The first thing to say about the questionnaire, Crime and the Farm Environment, which some or all farmers are now receiving in the mail is that its claims that respondents will be anonymous is not worth a cracker.

By the time you have described your property and yourself and provided your property's distance from the nearest main road, that is to say its road number, you would have provided Inspector Tom Barnaby or the forensic teams in those American crime dramas with enough detail to pick you up in half an hour.

Why would they want to? Because the survey invites you to convict yourself of intentions to break the law.

It would be hard to find a farmer who is not concerned about government policy towards the rural community, the greenhouse effect, climate change, emission trading and the cheerful forecast that petrol is on its way to $8 a litre.

How are cows going to be measured for the amount of methane they produce, and how is the tax on it to be assessed. How big is carbon's rural footprint to be, and is there an element of unpleasant glee lurking about in the way that the chattering classes are behaving.

Are there farmers who are tempted, like the prime minister when under stress, to use the f--- word, when they reflect on the rush to embrace and implement policies that would appear to be ill-based in scientific terms and futile in the absence of parallel policies on the part of the world's great emitters?

They would be no more than human were they to express strong feelings, which is what the Crime and the Farm Environment questionnaire invites them to do. The questionnaire is the work of the Institute for Rural Futures at the University of New England, having been approved by the university's Human Research Ethics Committee.

Each form is numbered. Questions about distances from highways, river frontages and towns would serve to locate the property. After that, the questions get on to how awful you really are. Do you practise sustainable farming, pest control, weed control and erosion control?

Well, yes, if you don't, you don't have a farm. Don't these people know that?

Twelve questions are about land management. Do you preserve a special habitat for environmental purposes, and does the public have access to this site, or is it just for your own enjoyment? Another 12 questions want to know why you don't carry out environmental improvements.

There are 14 questions about problems, salinity, run-off, pest animals and so on.

How do you get on with your neighbours? What incidences (they mean incidents) haven't you reported to the authorities. Then, having invited you to think about your grievances, they invite you to provide reasons, ranging from insufficiently serious to not wanting the media to get hold of the story.

Are your neighbours growing marijuana, clearing land without authorisation, or sinking bores they shouldn't?

Do you agree that your neighbours can't be trusted, or can be cliquey?

Do you value farm flora and fauna? Are you involved with local groups concerned about sustainable farming? Who should be responsible for environmental farm management, property owners or governments?

Farmers are invited to say whether they believe there is any such thing as climate change, and that they wouldn't lose sleep if they discovered they were infringing environmental law and regulations. Who should be responsible for environmental management on farms? Property owners, local groups, or any of the three tiers of government, local, state and federal?

By section four the farmer is being invited to say that most rural properties have some sort of land degradation, that people who pollute the countryside are just as criminal as those who steal, and that consumers and buyers of products have a right to demand certain standards of agricultural production. Furthermore the high cost of irrigation water and tough times on the land makes the unauthorised taking of water justifiable. There are more questions about gender, age, your post code, number of years on the property and so on. Respondents would be easily identifiable. It would not be in any individual's interests, or that of the rural community as a whole, no matter how stressed he might be, to strew this suspect questionnaire with the f-word.

Those who choose to tick the boxes and send it back to Armidale might bear in mind that the NSW Farmers Association has done some surveying itself, and has found that farmers spend $1.1billion a year on weed prevention and $900million on soil-related activities and that in 2006 Western Region Farmers won the NSW Premiers Public Sector award for conservation work.

The Government showed itself to be conscious of the difficulty of calculating the impact on atmospheric greenhouse gas of agriculture in its Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Green Paper green paper issued yesterday. Just how do you work out how much methane is contained in the afflatus of a cow, let alone in the malodorous gas generated by unmulesed sheep as they are eaten alive and inside out by maggots working their way up from the sheep's anus.

It was not practical at this stage to include agriculture in the carbon trading scheme. The Government is disposed to eventually include agriculture, Climate Change Minister Penny Wong said at her formal launch of the paper at the National Press Club yesterday. Considerable consultation and joint effort with the industry were still needed to identify practical methods, she said.

So the earliest that agriculture could be included in such a scheme would be 2015, with a final decision in 2013 in the light of progress in overcoming practical difficulties and after extensive consultation.

David Barnett is a Canberra writer.