"'Eustice' or 'Eunice', the result’s the same – they’re both wrecking the countryside,” was the reply I got when I corrected a friend from south of the Border’s slip of the tongue as he updated me on last week’s storm damage.

I suppose the metaphor is a bit of an apt one, because like a lot of the buildings and trees in the south which had been shielded for years from the worst of the gales, the cold winds of harsh economics look set to root out a lot of businesses when Defra’s new regime is fully implemented.

But, while our colleagues in the south might not yet be totally exposed to the full force of the new environmental support regime which is set to create carnage as it ploughs its way through the industry in England, it is obvious that the winds are getting up – and pretty clear in which direction they’re blowing.

I guess it’s comparable to the short-term forecast and everyone has a pretty clear and reliable idea of the sort of conditions which are going to prevail in the near future.

In our own neck of the woods, however, we’re still looking for any hard and fast indications of farm policy development. I guess you could say that we’re still pretty much relying on the sort of levels of certitude given by feeling the lump of seaweed at the back door – or getting hints from weather lore and old soothsayer’s sayings like: “Red sky at night, carbon auditors delight, red sky in the morning, nutrient management plan warning”.

For it was pretty disappointing that we didn’t get much in the way of details – or even real hints – on how things were developing at the NFUS agm a couple of weeks back.

While I think everyone would be happy to accept the fact that if a things’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right – and the process taking a decent amount of time to sort out and check for unintended consequences – there’s no getting away from the fact that the industry is being crippled by this lack of information and forced into inaction at a time when plans for major changes should be getting drawn up.

In the arable sector, at least, while there’s probably still a week or two to go before spring work gets into full swing – and the annual SAF forms have to be filled in – it looks like pretty much all the plans for the coming year will have been drawn up and finalised before we’re given any real steer on future policy direction.

While there were some hints that carbon audits and soil testing would play a role in future support, the so-called Track 1 measures don’t look to be much more than a baseline setting exercise. But, as I’ve been led to believe, the details won’t be available until April and so we’d be hard pushed to get any significant soil-testing scheme off the ground this spring – even come autumn it’s likely that those providing such a service will be more than run off their feet.

Similarly, if the pilot projects are going to be tested before they’re widely introduced, unless there’s been an awful lot more going on in the background than has been visible to us mere mortals, I can’t really imagine that there will be time to have them in place to carry out any serious assessment of their effectiveness this cropping season.

All of which makes the schedule of having the delivery plans and schemes for future policy drawn up in time to go out for consultation in 2023 and then passed by the Scottish Parliament in 2024 for introduction in 2025 sound a bit tight on the old time-scale front – especially if you factor in getting the IT system knocked into shape to cope with the new demands.

Of course, it might be that by then we’ll all have accepted the 'green shilling' and sold out to the increasing number of so-called green lairds who are buying up agricultural land for forestry and other carbon sequestration projects, alongside even more controversial rewilding projects.

For there’s no escaping the fact that the emergence of markets for carbon and other forms of natural capital has led to increased interest from private investors in ecosystem restoration. Coupled with grants for woodland creation and peatland restoration, it’s pretty obvious to one and all that this is acting as a major driver for land use change across the UK.

The growing concerns over hill land – and even some of the more marginal lowground areas – going for forestry due to the increasing interest in forestry and plantable land from corporate investors due to high timber prices, competitive planting grants and the strong investment performance of forestry, have also been recognised as a growing threat to agricultural production in Scotland.

Increasingly, the industry has been ringing the alarm bells and warning that the lack of regulation on such sales threatens to see Scotland become, as NFU president, Martin Kennedy, put it a few months back, the ‘bargain basement’ for foreign investors wanting to either offset their environmental footprint or to speculate in carbon credits – raising fears in some quarters of a repeat of the Highland Clearances.

So, with agriculture increasingly being displaced by large private acquisitions, it’s probably about time that the issue was given some serious consideration by policy makers.

On that front, it could only be a welcome move that a major round table event was set to take place this week to bring together key stakeholders from across the UK to investigate the opportunities and risks arising from such landscape-scale alterations in how the countryside is managed.

As tree planting displaces agriculture, food sovereignty and the viability of rural communities must also be on the 'table'. But, in order to be even-handed, the round table was also going to look at the benefits of private investment which could help meet net zero and other nature-related targets over the next 10 years – as well as increase land values for owner-occupier farmers.

Researchers from the Scottish Environment, Food and Agriculture Research Institutes (SEFARI) and the University of the Highlands and Islands have invited people from all sides of the debate – including representatives from the UK and devolved governments, investors, landowners and community groups – to join this proposed Special Advisory Group.

The initiative, which will look at the changes in land use within existing holdings – as well as large-scale acquisitions – is funded by the Scottish Government and was to be chaired by the SRUC’s Professor Mark Reed.

But while I didn’t have any indication on how the event had gone at the time of writing, a preliminary evidence review, which collated and assessed evidence from the UK and international studies, was drawn up before the meeting by SRUC rural society researcher, Dr Rob McMorran.

“These market shifts bring real opportunities for increasing private investment in the environment and for land managers to diversify their income at a time of uncertainty in relation to future agricultural support,” said McMorran.

“However, we found that large-scale private acquisitions of land for natural capital may also bring real risks, including potentially concentrating the distribution of benefits associated with natural capital and conflicting with a wider policy emphasis on diversifying landownership and increasing opportunities for communities to influence decisions around land use.”

McMorran said this meant that how large scale acquisitions and the development of natural capital markets sat alongside public support mechanisms, needed careful consideration to ensure related opportunities were fairly distributed across the land management sector and rural communities.

Let’s just hope that farmers continue to have a role to play in that land management sector.