Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Rural Affairs and North Wales, and Trefnydd – in the Senedd at 3:06 pm on 15 September 2021.
The cake and tea is always good on farm visits, I’ve always found, and certainly I’d be very happy to do a visit, if they would like to invite me, Huw.
Small and medium-scale farms play an absolutely fundamental role in the resilience of so many of our rural communities, and that’s why they must be protected. As you say, it’s been a very uncertain time, and continues to be, for our agricultural sector, certainly because of EU exit, I think, primarily.
Next week, I will be making a statement on the next steps in relation to our sustainable farming scheme. At the current time, we are conducting a range of analysis to explore the potential impacts of our proposals, therefore helping us then to design our scheme to provide those opportunities for farms across Wales. The future scheme’s got to work for farmers. It’s got to work for all farms—small, medium and large—so that they can help us achieve our ambitions, because they absolutely see themselves as part of the solution to the difficulties that we face.
We’re going to have a further phase of co-design with the industry. I think it’s fair to say our co-design has certainly been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic—we’re not as far forward as we would have liked to have been. So, we’ve really stepped up that co-design work over the past couple of months to make sure that we shape our proposals in the correct way. We’ve had a great response from the agricultural sector for that first phase of the work, and I really, again, would encourage any farmer to get involved in the next phase.