The country’s farm sector today is more balanced after state payments were withdrawal in the mid-1980s kovgabor79/Getty Images

In the midst of a financial crisis in the mid-1980s, New Zealand decided to swallow a bitter pill and scrap all farm subsidies. There were nationwide protests, more than 50 suicides as land values plummeted and interest rates soared for indebted farmers no longer eligible for cheap finance.

Yet today the country’s farm sector is thriving and much more diversified. With farmers in the UK facing a fork in the road after Brexit, the architect of New Zealand’s dramatic reforms believes that Britain should try a dose of the same strong medicine.

Sir Roger Douglas, the Labour finance minister who led the change, told The Times that the experiment had convinced him — and most New Zealand’s farmers — that agriculture could only benefit from the withdrawal…