Planting trees on fertile farmland is seen as regressive by many farmers who are in the business of farming to produce food.

Woe betide the land agent then who rocks up in the farmyard of one such farmer, proffering wads of cash on behalf of ‘loadsamoney’ investors seeking to offset their own polluting practices.

Farming unions believe the frequency of cold calling is gathering pace in Wales, almost exclusively driven by non-farming businesses seeking to boost their green credentials.

It is of course up to farmers what they do with their land. In a recent interview with Radio 4’s 'Farming Today', Wales’ rural affairs minister quite rightly pointed out that the government had no right to tell farmers who they could sell their farms to.

But what the government could and should be doing is putting controls in place around the buying of land for carbon offsetting.

Surely it is no more than a box-ticking exercise to use tree planting as a means of greenwashing a company’s activities so that it need make little or no change to reducing emissions in its own practices.

For instance, if an airline flies a plane between destinations with just a few passengers on board to fulfil its obligations on take-off slots, is it really OK for that airline to present the flight as carbon neutral just because it has planted some trees on a farm in Wales?

It has been described as ‘gaming the system’ and that is just what it is.

The Snowdonia Society has called for a national conversation to agree on controls over how and where new trees are planted, but that conversation needs to be happening right now.

A contact who works at a firm of land agents told me that in the last year or so most of his time had been spent facilitating farmland purchases for carbon offsetting.

He spoke about the owner of a large farm who was selling up and wanted the farm to continue as a food producing one but the offer she received from a carbon off-setter was too good to turn down. As agricultural land, no farmer could justify that price tag as a sensible business decision.

His work is mostly concentrated in Scotland but interest has been growing rapidly in Wales. To understand what the future holds for Wales we just need to look at the thousands of acres of Scottish land that was once farmed but is now covered in trees.

Once land is planted with trees it can take decades for it to come back into production.

The war is Ukraine is teaching us many things, not least how fragile our peaceful existence is, but it has also shown us that we must be able to grow enough food to feed ourselves.

Globalisation has peaked, the cracks are already evident, and concern about the environment is one of the factors driving this. But planting trees with no controls and for dubious reasons is not going to provide the solution we need as we move away from relying on overseas producers to feed us.