Upland farmers are key workers in the climate and nature emergency response - Andrew Fagg

The state has in effect been paying farmers’ wages here in Upper Wensleydale for many years.

Nine pounds out of every ten made by the average grazing livestock farmer, known as the ‘farm business income’, comes from the taxpayer, mainly through the Basic Payment Scheme.

To be clear, though, there is a big difference between the coronavirus furlough scheme and this annual farm payment: farmers are still working.

One of the only after-dark noises during the height of lockdown for me was a farmer on the other side of the beck jiggeting the bucket of a digger while mucking out his beasts.

Most farmers here work hard, mainly in sheep and beef enterprises now that milk cows have all but disappeared from the dale heads. They work not for the profit, as there is not much of that, but for enjoyment or because it is in the blood.

Upland farmers themselves have talked grumblingly about the Government wanting to turn them into ‘park keepers’ or ‘habitat managers’. Yet they are already public servants in all but name.

It might not come naturally to bloody-minded Dales farmers, but it is likely to be strongly in their interests to embrace the idea.

The Country Land and Business Association called in March for a delay to the cuts to the Basic Payment Scheme, which are due to come in next year as part of the seven-year ‘agricultural transition’. The farming minister, Victoria Prentis, was right to resist the call.

The sooner the regressive, morale-sapping, land-price-inflating, bung-like Basic Payment is consigned to history, the sooner farmers can become acknowledged not just as food producers but as providers of public goods.

Upland farmers are key workers in the nation’s response to the climate and nature emergency – and they should be rewarded accordingly from the public purse.

What the Government must not do, though, is slash the incomes of upland farmers by removing the Basic Payment without at the same time making available other schemes through which just as much money can be earned.

The size of the farming community in Upper Wensleydale, and I dare say the wider Yorkshire Dales, has shrunk over recent decades.

If the agricultural transition is mismanaged, the number of farmers and farm businesses will dwindle further.

Ms Prentice told MPs that upland farmers will be well placed to benefit from the forthcoming Environmental Land Management scheme.

The community in Upper Wensleydale, in which farming families are arguably the backbone, depend on that being so.