FARMERS have welcomed a deal to end 50 years of restrictive European subsidy rules.

The Government announced radical reforms to the Common Agricultural Policy (Cap) yesterday, so that farmers will no longer be paid purely on the amount they produce.

Instead, subsidies from Brussels will be linked to environmentally friendly farming methods and rural protection, leaving farmers free to farm as they choose.

The move should mean an end to the "surplus years", when huge stockpiles of unwanted beef, butter, milk and wine built up as farmers produced as much as they could to get more subsidies.

Under the new system, farmers will continue to receive money through the Cap as a single income payment. The link that has meant keeping specific numbers of sheep or cattle to receive the payment will be broken - otherwise known as "decoupling"

David Maughan, chairman of Durham and North Yorkshire National Farmers' Union (NFU), welcomed the deal, which was agreed by EU agricultural ministers on Wednesday night.

"It means we can farm to our strengths without having to look continually at the effects on subsidy entitlements," said Mr Maughan, who has up to 350 beef cattle and 320 acres of arable crops at Morton Tinmouth, near Darlington.

"It will change practices and free the market up," he said.

Alastair Davy, spokesman for the Hill Farming Initiative, said it was a good deal but that the "devil was in the detail".

"The feeling is we should get decoupling, but it is how they do it and how it is going to affect tenant farmers," said Mr Davy, who has 250 sheep and 90 suckler cows at Marrick, in Swaledale, North Yorkshire.

Farmers' unions also expressed concern that some other European member states had been given the option to partially maintain the link with production.

NFU president Sir Ben Gill warned of a "patchwork of different policies operating across Europe".

"We will ask the Government for full decoupling in England. But if other members states don't do this, it could potentially distort the market," he said.

Meanwhile the Tories accused the Government of a "botched compromise" which had fallen short of the radical changes needed.