HE'D farmed all his life on the acres his family had tilled for more than 200 years. He's a sportsman, a naturalist, but above all he, like his brother, is a top-rate farmer in both traditional and contemporary terms.

A year ago, he saw the changes approaching which have now come about in the form of the SFP, and he had no wish to follow the policies of Defra where the so-called environment takes precedence over good husbandry. He remembers the Second World War when, as a boy, he saw the farming community save the nation from famine and, from his reading of the world situation, that day will return.

His children have all broken with the family tradition and gone. He'd inherited the 300 acres from his father; his brother had been put on to a similar 300-acre rented holding, and they had worked the two as one. Agreeing that park keeping was not for them, they decided to retire and have a joint sale of live and dead stock. The one would release his tenancy and the other sell the farm.

The sale of the farm took no time at all. There were three lots. The main house and adjacent buildings, with 200 acres, made £1.72m and were bought by a surgeon attracted by the small shoot, much of it created at the Government's expense through stewardship grants. The two cottages, each with 50 acres, made £400,000 so that, after paying off a small overdraft, the elder brother had a retirement fund of £2.5m.

The younger brother could not do a deal with his landlord's agents on a payment for the release of his tenancy and walked away with only his share of the farm sale, less the overdraft, getting £190,000. So, in a village near you today, live two brothers, one in a house that cost £325,000 and the other struggling to find a house at £150,000 then facing retirement on the state pension and the income he can get from his £40,000 pension fund. In fact, he is working in the local garage and, miraculously, the two families are good friends still.

Both brothers are annoyed that the two friends who were their farm staff from boyhood cannot get a council house and may have to leave the village. How different from the days when they saw their parents and many farmworkers retire to council houses or to village cottages costing a few hundred pounds.

Above all, this demonstrates the problems of the agricultural tenant and the problems the wind-down of home food production will cause for them. Few people realise that 35pc of all farm land is tenanted - in the 1950s when our brothers came into farming this figure was 60pc - and, here in the North, the figure is about 40pc, owing to the number of large estates, both private and public.

For the acre-owning farmers, the Secretary of State's pronouncement that national food security is an expensive non-option is sad news, but they can go liquid and to heck with the time-honoured tradition of providing the population with quality food. They can cash in on the ridiculous price of land that bears no relation to profitability and go abroad, retire, go into another business or turn the place over to alternative uses, with all the disasters that can create.

For many tenants, it is the end of the road. Or is it? What will happen to the vacant farms? The Government seems to be under the impression that young people no longer wish to farm, and it is wrong. Fewer want to come into the industry and a lot of farm-reared youth, well-educated as they are, has gone into the professions and trades. But there is a queue a mile long of aspiring farmers who can't get in.

Rental values have been fixed on an assumed profit, given sound practice on a given type of land, for a long time but now that production support has gone, so too has the basis of rental agreement. The park-keeping element which has taken its place can be retained by the landowner at the moment, or it can go with the outgoing tenant for the seven years of its life, leaving any incomer with neither. At the same time, the rental value of rural housing has rocketed and so, too, has the value non-farmers put on the occupiership of a few acres, with the result that a farm coming up for rent today is going way out of the viability zone that a young couple can sensibly afford. Couples I am helping to look for farms are facing rents far higher than they were a year or so ago in an economic climate that is gloomy, to say the least, on the grassland farms they seek.

There are bright spots. I have been involved on one farm where the owner, against the advice of his agent, has let a good 250-acre farm at a rent in line with the current situation, on the basis that his large estate has been maintained by good farming and in the belief that, within the next decade, our leaders will acknowledge the fast approaching world food and water famine. He does not want his heirs to face an asset ruined by horses and alternative uses, populated by businessmen and their very nice families.

So there is hope that the tenanted sector will continue, but the situation down on that farm needs to be understood. The new tenants needed £200,000 to stock the acres, to raise which they have had their families mortgage their homes to meet the banks' criteria. Still the husband will drive overnight trucks for £100 a night four times a week.

Who in their right mind will do that? A lot will; such is the determination to farm.

In my view, it is over to Defra to sort out this serious situation for, if the 35pc of England farmed by tenants is not put on a healthy footing, the decline in rural economies will be even faster than they forecast