"The Treasury is intent on removing payments for farmers under the guise of environmental payments and unless this is looked at again, we will see the demise of payments for farmers over time."

This warning from Cabinet Secretary Fergus Ewing was delivered during the Oxford Farming Conference, where for the first time in 75 years since it was founded, all four UK nations agricultural ministers came together virtually, to discuss their future visions for agricultural policy – exactly a week on from the UK’s departure from the EU.

Defra secretary George Eustice led the charge by explaining to delegates the benefits he believes that lie ahead outside of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) – pointing to investment opportunities in innovation to drive efficiency and profitability, and the ability to reward farmers for environmental outcomes.

Although there was some agreement that the opportunity for tailor-made policies would benefit individual nations, the other Ministers kept coming back to the importance of protecting domestic food production, calling for assurances over future trading standards and promising to ensure farmers and crofters would always be given support for producing food, as a mainstay of future policy.

“Our farmers and our crofters work very hard for their payments they deserve and earn them, they contribute value to society by producing food and by stewarding the land so we should celebrate that contribution and we should pledge to continue their financial support that enables them to do that for which society benefits greatly,” Mr Ewing told delegates.

“The financial model we envisage will continue direct income support for our farmers and crofters but after the transition period, we will make that support conditional upon meeting climate change targets,” he continued. “In a sense, that is an extension of a greening component in the pillar one programme."

Mr Ewing made the case for finding new ways of farming which minimises emissions but stressed that this should not be at the expense of food production.

“We can’t take food security for granted in this world where uncertainty is a constant,” he argued. “With the resurgence of tariffs, leaving production to market forces, as we believe the UK Treasury seems intent on doing, seems to us to be a dangerous strategy and one in a few short years could undermine the very foundations of rural Britain."

Welsh agricultural minister Lesley Griffiths sung from the same hymn sheet: “There are two areas I want to focus on – the active farmer and food production. It is really important to have that focus on sustainable food production and of course it is really important that our farmers are rewarded for their environmental outcomes, which they are not now.”

Despite making clear her disappointment in leaving the EU, she admitted that productivity in agriculture had been stifled under the CAP: “The basic payment scheme hasn’t enabled the agricultural sector to be as resilient and competitive as we would want it to be,” continued Ms Griffiths. “One of the opportunities now, is that we can have a bespoke tailor-made policy for Wales which we haven’t done before.

“I hate the word subsidy; this is support for our farmers. I can never envisage a time when our farmers won’t need support, if anything the pandemic taught us last year is the reliance, we place on our farmers to ensure we are fed. No one went without food in Wales last year and that was down to our farmers.”

Northern Ireland agricultural minister Edwin Poots welcomed the news of a free trade agreement with the EU but stressed that the deal would not be the same for Northern Ireland as the rest of the UK: “Northern Ireland remains aligned to the EU rules for good and protocols, which I cannot support. There are certain constraints in taking forward new policies. We face unique trading circumstances and remain bound by the EU state aid rules, for example.

“Nonetheless we have now left the EU and most particularly the CAP and see tremendous opportunities and room to manoeuvre that we haven’t had in 50 years.”

He went on to outline his vision for the future of the industry: “Northern Ireland must take full advantage of the opportunity to develop a sustainable agricultural industry in which all farmers are supported on an equitable basis, to make best use of the assets at their disposal and to invest in all forms of capital: physical; environmental and human.

“This will be underpinned by a set of bespoke measures that will ensure profitable; productive; environmentally sustainable; resilient; supply chain focused outcomes tailored for Northern Ireland.”

Mr Poots commended the high standards of production, animal welfare and provenance which set UK produce apart from others on the world stage but exclaimed that if they can ‘tie off’ high environmental standards too, then the UK will have the ‘Rolls Royce’ of product across the world.

“I don’t want to be competing with South American commodity-based agriculture I want to sell the best products in the world to the best customers in the world,” stressed Mr Poots. “We can have superb environmental standards along with high production measures at the same time. Any notion that we can just cut off vast swathes of land in the interest of the environment is entirely misplaced, we need to ensure land is well utilised and that good nature policies can sit alongside high standards of food production and food production which is efficient and economical and we have to aim for all those things together.”

Mr Eustice attempted to quell concerns from the other Ministers on future trade standards: “When it comes to international trade agreements, we have clear manifesto commitments on what we will and will not accept in those. And the SPS (Sanitary and phytosanitary) chapter is something the UK will decide, and we will also use tariff policies as we have said many times before to ensure our producers are not undermined by lower standards food in other parts of the world.”

He appealed to his UK counterparts to embrace the opportunities which he believes present themselves in leaving the EU: “Very few farmers feel they have a luxurious income as a result of the single farm payment, what it has done is drive up land rents to be unsustainable in many sectors, inflated input costs, in some cases it has enabled farmers to accept a lower price than what their produce is worth because buyers know they have the single farm payment to plug the gap and enables them to produce food at a loss.

“These are things that we need to unravel and the premise behind our approach to agriculture is as far as there is a profitability problem in agriculture, let’s address that by helping farmers invest in new equipment, by supporting new entrants on to the land, by making sure farmers get a fair price for what they produce and then lets also properly reward them and not begrudge them a margin for the work they do for the environment.

“We have the opportunity to change things, let’s not cling to the bureaucratic system we inherited from the EU, let’s think what a coherent policy is and go for it,” he concluded.