I’ve done it! My Single Application Form is, I very much hope and trust, now electronically submitted.
In truth it wasn’t as hard to complete as I had expected.
Maybe the fact that I have quite fast broadband helped and perhaps choosing a bank holiday weekend to work on the pages did no harm.
There would be no civil servants logged on to the system and probably very few, if any, agents.
I have heard of people starting work on their Saf at 3am to catch the government computer at its page-turning swiftest but it does seem that at last the online application system is working.
Non-farmers will wonder why there is so much anxiety about filling in a form but of course no Saf means no Cap payments and for many no Cap payments means not much, if any, profit.
I have compared notes with others who have logged on over the last week or so and there is a general agreement that although it sometimes judders and stalls, it does now work.
My main criticism would be over the lack of guidance as to how to actually fill in the field data sheets.
It must have taken me the best part of an hour to get past the first field with two types of greening measure and one crop within its boundaries.
At one point I had accumulated a discouraging seven errors and the laptop was on its last warning.
Once the penny dropped in terms of making everything match and discovering field margins and buffer zones had to be logged in as Permanent Cover, or PC, then I made progress.
The conclusion I have come to is that the system was simply bunged online by the Scottish Government on March 15 to avoid an EU fine.
It was untested under fire and soon found wanting.
The early adopters were inevitably the agents with in some cases hundreds of Safs to complete. They could see that if nothing was done to speed up a truly defective system they would run out of time before the May 15 deadline.
Hence the call, backed by NFU Scotland, for a one-month extension.
It is a four-week delay Scottish farming could have done without and the industry may rue it yet if the funds fail to materialise in December.
If my experience is typical the May 15 deadline just may have been achievable.
The main problem of course is the complexity, and in some cases futility, of the greening regulations.
I cannot see Environment Focus Area fallow achieving anything except a reduction in agricultural output. A re-think for next year has to be the priority.