THE UK farm lobby organisations seem to be singing off the same hymn sheet when it comes to negotiations over Brexit.

This is good news, since the last thing needed is a divided industry in the face of a huge a challenge for farming. When they met recently the main farm unions set trade as the key issue where speedy progress was needed to deliver certainty.

But events later the same week showed that farm lobby groups will have as big a battle at home as they will in Europe. There, the aim is to persuaded Brussels and the European farm lobby to allow terms similar to the Single Market for exports.

At home, however, they will be battling powerful environmental lobby organisations, which are seen by the general public more favourably than farmers or farm unions.

It was always going to happen that pressure would be exerted swith regard to the replacement for CAP support. It came in the shape of a call from the National Trust for support to switch from food production to the delivery of 'public goods' for the environment.

This was inevitable, but it has happened before the Brexit negotiations even get off the ground. The aim of the National Trust was to seize public and political advantage, and they certainly got a lot of sympathetic publicity for their call.

When organisations like this talk, politicians listen.

Taking the big two beast of what might be called the environmental jungle – the National Trust and RSPB – each organisation has massively more paid up members than there are farmers in the UK.

For politicians, that translates into votes and for broadsheet newspapers into readership. In that numbers game, it is not difficult to work out who is best placed to win the argument.

There is also a sense that the Defra minister, Andrea Leadsom, is sympathetic towards such calls, given past comments she has made and a lack of commitment yet to maintain direct support. To be fair, it would be early for her to do so, but her comments have shown a lack of understanding of the reality that support is essential.

The theoretical alternative is for people to pay a lot more for food, which will not happen because supermarkets will import to meet demand at the price they want to pay if local farmers are left uncompetitive by changes to the support structure.

This will be a difficult battle for the farm unions. They are starting on the back foot, because there is not a lot of sympathy for farmers from the general public or at Westminster. The days when the Conservative party could be seen as friends of farmers, are long gone.

They will, instead, deliver policies they believe will sell well in urban focus groups, and those groups are unlikely to support direct payments to farmers. If Labour ever gets its act together. they will be even less interested in farmers, given that it is an urban party.

At this stage, it is hard to see how farmers can get around this to secure the support they need. In response to the case put forward by the National Trust, they argued, with some success, that producing food and delivering high environmental standards need to go hand in hand.

That is an argument that is hard to win. It seems certain that whatever support scheme for agriculture is put in place after 2020 it will include a big agri-environment element.

Wrongly, when they visit supermarkets with shelves stocked with food at bargain prices, consumers believe food production is not an issue. This is not the case if they are interested in quality and traceability, and it is certainly not the case if they want a guarantee of food security in an increasingly uncertain world.

This is an argument that is difficult to win at Westminster, or indeed with the general public in England. However, if decisions on farm support can be devolved at an early stage the political process will work more effectively for farmers. Scotland has politicians from big rural constituencies, who know how farming works.

A mechanism that would being that sort of influence to the debate is what is needed. If decision making stays at Westminster, under the iron grip of the Treasury, it is unlikely to work well for farmers.

The National Trust comments were just the initial shots in what is going to be a long war, where victory is far from guaranteed.