For the past 19 years the European Union has argued that it’s expensive and wasteful to run a grain mountain. So, to get round the problem, it’s been paying farmers large lumps of our money to grow nothing at all.

It’s called the set-aside policy and I’ve always hated its communist overtones.

So I should have been delighted yesterday when I heard that this autumn it’s expected to be abolished. But I’m not. I’m filled with an awful sadness, a sense that something truly terrible is about to happen.

The problem is that unlike the rest of the world, where all the most beautiful views were created by nature, here in England almost all the countryside was made by man.

If you gaze up Swaledale it’s the labyrinth of drystone walls that mark it out as special. If you scan the Vale of Burford it’s the patchwork of fields that make it all so splendid. And, of course, the last time Country Life had a competition to find the best view in England it was won by a scene that had Salisbury Cathedral parked slap bang in the middle.

Great. But now 1.2m acres of Britain, which for the past 19 years have been sitting around doing nothing, have suddenly got to become economically viable again.

This is a huge chunk of land. The National Trust only owns about 620,000 acres. Mrs Queen’s farming land only runs to 110,000 acres. Add them together and you are still short of what’s currently set aside for yellowhammers and lapwings. And what must soon start to generate cash.

You can forget the notion of it all being covered in barley or lavender. There just isn’t the demand. And you can forget grassland for cows and sheep because these days there are too many stupid vegetarians to make that work.

So now put yourselves in the stout working boots of Johnny Farmer. You’ve got 70 acres down by the bottom pond and you’ve got to think of something that’ll make it pay.

Some will be lucky. They will be given the equivalent of a lottery cheque in the shape of planning permission to build 400 new executive homes for people in IT and call centres. But some won’t. And what if you’re in this camp? How long’s it going to take before you realise the answer is to be found in the country’s current obsession with global bloody warming?

ScottishPower announced recently that some of its power stations will soon be running on willow and cereal. The crops will take up a staggering 12% of Scotland’s agricultural land – but will replace only 5% of the coal currently used. Pretty soon then the Lowlands will start to look like Winnipeg.

Meanwhile in Wales every single south or westerly facing escarpment is being smothered in wind farms. Giant tubular bird mincers that whir and moan 24 hours a day and eventually, after a year or so, produce just enough energy to light up Mrs Llewellyn’s bedside lamp.

Then there’s England, which will be smothered with so many polytunnels it’ll start to look like the freezer cabinet of an American supermarket. Oh, and the bits that aren’t under polythene will be smothered in a yellow sea of asthma, bronchitis and eczema as our friend in the stout boots realises that the only crops anyone wants these days are the ones that you can put into the petrol tank of your infernal Toyota Prius.

In other words, to save the sky we will completely wreck the land.

There’s no point turning to Gordon Brown for help because he represents some godforsaken pebbledashed constituency in Scotland, lives in Westminster and believes that everything in between is full of Tory bastards who need burying in executive homes, polythene and asthma. And that all their horses should be fed through an eco-windmill.

Nor can we rely on the Campaign to Protect Rural England. It’s terribly noble, especially now it has Bill Bryson as its president, but the simple fact is that it took it 20 years to get the government to save the nation’s hedgerows. On that basis, saving 1.2m acres would take it about 4,000 years.

So, as usual, it falls to me to come up with a plan. And I have.

You may have read recently that Sir Tom Hunter, who is a businessman, decided to give £1 billion to charity because he feels the gap between rich and poor is now too wide. This is all very worthy and they will probably give him another knighthood.

However, Sir Tom is wrong. What he should do is spend £1 billion buying up as much of the countryside as possible. And then he should encourage the rich to become richer so they can do the same.

I even suggest that we tax the poor, who cannot buy land, and give the money to the wealthy so they can buy even more.

No, really. If the land is taken out of the hands of the farmers, who earn on average £10,000 a year, and bought by private individuals, the need to make money will be shoved aside by the need for better aesthetics.

And not only would the countryside look better, there would be no overproduction of crops, no intensive farming, no need for set-aside payments, no more polythene or windmills. There would be a much greater diversity of animals and birds because they won’t all be choked to death by the oil seed rape, and the few remaining miners could continue to produce coal for the power stations. And the quality of cheese in our supermarkets would improve.

Everyone wins – except for Janet Street-Porter, and she doesn’t count.

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