Ah February. The short month where every farmer hopes it finishes warm and dry and without any arguments about who got what for Valentines Day.

The shooting season being over, we pick up, wash down and put away our equipment until the chicks arrive in summer, our surviving birds being grateful to be left alone to court, build nests and lay eggs in the spring.

The farm is beautiful in the morning light of the lengthening days, rabbits and deer leaving their tracks in the frosty fields. The crops grow imperceptibly.

As I start writing this month’s diary; the latest attack review of farming policy is a proposal to further restrict the ability of the public to buy and keep shotguns.

I am cross: not content with jacking up the renewal fees for our firearms and shotgun certificates, the government are now proposing to change the permitting criteria from “no good reason not to issue” to “reason to issue”.

This will affect thousands of law-abiding sporting shooters and gunsmiths more than it will gamekeepers and farmers, since many of us will already hold both a firearms and shotgun certificate, but I don’t believe it’s a proportionate measure to the scale of the problem: the proposals are designed to reduce serious crime involving legally held shotguns (of which I can think of 1 in the last 5 years and 2 in the last 10, both involving serious shortcomings in the certifying authorities).

I sit in an immobilised tractor in the shed as I fulminate over the government… and the tyranny of technology.

Our machinery has never been so clever – with GPS software, laser guidance, computerised control units that govern everything – and yet so foolish: locking itself out if it can’t detect the right digital token, derating itself if it thinks you may be doing harm to the machine or the environment and getting very upset if a sensor stops working.

None of these things are an exclusive farming problem/benefit, but as I sit here in the cab waiting for the engineer, I ponder the extent to which my joy at having comfortable, precise and powerful things around me is cancelled out by my ennui at sitting in a comfortable seat in the warm(ish) and dry unable to get on with anything other than billing and trading corn online.

But then I think of my forebears and their working conditions – cramped, cold and wet a lot of the time – and I think on balance we’ve never lived so well.

My newly found gratitude for my lot is short lived, as my colleague rings to tell me the windscreen on his tractor has exploded for no reason other than to take two machines out of commission. And take £1200 from my pocket to pay for the windscreen and the prompt and helpful glazing chap who fitted it. The old boys didn’t have to worry about that, did they?