The biggest change in rural England during the past 40 or so years, is the way all the available spaces in our villages and small towns now have homes built on them.

Every morning during term time in the early 1960s, I used to walk to school with my brother. The other day I walked down that street again. I do not do it all that often these days because it is easier to drive.

When we walked to school we were coming from one of nine farms in a village where the farmers actively farmed their land.

Building the much-needed bypass moved two farms to new premises.

Those farms are still there, but the centres of the operation for nearly all the others have moved further out.

In a village with only a couple of hundred residents, most of the farms then had at least two employees and the larger ones had more.

The proportion of the employment offered by conventional, non-specialist agriculture was large.

The picture is now very different. There are less than half as many farms in the conventional sense.

Many of the units are now amalgamated into larger units, and these use mechanical means to do the work.

There is much greater specialisation. We have, for example, a large operation growing nursery trees and sending them all over the country. It employs a lot of staff, but in a narrower way than the mixed farms traditional in the Vale of York used to.

Those of us still engaged in mixed farming feel a bit like a beached barge. There we were getting on with our businesses, doing, we felt, a decent job.

One night we tied up and next morning the tide had gone out.

We had responded to the signals from Government which encouraged us to diversify into other activities. But then the local planners say they would rather we didn't.

We have tried to use organic manure to improve our land, as our predecessors had for generations.

Then we are told the newcomers to the village came to see cows, not to smell them.

It is all very confusing.

What agriculture needs is clear guidance about where our political leaders want us to go.

We produced more food when the economic signals indicated that was really what was wanted.

It doesn't seem all that long since the then minister was producing White Papers called 'Food From Our Own Resources'.

Now we are ceaselessly told that we are producing mountains of food which no one wants.

I bet that's a problem the people of Ethiopia would like.

Worse, we are told that we produce 'mountains' that are subsidised.

The way politicians go on you would think the British farmers are the only ones in the world receiving any support at all.

The truth is that almost all countries support their agricultural industries.

The USA is one of the biggest supporters of their industry, despite repeatedly telling us they are not.

Examination of most farming balance sheets would prove that the support does not stay in farming hands.

It enables farmers to sell produce at less than the cost of production and stay in business.

The beneficiary must be the consumer, because we are assured that supermarkets are not making excessive profits.

The problem is that for our political leaders to give us a clear lead, they have to know which way they and Brussels want us to go.

Perhaps they will let us know when they have made up their collective minds.

Updated: 10:46 Tuesday, January 29, 2002