How Truss’s post-Brexit farming policy descended into chaos

theguardian.com:

The chaos in the English countryside began with the click of a civil servant’s mouse. At the end of last week, farmers who had been working with the government on environmental subsidy schemes saw that their regular meetings about it had been removed from their online diaries without warning.

This appeared to hint at what had been feared – that the new post-Brexit farming subsidy scheme was in danger of being scrapped.

When the UK was in the EU, landowners were paid simply for managing land. The more land someone owned, the more money they received.

Michael Gove, who at the time was the environment secretary overseeing post-Brexit changes, decided to build a scheme under which landowners would only get paid if they provided “public goods” such as environmental protections.

This became the environmental land management scheme (Elms). The idea was that this would be a fast and effective way to transform the countryside, make it more nature-friendly, store carbon and create a sustainable farming system that is resilient to climate change and less reliant on inputs such as pesticides.

However, creating it has been an uphill battle, with farmers and other land managers spending hundreds of thousands of hours on pilot schemes and wading through bureaucracy. Not only that, but the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) was lobbying hard to water down environmental aspects and “focus on food productivity” – though any regenerative farmer would tell you that these go hand in hand.

Rightwing Tories also loathed Elms, too, thinking it was “woke” to spend taxpayers’ money on eco-friendly policies. Many of those who lobbied against the scheme are now part of Liz Truss’s cabinet, so there were fears it would be scrapped once they came to power.

Farme