THE Environment Agency has warned that if conventional methods are used to implement new EU legislation, farmers could soon be facing huge bills.

Laws introduced over the next few years alone, which include agricultural waste regulations, could cost farms £25-40m and involve 200,000 agency inspections.

To keep regulatory burdens on farmers to a minimum, agency chief executive Barbara Young is calling for the rapid introduction of more efficient methods.

"We are anxious to work with farmers and with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) on smarter, less cumbersome regulation," she said. This would include the adoption of an 'environmental management standard', a single framework to help farmers manage their impact on the environment.

Measures would include pollution prevention, recycling water and composting manures.

"Simply telling farmers to improve their performance won't work," says the agency's director of environmental protection, Paul Leinster. "We need to put them at the heart of the solution. They are already experts at managing certain types of risks, such as the weather, disease and the market, so they are ideally placed to manage environmental risk."

The agency says that such initiatives will drastically reduce the amount of regulation farmers would be subject to.

"It would also allows us to focus our attention on struggling or poor performers," says Barbara Young. "We want to work with the farming community on properly supported, whole-farm environmental management standards to avoid more burdensome regulatory regimes."

The agency's proposals were also fed into the Government's Policy Commission report Farming and Food: A Sustainable Future, which calls for subsidies to be redirected from producing crops to protecting the environment. The agency welcomed the report's recommendations, including early, radical reform of the Common Agricultural Policy.

Updated: 16:46 Wednesday, April 03, 2002