Many farmers will find a touch of irony in the news from the Rural Payments Agency (RPA) that it managed payments to slightly shy of 98 per cent of claimants during December.

After years of complaints about the RPA’s poor performance, in the year when Covid-19 restrictions would reasonably have given it a cast iron excuse for being late, it did its best on on-time payments since 2015!

So why the irony? Well, just as the system is working as it should, the Basic Payments Scheme (BPS) is being phased out and payments diminishing as the Government instead promotes its new Environmental Land Management scheme (ELMs) that rewards farmers for things such as managing the natural environment rather than producing crops.

ELMs has meant a whole new terminology coming to the fore. Farmers are now being encouraged to consider the “natural capital” of their land; what value it holds in tangible environmental assets that can be put to work to earn subsidies and also to bring payments from other sources. It is anticipated that there will be a market for natural capital with landowners able to trade environmental good deeds to companies who are developing other areas and so need to offset and damaging “footprint”.

Water companies, for instance, might be willing to subsidise a land holding that helps prevent flooding or takes action to provide a cleaner water source by managing assets such as moorland or floodplain differently.

Moorland is in short supply in southern England but bright minds are being put to work to think of ways where natural capital can be exploited to earn money that growing crops no longer produces. More than half of the UK’s farms rely on the BPS to provide a viable income and the fear is that without a subsidy scheme for growing stuff, which is what most farmers thought was their job, many farms, particularly the smaller ones that have been in the same family for generations, may well go out of business or be absorbed into larger conglomerates that do not have the same local community connection.

There has also been an upside to the Covid crisis in the form of more people connecting to the source of their food as they use farm shops, online ordering, or home delivery systems that some enterprising farmers have developed or expanded.

For some people lockdown has allowed them to explore their local area and enjoy walks they never had the time for when work required them to be in an office five days a week and commuting ate into their leisure time.

Some farmers have reported problems with crops being trampled as footpaths have widened as a result of extra footfall and the need to socially distance but in general farmers have enjoyed seeing people on their land as it showcases how good our farms are in terms of crop growth and animal welfare.

One thing I have noticed is the unwillingness of people on footpaths to say hello, or even acknowledge your existence. But for those who do pause, and maybe even ask a question about a crop, it is often a welcome (and sadly infrequent) human interaction for farmers and helps distract them from the worry about how Brexit red tape might affect imports and exports, a topic that affects a wide array of producers and something that I’ll no doubt come back to as the year progresses and the situation clarifies.