There is no doubt that one of the main reasons why the majority of farmers seemed to want to leave the EU was because of the amount of red tape and bureaucracy that has been inflicted on their businesses in recent years.

Where the European Commission really lost the plot was the rules related to area based payment schemes. A booklet on land eligibility produced by DAERA now extends to over 50 pages. We have farmers told to measure the width of hedges, the height of heather or the length of a lane. Any feature over 0.01ha must be removed from the declared eligible area of a field. The rules around greening for arable farmers are irrelevant here. The ability to apply a bit of common sense was lost early on.

Farmers will also point to rules around cattle tagging, animal movements, disease control and slurry spreading. While the rules are often set out in European legislation, we must accept that many are in place for a good reason and backed up by science or concerns around food safety. Even in a post-Brexit scenario, there is little prospect of an easing in the requirements. The future vision for farming of pro-Brexit campaigners (now in charge at Westminster) would suggest environmental controls will be even more rigorous in future, not less.

We should also recognise that there are rules and regulations in place from Europe that protect the interests of farmers. Take, for example, rules around beef, sheep and pig carcase classification, price reporting or beef labelling.

At slaughter, factories must present carcases at the weigh scale to a set standard, enforced by DAERA. They must also report prices paid and identify the origin of the slaughtered animal. It might suit factories to get rid of many of these regulations, but it is not in the interest of farmers. All regulation isn’t bad.