A radical plan for solving the crisis in British and European agriculture has been put forward by a prominent British farmer and broadcaster.

Oliver Walston, a cereal farmer and presenter of BBC Two's Against the Grain, told BBC News Online that the way out of farming's "total crisis" lay in drastic reform of the EU's common agricultural policy (CAP).

At the moment, that pays farmers to rear animals and produce crops whether or not there is a market for them.

The CAP provides �4bn of support to British farmers every year.

Looming disaster

The CAP's subsidy system has given Europe its grain and butter mountains, its wine lakes, and the scandal of crops destroyed because nobody will buy them.

Instead, Mr Walston argues, farmers should receive subsidies that have nothing to do with producing food - "decoupled subsidies", in the jargon of Brussels.

He says farmers in the hills and uplands of Britain - places like Dartmoor, north Wales and the Highlands - should receive payments from Brussels to help them to survive.

That is because the environmental and social implications of an end to farming in those areas would be disastrous.

Brussels, according to the Walston plan, should announce a five-year adjustment period. At the end of it, there would be no reduction in subsidies, but a revolutionary redirection of them.

And he says hill farmers and others struggling to survive on marginal land could then expect regular help from the CAP.

"Dear upland farmer, here is a cheque this month to enable you to stay on your farm. Love from Brussels."

In much of Europe, the CAP is deeply unpopular

Mr Walston, from East Anglia, believes people like himself who earn a reasonable living from fertile lowland farms, should also be eligible for subsidies.

But these would be paid for environmentally friendly farming - planting trees and hedges, for instance, leaving wetlands undrained, or caring for the countryside in other ways.

And the new subsidies would of course be available throughout the EU.

Losing money

Mr Walston has also been affected by the crisis. "Two years ago I was doing jolly nicely", he says.

"But last year, despite receiving �180,000 in subsidies, I lost money because prices have dropped so much."

He still receives �100 for every acre of wheat he plants, a form of aid that decoupling subsidies from production would abolish.

But Mr Walston faces the prospect of change with equanimity.

Farming in the marginal uplands would still attract support

"With five years' warning, I would have time to adjust. And the last year has shown that, when farmers' incomes drop, so do their costs.

"With any luck I should be able to survive quite well, though not as well as in the past.

"I should no longer be a fat cat - but I would remain a comfortable one."

Agriculture Minister Nick Brown is another of those arguing for CAP reform. Mr Walston says they are both thinking along similar lines.

Unattainable goal

"In five years there will be fewer farmers, and as a politician Nick Brown cannot say that.

"But he knows that is what will happen. In essence he is saying exactly what I am saying."

Mr Walston believes that a total decoupling of subsidies from production will never happen, because it will always be unacceptable to the EU's southern members.

But with the prospect of expansion towards eastern Europe, he says the price of the CAP will become unsupportable, and drastic reform must happen in the next few years.

"In five or six years, I think at least half of EU farmers' income will come from decoupled subsidies, not payments for production. And the crisis will be over."