Beware! Defra’s going to run the show

I WONDER what everyone in Defra been doing these last three years? I ask the question having heard what Minette Batters had to say about the department’s apparent lack of preparedness for life after Brexit and having also taken soundings from many, many farmers.

Defra just doesn’t seem to have accepted the fact that from the end of this year the orders will stop coming from Brussels and farmers in this country will be very much masters of their own ship.

They will, however, need some sort of chart in the form of a national farming policy - and one that is enshrined in law.

Yet aside from a few mumblings, lots of consultations and a welter of assurances that it is on top of the issue nothing I see or hear from Defra suggests to me that we are even approaching having an overarching policy guiding us as to what we should grow and produce and, moreover, what we shall be financially supported for.

Equally we are only two and a half years away from the point where, theoretically, direct subsidies as paid under the current EU system will be halted.

And since most farming operations are planned at least 18 months ahead that doesn’t exactly provide a huge amount of time for options to be considered, choices made and future strategies put into operation.

But then we are only talking about the farming industry and Defra’s relationship with it, as we can all testify, has been typified by an attitude which suggests most of its civil servants would be happier if we simply got rid of all the farms and covered the UK in concrete.

No other department, I suggest, would allow an agency like the RPA to become such a rolling failure spreading confusion, desperation and misery in such quantities among the farming community it is supposed to be supporting.

No other department would have made such a monumental mess of the business of bird control licences (and yes, we are still waiting) as we have witnessed in the last couple of months.

The problem is the new world we are about to enter will not only entail considerable changes for those of us who farm the land, it will require a new spirit of enthusiastic co-operation and encouragement on behalf of Defra, the alternative to which will be wholesale business failures and total collapse of the farming economy.

And I am afraid I have to say to consumers: if you think we are in a mess now, just wait until something on that scale happens.

Like it or not, Defra will be running the show for UK farming. It should have already started preparing consumers for the fact that with the health education and public transport sectors crying out for cash, some three billion is due to to be shelled out annually to farmers for the next two years.

It should be explaining to taxpayers that the industry will be weaned off the EU system of direct payments and onto another one – but still one which continues to reward farmers for producing food and caring for the countryside.

Perhaps Defra is working up a big pro-farmer publicity campaign to drive home such a message. But somehow I don’t really think it is.

Defra doesn’t seem to have accepted that from the end of this year the orders will stop

coming from Brussels