As you tuck into a leg of roast lamb this Bank Holiday weekend, consider how religious festivals are a boon for British farmers. The agricultural sector may be struggling overall, but lamb prices have just hit a record high, up £2 per kilo since the start of the year. Simple supply and demand. The surge is not driven so much by Easter, as Ramadan. The three-day feast of Eid al-Fitr is now an established – and prized – feature of the shepherd’s calendar.

Farming never stands still. New markets emerge, even as old ones shrink. But the recent protests in Cardiff and Westminster have been prompted not by questions of demand, but supply. That and the perception that our elected leaders are forcing British farming into an unprecedented act of ministerially-mandated self-harm.

Farmers believe that Britain cares too little about where its food will come from in the future

Take those lambs. Upland Wales, in particular, is reliant on sheep exports, mainly to England. But the number of sheep available to sell is about to plummet. One reliable projection suggests by as many as 800,000. If such a reduction were caused by disease, farmers might offer a stoical shrug. Instead they are mad as hell, as this loss would be the result of what they see as a flawed attempt, by well-meaning if misguided environmentalists, to use their farms as a giant ideological laboratory. In particular, the Sustainable Farming Scheme (SFS), which from next year requires Welsh farmers to commit 10 per cent of their land to tree cover in return for subsidies, is viewed as folly.

In England, the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) also promises taxpayer’s cash in return for tree-planting, but without stipulating how much land must be taken out of production. Under Defra’s rules, English farmers are encouraged to get out of growing food too. Many are ditching crops in favour of soil-improving and erosion-stemming herbal leys, which currently pay £382 per hectare. That is guaranteed income. This winter’s weather has reminded arable farmers, struggling even now to get their spring cereals drilled into sodden seedbeds, that a bird in the hand is worth at least two in the bush.

But it is one thing to drill legumes or a bird seed mix (£592-£732 per hectare), another to commit to trees. A meadow can quickly be returned to food production. A wood, not so much.

The UK government says it recognises public anxiety over food security. Rishi Sunak recently told an National Farmers Union meeting that Whitehall would now use an index to track how much food we produce as an island nation (currently about 60 per cent of what we consume).

Farmers are united in their belief that Britain cares too little about where its food will come from in the future, while remaining divided about how to effect change. At a lunch last month I sat next to a former head of the Soil Association who was worried that direct action had the potential to backfire on farmers, especially if activists were seen as right-wing climate-change deniers.

But anyone who saw 3,000 Welsh farmers singing their national anthem outside the Senedd last month will recognise that for many in the industry, this is a fight that cannot be ducked. And one which speaks to deep questions around national identity. Modelling claims to show that the Welsh government’s environmental plans jeopardise not only sheep numbers, but more than 5,000 farming jobs too. Many of those jobs are on small units, farmed by one family for generations.

Some British farmers look at footage of their continental cousins and wonder: is it time to change tactics? Those scenes in Westminster yesterday, with dozens of tractors driving slowly past parliament, may be a foretaste of what is to come. The convoy hailed from Kent, a country with a long tradition of dissenting agriculturalists, not least as the birthplace of our most celebrated activist-farmer, Wat Tyler.

His peasants’ revolt of 1381 did not, however, have access to Instagram. The success of Dutch, German and French farmers in persuading their governments to drop environmental schemes, is partly a story of activism shared digitally. Relatively few people get caught up in a tractor-tailback. Many more see the images online. There are signs that angry British farmers increasingly get this.

On Youtube, the impassioned monologues of Welsh hill farmer Gareth Wyn Jones draw thousands of eyeballs. In January, James Melville, who hails from a Fife farming family, launched ‘No Farmers No Food’ on Twitter/X. Within a week it had more than 40,000 followers, with Jordan Petersen among those retweeting its posts.

The demonstration in Cardiff last month secured widespread coverage of Welsh farming’s cause, in part because of savvy social media management. Pictures of 5,000 pairs of wellies, left on the steps of the Senedd, dramatised the potential loss of farming jobs better than any press release ever could.