THE sky is big, the horizon pierced by Gothic spires and windmills and the flat, arable land criss-crossed by canals. In the towns, shops sell dumplings, herring and vodka. But this is proudly England. Indeed, Lincolnshire is one of Britain’s more Eurosceptic counties. Here, the United Kingdom Independence Party, which campaigns to leave the European Union, obtained its best result in the 2010 election outside of Buckingham, where its current leader stood against the Speaker of the House of Commons. Agriculture and Euroscepticism are tightly linked. In 2012 the polling firm Ipsos-MORI found that rural voters were twice as likely as urbanites to regard the EU as a pressing concern.

Francis Dymoke and his son, Henry, are two such examples. The 34th and 35th generations of the family to run the 3,000-acre estate at Horncastle, they are aggrieved by the EU’s shortcomings. “My shepherd was close to tears this morning,” complains the agreeably dishevelled older Dymoke, who explains that his common agricultural policy funding will be docked (incorrectly, he insists) as punishment for a small number of untagged sheep.

He admits that he is “struggling with the never-ending paperwork” on which payments from Brussels depend. In this, he is not alone. At an information session in Louth, farmers shake their heads at news of the latest fiddly regulations. “A slight tweak that surprised me,” says one speaker, confessionally, “was that the hedgerow removal rules do not apply within the curtilage of a farmhouse.” Much worse looms, in the form of onerous new environmental conditions and—potentially—cuts in support for the large farms in which Britain specialises.

Britain implements the rules more thoroughly than other EU member states, complains Mr Dymoke. The nation’s farmers are “light-years” ahead of their European competitors, agrees Nicola Currie of the Country Land and Business Association, adding that this “permanent gripe” puts them at a commercial disadvantage.

The influx of cheap eastern European labour irks many rural folk. Immigrant vegetable pickers strain local police forces: in 2011 a fatal explosion shook Boston, an elegant Lincolnshire town that is home to many of them, when one lit a cigarette at an illicit vodka distillery. Jarek, a broccoli-picker, admits that some eastern Europeans spend five years in Britain “and still don’t speak English.” And farmers must pass on the savings from employing this cheap workforce, notes Mr Dymoke: “supermarkets know exactly how much it costs to make a margin.”

Most of all, rural areas resist European harmonisation out of a sense of tradition and place. One landowner, who grows vegetables on the Lincolnshire coast, complains that compared with their continental counterparts, Britain’s farmers have stewarded the land well over the generations. They do not need outsiders to tell them how to nurture varied, sustainable landscapes. The problem with foreign workers, he adds, is that they do not invest in a life in Britain’s rural communities. Instead, they send their money home and eventually follow it themselves.

But rural Euroscepticism is smoothed by pragmatism. Without the CAP, admits Mr Dymoke, he would have earned a living in just five of the 22 years in which he has farmed. Although Ms Currie insists that Britain needs to invest more in biotechnology, agricultural training and shale gas (a source of nitrates), she questions whether the country’s voters would sanction the same level of payouts if it left the EU. All accept that, for all the tensions caused by mass immigration, British workers would not last a week picking vegetables in the cold Fenland rain. Rural folk grumble about the EU but fear leaving it. They are like other Britons—just more so.