CAP Subsidies.

Christopher Booker has an item on the changes in Common Agricultural Policy subsidies. Essentially, farmers will no longer be paid on production numbers. Instead, simple straight payments for the area of land they farm. As noted, this rather screws those who rent land rather than own it:

When Colin Flux, who farms on the Suffolk-Essex border, recently received details of the new "Single Farm Payment" scheme for paying agricultural subsidies he received a shock. He holds 300 acres of his farm, which he has been farming for 15 years, under a tenancy. And under the new EU rules, which use land area rather than yield as the basis for subsidies, the chief beneficiary will now be the owner of the land, because until 2002 Mr Flux only farmed it under contract.
So the owner of the 300 acres, now retired, will receive £26,000 in the first year, and £100,000 over seven years; while Mr Flux, doing all the work, will get just £2,400 a year. He finds this so odd that he wrote about his plight to his MP; to ministers such as the Environment Secretary, Margaret Beckett, and the ministry's spokesman in the Lords, Lord Whitty; to the shadow agriculture spokesman, Tim Yeo; and to several others. Most did not reply, and none could explain how such a situation might have arisen.

It's a pity that no one in power seems to actually understand economics. Payments of this sort, simple subsidies to land, simply get capitalised into the value of the land. Or, if you prefer, land prices go up to reflect the higher income possible from owning it. Great for landowners, not so good for tenant farmers, those who make up a large portion of farmers in the UK.
It will all end in tears as anyone who had read 18 th century economists would have been able to tell the blithering idiots who run the CAP.