Pay farmers for ecological outcomes, not just for having land

The basic payment scheme that replaced EU subsidies paid farmers essentially for owning land. The more land you had, the more you got. A hedge fund that bought 10,000 acres of Lincolnshire received more public money than a hill farmer in Wales who had been maintaining the landscape for four generations. That system was insane.

ELMS (Environmental Land Management Schemes) was supposed to fix this by paying for "public goods" like clean water, biodiversity, and carbon storage. The principle is right. The implementation has been a mess. Payments are late, the application process is bewildering, and many small farmers have given up and gone back to intensive production because at least that pays the bills.

Simplify ELMS. Pay per outcome, not per hectare. A farmer who restores a wetland and sees water voles return should be paid well for that. A farmer who plants wildflower margins and sees pollinators recover should be paid well for that. And pay them on time, because unlike hedge funds, they cannot absorb a six-month delay.