NFU President in England and Wales, Minette Batters delivered a stark warning from south of the border to the NFUS conference in Dunfermline last week.

Outlining the changing situation, she said: “The Green Brexit, Health and Harmony was launched in 2018. It’s hard to believe that back then Theresa May was PM and then Boris Johnson won a majority government in 2019.

“In many ways, everything has changed and nothing has changed so the policy statement of the period of health and harmony effectively stopped in February 2020 and of course, the agriculture act received royal assent in November 2020 – the first piece of primary legislation for agriculture since 1947.

“I remember when the press release was put out about what it was going to achieve and that was the focus and I remember people saying this isn’t an agriculture bill it’s an environmental bill.

“Since then we have really been trying to make the case this has got to be about delivering food production and delivering for the environment.

“You remember in that quarter of party conferences and Boris Johnson was all about ‘build back better’ and his headline was it was going to be about ‘build back beaver’ for those of you who remember that statement and those of you in Scotland will remember all too well the challenges of beavers.”

Ms Batters said from that point to now there have been four different Prime Ministers and the NFU had focussed on working on policy solutions to problems, but it had also been necessary to campaign at the same time.

She said: “I don’t feel always that the opposition has really challenged the government of the day enough on these critical issues, particularly on trade and it has fallen to us a lot of the time to really campaign on those critical areas.

Ms Batters said the NFU had made progress and the government decided to introduce the sustainable farming scheme which was “very much in bundled options so there were enormous concerns for us.”

She added: “There are massive questions to ask, but at the end of last week, there were 4000 farmers who have started the SFI process in England. The applications this week are 996 and there are 40 agreements that were started on the 1st of October. Only those 40 received the upfront payment in October. You can see that it is just minuscule – it goes absolutely nowhere.”

Turning to foreign trade deals, Ms. Batters said she had ‘real concerns’ given the possibility of fully liberalised deals in the future.

“The moment you give a country a deal, the next country wants the same – this has huge implications for Scotland.”

“Don’t forget we started this Green Brexit journey with the ambition that we were going to raise animal welfare standards and environmental protection in England above the level of the European Union.

“There is a slightly more pragmatic approach now, but there is a lot that is in place, a lot that is legislated now on Net Zero, on clean air and clean water.

“Powers given to Natural England sit outside Defra. The Office of Environmental Protection has extraordinary powers, I would say more powers than the government has itself.”

In closing Ms Batters warned about de-linking payments.

She said: “There are no limits on the environmental crop you can grow and that is worrying for domestic food security.

“There are new people buying land and rewilding and planting trees – pulling down taxpayers money to do it. I think a real word of warning is the de-linking journey we are on in England. We are de-linking from the BPS payments to a world in 27-28 when we will have de-linked these payments. Be really wary of this de-link journey and be really wary of the impact on devolved nations.

“In de-linking, we are de-linking away from farmers as custodians of the land who deliver for the environment and produce the nation’s food and we are heading to a world where anybody can access the money.

“The focus in England is very much about devolving future investment to local authorities. If it gets into local authorities, they have huge spending requirements and fiscal challenges and agriculture will be pitted against many others at a local level – that is really, really concerning.

“We need to re-link to sustainability. It’s important we standardise across the four nations and standardise the approach on the baseline. In a world where face so much risk and volatility, as we step back from the BPS, it leaves us with no mechanism whatsoever to manage our risk and volatility.”