WITH THE formal Article 50 letter now in the hands of the European Commission, there is no going back.

Leave and Remain voters are heading in the same direction. The challenge now is to secure the best deal possible for the UK outside the EU.

By the time we exit in 2019, we will have been a member of the EEC, followed by the EC and then the EU, for 46 years. That membership drove all policy decisions, and nowhere was this more true than in agriculture.

In an era of instant communications, the delivery of the letter was an old-fashioned process. It was signed by Theresa May in Downing Street, then taken to Brussels by a civil servant with a guard. It was delivered formally to the European Commission by the UK ambassador to the European Union. That all sounds worthy of a Gilbert and Sullivan opera, but when Article 50 was drawn up as part of the Lisbon Treaty, no-one expected to see it used, and certainly not by the UK.

Other EU member states are now coming to terms with the loss of the financial, diplomatic and power-broking role of the UK. But if they did not want that to happen, they should have been more generous with concessions to David Cameron before last June's referendum.

If polls are right – and they are backed up by what farmers say – most have no regrets about leaving the EU. They know it is a step into the unknown; they know they need to convince the Treasury in London to deliver agricultural support, and they are well aware of the threat to farm incomes. That they are prepared to live with these realities underlines how bad and frustrating the CAP had become.

The EU 27 will eventually realise it is impossible to have a centrally controlled policy that makes agricultural policy for regions from the Arctic Circle to the Mediterranean. By the time that penny, or euro cent, drops we will be long gone, and the challenge now is to make a UK outside the EU a real trading success.

Scotland and Northern Ireland both voted to Remain, but the Article 50 trigger takes every part of the UK out of the EU. The only alternative to remain in the EU is to exit the UK. That is an unlikely prospect, with the government ruling out an early Scottish referendum and a border poll in Northern Ireland even less likely.

In the calculations of the impact of Brexit, there are some big threats to agriculture. All studies put agriculture high in the top five of those most vulnerable to change. The cross-party think tank, Demos, put Wales, the east of England and Northern Ireland as the regions most exposed to Brexit. One of the main reasons was dependence on agriculture – in the case of Wales and Northern Ireland on the Single Market to export lamb, and in England migrant, seasonal labour. Rural Scotland cannot be very different, although the industrial centres help offset the risks.

The Great Repeal Bill will bring all EU legislation – almost 20,000 laws in total – into UK law. This will ensure continuity, and legislation can then be removed as the government at Westminster sees fit. That will not include the CAP, which expires in 2020. The future of legislation on which CAP payments are conditional is uncertain, but they will probably be in the Bill.

The Daily Telegraph, as an advocate of Brexit all along, has started a 'scrap the red tape' campaign. That is a worthy objective, but one of its claims is that getting rid of the CAP will reduce food prices by £10 billion a year.

It is difficult to see the logic of this claim. If anything the CAP, with its generous pillar one support, reduces the price of food, since it allows farmers to sell below the cost of production. The CAP has always been a food rather than a farming subsidy.

The only way that £10 billion saving could be delivered would be by dismantling the EU tariff walls against food imports. That is what the newspaper and indeed many in government want to happen. This is why it is 100% in farmer's interest to support a Brexit deal that maintains the Single Market. That would retain tariff protection and give us access to the EU 27.

But good as that would be for agriculture it is an argument wrapped up in policies far removed from farming.