Is it looking up for rough shooting?

Richard Negus asks what the new Environmental Land Management schemes mean for wild game

When the UK voted to leave the EU on 23 June 2016, the winds of change in the British countryside shifted from strong to gale force. The majority of UK farmers voted to leave, citing the EU's monolithic Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) as the leading factor in their decisionmaking. While no firm details were given of what would replace it during the campaign period, Vote Leave's narrative was British agriculture would be greener, more prosperous and freer to operate out of the aegis of an overly bureaucratic Brussels.

Farming and shooting are inextricably linked; the countryside over which we enjoy our sport is overwhelmingly farmland.

The new Environmental Land Management schemes (ELMs) purport to bring about not only an agricultural revolution but a complete restructuring of how the countryside is managed and funded. The question is, will this rural regime change bring the promised sunlit uplands for shooting and conservation, or will ELMs prove to be disastrous for our sport? We are now on the fifth Prime Minister since the referendum result was announced. Only now is there any clear idea as to what ELMs will actually provide in both financial and practical support. The CAP's single farm payment subsidy, which pays landowners depending on how much land they own, will be fully phased out by 2027. The scheme that replaces it no longer pays simply for owning land. ELMs instead support farmers for the environmental goods and services they provide, as well as providing grants to support farm productivity, innovation, research and development.

The negatives are mainly financial.

Thanks to a combination of the loss of the single farm payment, staffing shortages and heightened costs of inputs, something of a crisis has emerged in the agricultural sector.