According to figures from the National Farmers' Union, last week would have been the time that we ran out of food in this country if we relied entirely on our farmers to produce what we eat.

Only about 61 per cent of our food is produced in this country. For me that is a scary figure. What is even more worrying is that low incomes are currently driving more and more farmers out of business, 72 farms have gone out of business over the past three years in Cumbria alone with four selling up in the past month alone.

This is not simply an issue of ensuring that we can feed ourselves. There are nearly four million jobs involved in our food industry, it is the largest industry in this country.

Added to which a lot of effort has gone into making our farming industry one of the highest quality ones in the world. If you buy meat, eggs or dairy products that have come from British farms you can be fairly confident that the animals involved have been treated very well.

The same, sadly, cannot be said for imported food products. We need to ensure that this work continues and the only way to do this is to ensure that our farmers are treated in the same way as their direct competitors in Europe.

We need to ensure that our regulations allow them to compete fairly and importantly that they receive the same levels of subsidy. For the past 40 years or so farm quality regulations and the subsidies that farmers get has been decided by the EU, to ensure that all farmers can compete fairly.

That is why, more or less since the announcement of the referendum result in June, I have been pressing the government to commit to providing our farming industry with the same amount of funding that they could have expected from the EU.

Initially I was told that all of these things would be agreed when the new prime minister had her government in place. Then I was told that it was waiting for the minister to understand what her responsibility. However, last week, at last, we had the commitment from the chancellor of the exchequer that when we leave the EU the government will provide the same level of grants to farmers as they could have expected if we had decided to stay in.

This is great news. At least for the short term. The problem is that farming is a very long term business, decisions taken today will have implications for generations to come.

What we need to hear is a commitment to farming for decades to come. Something that can ensure that young people start to feel that this is an industry that they can have a real future in.

Only when this happens will we start to see the proportion of our food that is produced in this country going up, something that I am sure we would all like see.

Tim Farron, MP for Westmorland and Lonsdale, and leader of the Liberal Democrats