy of pounds-40 a hectare for leaving stubble in his fields until after February 28. But to earn that he will have to give up growing winter barley which yields him four tonnes to the acre in favour of spring barley, which is unlikely to yield three.

There are some subsidies on the menu which are to do with making a good job of farming. Nutrient management is what good farmers have always done.

But it is the act of management that is good, not writingup plans and keeping records of it. To qualify for pounds-2 a hectare farmers will have to fill a mountain of paper with statements of good intention and lies about good practice.

The Elder Investment is right to be disappointed. The Farmer is lucky to be out of it.

Mind you, it doesn't feel like it is all good luck as he tries to get his new metal knee to do the work his old arthritic knee did so well for so long.

Everyone the Farmer has met who has had a metal knee planted in his leg is delighted. They all tell how the pain disappeared, and in no time Scottish country dancing was being enjoyed for the first time in decades.

The trouble is that the Farmer's old knee, although carrying perhaps a pound of excess bony stuff, wasn't sore at all. So the pain of having this foreign body inserted in the leg is all loss.

Not that it is very sore until I try to bend it. It is not willing to bend.

To encourage f lexibility the Farmer has to walk a bit further every day.

On a fine day he takes to the loans, otherwise he goes round and round the retirement housie. If he starts at the kitchen and takes the road through the sitting room to the hall and then through the bedroom to the sit-ooterie and from there back to the kitchen that is 19 yards.

The Farmer does an extra lap every day and has reached 31 laps. To keep count he lays out 32 raisins on the kitchen table. Each time he passes he eats one. When they are all done so is he.

subsidies@charlieallan. com