A Cambrian shepherd and best-selling author says farm subsidy reforms are a delusion to divert attention from deregulation.
The government says the changes will support affordable food production as well as protect the environment.
But James Rebanks, the guest editor of the BBC Today program, said they had offered "a bit of the desert" to "buy us".
England's "vast majority" was then told to be "more intensive, more industrialized," he said.
"Those two things don't actually make sense, ecologically or in terms of food production," he said.
"What this is really about is the deregulation of agriculture and the environment, the liberalisation of trade policies."
The reforms, announced earlier this month, are the biggest change to the payments made to farmers since the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy was introduced in the 1960s.
Mr Rebanks, who lives in Matterdale in the Lake District, said moorland farmers such as himself would now receive just 10% of what they had been given under the previous EU-run scheme.
But Environment Secretary George Eustice said this was because they would still be getting money from the old scheme, which was being phased out over seven years.
Overall the amount of money the government put into agriculture policy would stay the same, he said.
Former Conservative MP Rory Stewart, whose Penrith and the Border constituency included Mr Rebanks' farm, said the new policy would encourage separate areas of wilderness and intensive food production.
"What we should be doing instead, I believe, is going for much more mixed, low-intensity farming, where nature and food production are balanced together on the same plots of land," he said. Read details.
|Source: BBC
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