New plan to pay farmers who protect winter soil
This story shows how the landscape will change as a consequence of rural policy as it evolves over the next 3-5 years it tells us:
The empty brown fields of England’s winter countryside could be transformed under government plans for farming.
Cold naked acres will in future be clothed in vegetation as farmers are paid for sowing plants that bind the soil together.
The aim is to hold precious topsoil on the land, instead of seeing it washed into rivers during heavy rainfall.
But critics say it is not ambitious enough to reverse the UK’s nature crisis.
The changes are being introduced as part of a broad post-Brexit reform of the subsidies paid to farmers.
Under the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, farmers received taxpayers’ cash proportional to the amount of land they owned – the richer the farmer, the bigger the subsidy.