ON market days, trailers and lorries taking livestock to auction create the closest thing Hoolet has to a rush hour. I’ve just watched several double-decker trucks pass, the animals crammed together so tightly that if even one of them has a cough, by the time they spill out the whole flock will be wheezing.

So far as I know, sheep don’t get Covid 19, but I have read that if social distancing is maintained between them, it could, over time, help eradicate the fatal respiratory disease called maedi-visna. Veterinary scientists working on this at the University of Edinburgh are offering one of the few glimmers of cheer for an industry enduring challenging times. And it’s a two-way road. Sheep are being used as living labs to generate antibodies to Covid-19, to help design a swift diagnostic test for the virus. Whoever says sheep are dim need to think again. They should also keep their voices down, because there are more sheep in Scotland than people – 6.67 million at the last count.

For the farming community, the complications caused by the pandemic are bad enough, but in the final weeks before Brexit, all farmers, and especially those heavily dependent upon flocks for their income, are on tenterhooks. Around Hoolet, there is no occupation whose presence is more all-pervasive than farming. Even when you can’t see workers in the fields, you can hear them, or their animals. When manure is being spread you can smell them too.

Early most mornings, a young man passes on his motorcycle, heading (I tell myself) for the farm on the hill. For all I know he works in the nearby hospital, but his hours suggest – not that I’m snooping – a less clockwork occupation. The sound of his Vespa-like machine transports me immediately to Italy and its mosquito-whining scooters. Right now, Italians are bringing in their olives, with backbreaking days of bending and stretching. A friend in Tuscany says it takes three and a half days, six hours a day, to gather all of hers, and it is exhausting. Many on the topmost branches are left for the birds.

The bottles of scrumptious viscous green oil she gets from the communal olive press, however, are compensation for her labours and the time spent awaiting her turn at the village mill, which makes an ear-splitting racket as it grinds. Meanwhile, our farm workers are sowing the fields which, compared with the old days when seed was scattered by hand, is relatively effortless. By the time their crops are ready next year, at least some of the question marks over our withdrawal from Europe will be resolved.

This summer, a survey by the SRUC (Scotland’s Rural College) showed that three-quarters of Scottish farmers are sceptical or pessimistic about post-Brexit conditions. What might happen if we revert to World Trade Organisation rules is the stuff of sleepless nights. Acknowledging the precariousness of sheep farming, Fergus Ewing, Secretary for the Rural Economy, raised the prospect of tariffs “of up to 50% on exports currently worth £400 million a year, and 95% of which are destined for the European market”. Hence the growing demand for compensation for this industry if there is a no-deal exit. You don’t need an abacus to work out the arithmetic.

But while sheep farming is on a knife-edge, I doubt anyone who tills the land or owns livestock is worry-free. The survey cited uncertainty over “commodity prices, available subsidies and other economic conditions” as the main causes for concern. Quite apart from fear of higher tariffs on exports if there is a no-deal, there is anxiety over a slew of separate agreements needed to be made with our former main market in Europe, and the myriad negotiations necessary to trade with the rest of the world.

The most important agricultural deals for Scotland, outwith Europe, will be with Australia, New Zealand and the USA. Each brings its own headaches. Like America, for instance, Australia’s beef herds are given hormones, which the EU won’t tolerate but we might just have to, if reasonable terms for our own agricultural producers and consumers are to be reached. Despite the abundance of quality beef in Scotland and the UK we still consume more than we produce. Perhaps that could change.

In the Borders, the importance of meat production is visible on every high street. People choose their butchers according to their specialities: prize sausages in one shop, rich steak pies or curried mince or an invaluable delivery service in another. The drive towards lower meat consumption makes sense, so long as people are happy to continue paying for the locally reared produce these butchers offer. But if dramatically cheaper cuts from across the world start to fill supermarket shelves, many will have no option but to think of price ahead of localism.

It comes as little surprise that the survey found that “farmers with higher levels of education were more likely to be actively preparing for Brexit compared to others”. Increasingly, though, even without Brexit, agriculture is a complicated and scientific business, whose outcomes can’t be calculated on the back of an envelope, or with no knowledge of soil chemistry, ecology or conservation.

That, in fact, is what makes it such a fascinating, multi-faceted industry. Where previously farmers could do what they liked, regardless of their impact on the wider environment, now they are seen as custodians of nature, held to account for their actions and inaction. Their role has become much more complicated and diverse, but they are well compensated for how effectively they combine food production with other less immediately tangible targets.

Whether it’s protecting watercourses from pollution or “budgeting” carbon, enhancing the quality of soil or helping to restore depleted wildlife, they are – belatedly – becoming part of the response to climate change and environmental damage rather than one of its causes. By stick or by carrot, farmers are becoming more like some of the landowners of yore who, like John Evelyn, the great planter of elms, took a more long-sighted view of their acres than simply filling other people’s stomachs and their own bank accounts. Surrounded as they are at the moment with flux and confusion, looking far to the future is the only sure way to stay sane.