Time’s surely up for unwanted board

to promote and facilitate an improvement in the general performance of farming and horticulture. In reality, it has failed miserably on both points.

Speak to farmers from any sector and the story is the same: the AHDB delivers appallingly bad value for money in return for the millions it sucks out of farmers’ pockets each year.

Farmers are increasingly frustrated because they, the people who fund the board, have no say in who sits on it.

But the tide has now firmly turned against the AHDB. Farmers are demanding more accountability – and most importantly that they should be the ones who elect directors to the board on a one-man, onevote basis (a system the NFU, of course, has resolutely refused to adopt for its own senior elections).

Even the vegetable growers in the east of the country – a group whose heads are not normally seen above parapet level – have had enough and are raising a petition to George Eustice asking him as a first step to make the AHDB levy voluntary, a move which almost certainly would lead to its demise.

When you read their case, the true injustice of the situation becomes clear. They are having to hand over £40,000 a year whether they make a profit or not. One of them makes the entirely valid point that had he put all his contributions into a pension fund it would now be paying him out £75,000 a year. Instead he has funded pensions for AHDB employees but hasn’t got one himself.

Brexit is going to be the signal for every aspect of British agriculture and its associated establishment to be held up to the light and examined, and for changes to be introduced in certain quarters which, under remote control from Brussels, have remained undisturbed and ploughing their own furrow.

If Michael Gove and George Eustice really want to demonstrate their commitment to British farmers and make good on their promises to support and develop an already worldbeating industry, then there could be no better way to start than by turning over the AHDB, an outmoded, inefficient, discredited and unwanted organisation whose time – in the opinion of those who pay for it – is clearly up.

‘The AHDB… an outmoded, inefficient, discredited and

unwanted organisation’