ARTHUR Simmers, Scotland's biggest pig farmer and neighbour of mine, is looking for a farm in Eastern Europe. He has made extensive researches in Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia but now inclines towards a spread in Poland.

His main reason is interesting. It is not land hunger - he has farms all over the place already..

It is not the timeless centripetal pressure which has blown generations of Scots towards the four corners of the earth.

King Arthur needs a farm where he can compete on level terms in the world bacon market.

British farmers are being hemmed in by legislation. There are new regulations just being implemented restricting journey times and conditions for livestock on the move.

There are a myriad of laws governing the welfare of animals like the banning of sow stalls. That can cost #600 a sow place. And when they die British pig farmers may be asked to pay a landfill tax to dispose of the bodies.

The Americans have no such burdens.

On top of that they are allowed to use in-feed antibiotics which are banned in this country and growth promoting hormones which would send a shiver down the spines of Britain's consumers if they had any.

And yet Britain's supermarkets, which are playing a leading part in agitating for safer, greener and more animal-friendly farming in Britain, are queueing up to buy American pork.

And this unfair situation is set to get worse.

Under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, we are due to allow 6% more pigmeat per year into the country.

There is no doubt that the Americans can and will undercut the British farmers. When the current shortages caused by the European disease problems is over prices will tumble. So King Arthur is looking for a farm where he can compete fairly with the Americans.

And the King is a considerable citizen whose views are to be given weight. He has 20,000 sows which should give him around 25 piggies each per year.

That's half-a-million pigs.

If they sell for the rock bottom price of #50 they are worth #25m and if they get a screamer of a trade it could be #50m turnover a year.

Arthur Simmers is not open to the criticism that, like the Farmer, he is all wind and no substance.

And even the Farmer has experience of such unfairness. We have to get vets to do virtually all the medicating of animals nowadays, even down to removal of horns.

Under the Farm Assured Livestock Scheme with which we reassure our customers that we can administer a painkilling injections and operate a saw. The other day we had to give a lethal injection to a cow stuck at the calving because it was uneconomic to pay the vet's bills.

My friend Gordon Phillip in Kansas City, Missouri, would have done the Caesar himself and saved the heifer. We have been importing beef recently from Africa in parts of which they still castrate bulls by bashing their testicles with stones and slaughter them with iron bars applied to the back of the neck. Anaesthetic? You jest.

So I know what the King means when he says he is subject to unfair competition.

At the same time I don't think his approach of finding an unregulated place in which to farm is quite right.

I don't think we farmers should be saying to our customers: ''You want 'greener' meat but I'm going to move to a country where we don't have to use green methods.''

I think farmers should say: ''If you want meat produced in a way which you think is humane, environmentally friendly and healthy we will give you what you want. But don't please go and buy food from countries where it is produced cheaper because they use those methods of which you disapprove.

King Arthur says: ''If we are to bear the full weight of international competition then we are going to need the world costs of production.''

Doing away with sow stalls could cost him #10m so can you blame the King for not just folding up his enterprise? But if we take in pork from America, or if Scottish pigmen set up in Poland, there will be just as many sows in stalls as there ever were.

That welfare measure will have achieved no welfare only the ruin of the British part of the pig industry.

Just how internationalised farming has become was brought home to me again this week by this story from the Red Rooster. He was speeding along one of the German autobahns while commuting to his 1000-hectare croft on Poland when the mobile phone rang.

It was the dealer in Valmet tractors calling from Inverurie. He wondered if the Rooster had an articulated trailer that could be loaded with a tractor, sprayer, one pass and sundry other bits and pieces and hitched behind another tractor to be pulled overland to Lithuania.

Can you imagine such a contract? Down to Hull by road by avoiding all motorways, across to Denmark and through Poland and up to the tiny Baltic State?

Mind you, Lithuania cannot be that tiny for the croft they are bound for is 20,000 acres.

That's how much land Willie Skip, a former discussion group member and partner of Big Hamish, has managed to rent at a rumoured #3 an acre.

Among the many wonders of this deal are the fact that this odd tractor driver load must just about pass the Valmet factory as it chugs its way North through Poland. And how did the boys get the deal? Well apparently, among other things the Lithuanians insist that migrant farmers must have a ''certain standing in the community''.

That's where Big Hamish could come in handy. As occupier of the ancient Barony of Errol he is entitled to be called ''Baron''. Standing doesn't come much certainer than that.