On Monday we celebrated St. David’s Day - an opportunity to highlight all that is great and wonderful about Wales, including our unique culture.

Of course, we didn’t see people up and down the country taking to the streets in traditional costumes, or participating in parades due to the on-going Covid restrictions.

However, I do hope that many of you will have enjoyed some of the finest Welsh food and drink to mark the occasion at home.

A cornerstone of our Welsh culture is agriculture, which directly employs 53,000 people and provides raw ingredients for a £7.5 billion Welsh food and drink supply chain employing 229,000 people - and that doesn’t include the tens tens of thousands of other businesses and their employees who work to supply farms and food businesses.

While family farms are at the heart of such direct economic benefits and the preservation of a culture intrinsically linked to food production, the wider benefits of Welsh agriculture are vast.

As managers of around 80 per cent of Wales’ landmass, farmers play an invaluable part in managing and preserving a landscape which provides clean drinking water for millions, is diverse in habitat and species, including more than 1,000 Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs) and brings millions of tourists to our country each year.

Given this, it is hardly surprising that key stakeholders are concerned about the future direction of Welsh agricultural policy following the Welsh Government’s publication of the Agriculture (Wales) White Paper, as the proposals it contains fail to reflect the unique economic, social and cultural role of family farms.

Instead, the White Paper copies, as a key policy, an approach dreamed up many years ago in England, rather proposing one which is ‘Made in Wales’.

This concern was raised in a joint letter sent recently to the Minister for Environment, Energy and Rural Affairs, signed by the FUW, NFU Cymru and Wales YFC, which calls for the Welsh Government to pause and consider what tools are needed to deliver for the people of Wales, rather than doing the equivalent of copying someone’s rushed homework, written in another country, in another decade.

Our devolved system of government was set up to design and deliver for the people of Wales, and we now have a once in a generation opportunity to do just that - and enable rural Wales, its people, communities, culture, landscape and environment to thrive. Let’s not miss that opportunity.