I'm sorry, but we seem to have lost our collective marbles.

Once a cucumber is sliced, who is to know it never met the criteria for the "maximum arc" as defined by the European Union under Commission Regulation (EEC) No 1677/88. Passed on June 15 1988, it lays down that Class I cucumbers must "be reasonably well shaped and practically straight (maximum height of the arc: 10 mm per 10 cm of the length of cucumber)".

When a carrot has been sliced and cooked, who cares, when it appears on your plate, that in the raw state the carrot diverged from Commission Regulation No 730/1999 of April 7 1999. This ordered that a carrot must be "not forked, free from secondary roots"?

It drove commercial growers mad trying to match-up these bureaucratic categories laid down in an office with the reality of what they dug out of their fields.

It was quite possible for their produce to be below Class I but too good for Class II and therefore, on the market, to exist in a kind of legal limbo. The British enforcer – the Rural Payments Agency – could and did stop traders selling produce that was the wrong size, in some cases prosecuting offenders.

The net result was financial loss and prodigious waste. At one point, an estimated 20 per cent of British onion production was wasted because it did not meet the standards.

But that was mostly in the past. The scrapping of the EU laws will be cheered, but their passing will not make a such huge difference today. That's because the vegetable market has become more specialised in recent times to cater for a more choosy customer.

So a potato for example, whose size once might have caused it to fall foul of EU rules, is now marketed so that its particular shape becomes a selling point, not a drawback. So big or small, they find separate niches on the shelves as baking potatoes, mashing potatoes, sauteeing potatoes or whatever.

Richard Snowden, who farms at Wharfedale Grange, at Harewood in West Yorkshire, will certainly be glad to see the back of the restrictive laws which he says were "complete stupidity".

But more pressing for him is a new battle with the same EU bureaucrats. This time it's over what he's allowed to put on his land and crops. He says restrictions being placed on commercial growers like himself will put them at a huge disadvantage against imports from non-EU growers.

"Some years ago the less safe chemicals were removed and rightly so," says Richard. "The new rules are basically for chemicals we use for weed control and fungicides. I cannot afford to have teams of people doing the job they do in the fields. The rules seems to have come out of the same bureaucratic black hole as the one that gave us rules for straight cucumbers and forked carrots."

In the meantime, he has other matters to divert him from his fields. Richard is a painter, and his work is on show at his farm next week, Friday to Sunday, in an event called Christmas Crackers. Call 07745 970039 or see www.richardsnowden.co.uk.