New Year is a reminder that time is passing more quickly than we believe and in terms of the journey from the EU referendum in June 2016 to the date the UK will leave – March 29 2019 – we are now past the half-way point.

That is a sobering a reminder that the festivities are over and we cannot go on sweeping things under the carpet in the hope that a solution will emerge to save the day.

For years, Brussels negotiations have operated on the basis of last-minute compromise deals that seemed to pull everything together, but which hid the cracks in the deal. We had a prime example of that before Christmas when Theresa May went to Brussels in the early hours to claims success.

In fact, all that had been agreed was to start negotiations on trade issues. This runs counter to how UK officials like to operate, in that they want to move through the process logically.

That is not, however, the European way of doing business and when the UK is one against 27, it is clear which side sets the rules.

This is frustrating for farmers and it will not end any time soon. We know the Defra Secretary, Michael Gove, has a vision of the sort of green support structures he wants. Some parts are good, but in essence he wants to move towards paying farmers for the public goods they deliver, rather than for producing food.

That runs against the grain for many farmers. It will drive key differences between the CAP in the

EU-27 and whatever we end up with in the UK.

To his credit, Gove, in stark contrast to his predecessor, Andrea Leadsom, has at least shown he has some ideas. But, given the flux the Cabinet is in, it is hard to believe an aggressively ambitious politician like Gove will remain at Defra through to March, 2019.

The problem is that he is a big hitter that leads a weak team, meaning the mechanisms to take his ideas forward are not necessarily there. The list of what needs to be sorted to ensure a smooth transition for agriculture is endless and that is without taking account of the mountain of trade issues.

Just about every activity in farming and food is controlled by Brussels. Start at the farming end and we have animal welfare, environmental and health and safety legislation; move along the supply chain and we have all the rules about how food is processed and packaged to EU standards.

Beyond that, we come to how the industry is promoted and the €180m the EU will put into that this year. Then we have all the legislation that decides how agrochemicals and veterinary products are licensed and used.

The simple option is to continue with EU rules, which will ensure access to the EU-27 market. But if that is the case, then there will have been little point in leaving the EU in the first place.

Those are just the top of the head issues and as we get closer to March, 2019, and dig down into the detail, it will become ever more clear that Brexit will dwarf all the other challenges agriculture has faced.

Ironically, for that effort the prize will be not a lot more than staying where we are now. This gloomy view needs to be dispelled by some Brexit self-belief in government, but that is lacking.

Farming has always taken on challenges and beaten them and it will do so again. Weather and disease have always been threats to be beaten, but politics are more difficult and frustrating.

The industry took on EEC membership back in 1973, which swept away years of a UK deficiency payments system, which many believed was better than the CAP with its milk lakes and beef mountains. Farming coped with quotas and all the many other inventions of the CAP and, despite what bureaucrats did to wrap the industry in red tape, it even managed to prosper.

Farmers will cope again, but until decisions emerge at Westminster, in the shape of a real post-Brexit plan, the process remains akin to trying to nail the proverbial blancmange onto the wall. For now we are stuck in a loop where it seems nothing can be agreed until everything is agreed by Brussels.

The lesson not learnt from the past is that this guarantees flawed decisions.