Britain's tragically swamped farmland is often a self-inflicted woe, claim farmers. Global warming not to blame.

Years of neglected draining by the Government's Environment Agency (EA) have resulted in blocked watercourses causing floodwater to back up and take longer to reach the sea.

This is a side-effect of the fashion embraced by Government agencies and championed by conservation charities for minimal land management or active reversion to pre-modern farming landscapes.

Dr Helen Phillips of Natural England, articulating these policies, has talked about the need to create more floodplains, restore wetlands by blocking-up old drainage channels, and allow rivers to find their own courses.

Sadly, this is incompatible with food-growing, reducing carbon emissions, and the management of land for the delivery of benefit to humans. Supposedly for the sake of wildlife habitat, 're-wilding', as some call it, looks non-sensical to food producers.

Summer flooding has put this whole approach to land management under pressure. The Government's soggy silence over the woes of farming betrays an anxiety that a link will be made between the failure of the nation's harvest, soil losses, and farmers' inability to get onto land and sow next season's crop, and their own whacky policies.

Have they made the effects of bad weather worse? If so, when will insurance companies be asking them what they are up to?

One area in agony is East Yorkshire. Arable farmer David Curtis claims that on his 650 acre farm near Driffield there would have been no flooding at all if drains had been properly maintained. As it is, he has lost 20 acres of wheat worth, say, £10,000, food lost to the nation.

Mr Curtis says it is all politics. Reeds in drains used to be cut by local drainage boards. No more. Drains used to be dredged allowing water to get to sea and soils to dry out for cropping and sowing. No more. 'One wonders', he asks, 'Whether management is up to the job?'

With Yorkshire bluntness Mr Curtis says: 'It has nothing to do with global warming. This is about practical realities.' He points out that he, like all farmers, has invested in tile-draining in herring-bone patterns to aereate and drain land, and make it workable.

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