In talks with faming minister George Eustice on Monday, the NFU warned that without farmers delivering the scheme, Countryside Stewardship (CS) will not exist.

The meeting to discuss the new CS scheme, comes less than a fortnight after the NFU revealed that membership of the new programme is way down, with just 3,000 agreement offers having been made for CS, though 11,000 ELS agreements expired in 2015.

According to union leaders who met with the farming minister, simpler and more accessible guidance would go some way towards righting the deficit. The union claims only 13 per cent of farmers responding to its survey on the scheme said the guidance answered their questions and 82 per cent were not satisfied with the ease of finding the information they needed.

Commenting after the meeting on Tuesday, NFU Vice President Guy Smith said, “The most important part of the scheme is farmers’ ability to make it work for both the environment and their business. We’ve seen some huge holes in the first year of the scheme – the ‘wobbly’ start which Defra admitted to – which tell us it needs significant work.  We are holding Defra and Natural England to the commitment they’ve made on improving the scheme every year.

“Farmers shouldn’t have to decipher guidance - it should be simple, usable and available as early as possible. We know the appetite is there for agri-environment schemes and we need to make it easy for farmers who are interested in applying to do so.”

The union also demanded a longer application window, in which leaders claim farmers could develop their applications before harvest, and also wants to reduce record-keeping requirements.