Love him or hate him, at least in agriculture we now have a “big hitter” in government.  Of course his main job may be towards the “environment”, but he is not an environmentalist (the greens are very anti his appointment), which is probably a benefit to farmers.  For instance his voting record is pro the badger cull to reduce TB infections in target areas.

Of great interest too, is an interview he gave exclusively to the Yorkshire Post during the leadership campaign in July 2016.  In that interview he stated “there would be no reduction in what people get from the CAP, but what we do want to look at is the bureaucracy which leads to delays in payments. So we would want to keep the money and not the bureaucracy.”

In another piece of good news after the election, we find that 6 of the 13 new Tory MPs from Scotland have a strong agricultural background.  In a parliament which is likely to find that all sorts of minority interests suddenly have huge importance in a forthcoming vote (for example, the DUP) is very possible that this could be of enormous benefit to agricultural interests in the medium term.

This sounds like music to our ears, but we will have to see how Mr Gove performs.  On the face of it, your payments from the CAP should have a better chance of continuing than perhaps we feared a few weeks ago.  But I still have a feeling that farmers should prepare for a continuing reduction in payments.  They are an easy target for a government short of money, particularly payments to larger farmers, and farmers themselves have very few votes.