This is the time of year when motorists, going about their lawful business, are likely to find themselves at the back of huge queues of vehicles. If they are lucky the traffic will be moving at about 25 mph. If they are not it might be 15 mph.

When the reason for the hold up becomes clear, the delay will probably have been caused by a farm tractor.

Here, in the rural East Riding, this may happen more than elsewhere.

Corn is now being moved to mills, straw for winter bedding from farm to farm and soon potatoes and sugar beet will be making their way from farm to factory.

In many cases the tractor drivers do not seem to realise how annoying it is to be at the back of one of these huge queues. Or worse, they don't care.

The antics of some drivers who try to overtake some, or all, of the queue can be very dangerous.

Added to this, some drivers do not realise how slowly the queue is moving and therefore run into the rear vehicle.

While the driving of any individual can only ever be his or her responsibility, frustration while driving does cause problems.

During the past few years road rage has been on the rise. It is easy to say that drivers should be patient. They should. But in the real world they are not.

Motorists are entitled to be proud of the way car accident fatalities have fallen in the past year, though there is clearly room for further improvement.

Not much praise is given to drivers.

Successive governments and local authorities seem increasingly to regard them as engaging in an anti-social activity. The considerable increase in efforts to catch them for speeding offences, which will result in further alienation between the enforcement authorities and the motorists, confirms this trend.

In these circumstances, the last thing motorists want is to be impeded on their way by thoughtlessly-driven farm vehicles.

Farmers would be wise to remember that a large part of the income of most farms is paid to them direct in some form of publicly-funded support.

If they are arable farmers they probably receive support under the Arable Area Payment Scheme. If they are livestock farmers they probably receive support under one or more of the various schemes available to them.

Because farming income is under such pressure the payment under these schemes is frequently more than the total profit on the whole farm.

It seems odd that certain members of the farming community are prepared to bite the hand that feeds them, at the very time when farming needs all the friends it can muster.

Farmers' leaders ceaselessly, and rightly, draw attention to the need for partnerships between producers, processors and consumers.

Farmers themselves seem prepared to risk what public sympathy they have not to have to bother to pull into one of the numerous lay-bys to let the traffic overtake.

Some police authorities take a relatively hard line, with the view that a queue of more than five vehicles is not acceptable, defining such behaviour as being a traffic offence. This seems extreme.

The huge queues behind some vehicles are clearly unacceptable. If farmers and their employees are not prepared to properly regulate themselves they will only have themselves to blame if someone else regulates them.

The tax-paying public is paying the piper, so it is entitled to call the tune.