In the wake of floods, which wracked parts of the country up until Christmas last year, the NFU has called for a more effective partnership between farmers, government and the Environment Agency to help protect high value agriculture land - and the food it produces - from flooding.

Despite an additional £120m capital spend for flood defences announced in the autumn, after the record-breaking wet summer, the NFU suggested that budget cuts mean spending has reduced in real-terms, meaning river maintenance has reached an all-time low, and that this has had "catastrophic impacts."

NFU Deputy President Meurig Raymond said it was critical that the Environment Agency and Defra put far more funding into maintenance budgets and that Defra policy re-balanced the weighting for flood defence spending to give greater consideration to high value farmland. He also challenged government figures, which show 13 percent of the best and most versatile agricultural land is on a floodplain. However, NFU maintains 58 percent of grade 1 land in England is within the floodplain.

Mr Raymond said, "We've heard how farmers are still battling the impacts of wet land, whether that’s not being able to harvest crops or vegetables or autumn plantings being drowned, there are huge concerns out there. While the capital budget has been given an additional £120m, in the main for defence projects, we have heard today that the Environment Agency is expected to have £49m less over the next few years to spend on essential things such as maintenance. This is nonsense and has to be reversed."

He called for more partnership approaches between the Environment Agency and farmers to "look after rivers and undertake additional drainage on their farm," claiming that regulations aimed at protecting habitats currently hamper such an approach, but that spending cuts risk jeopardizing both concerns.