Farming life is being made unnecessarily harder by funding misdemeanors - Yorkshire Post Letters

From: Peter Auty, Sunnybank, Great Hatfield.

In the past farmers were paid subsidies to grow food. Now they are paid a subsidy (if they are lucky and quick with a computer mouse) to grow wild flower strips, manage hedgerows and ponds, work that is part and parcel of farming life in any case.

Arable farmers already have a three metre environmental strip round their fields. Why take more productive farmland out of production? Organic farmers don't use manufactured insecticides or fertilisers.

Farming life is being made unnecessarily harder by funding misdemeanors created by woke environmental extremism. Farmers need to make a profit or at the very least break even.

It is very unfair of this and successive governments to reduce/remove subsidies for growing food and allowing subsequent funding to become a first come first serve lottery, that only aids the computer savvy, especially the large landowners with specialist internet staff.

It's so much easier to sit at a desk and press a few buttons on a computer than sit in a tractor out in the fields attempting to feed the nation with less and less land and in some cases no (missed) subsidies, in other words a lifeline to survival or destitution, whichever fits.