At the heart of controversial talks on the European Union budget is farming. Some 40% of the fund is lavished on the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), the subsidy introduced in the 1960s to support farmers struggling to turn a profit against a backdrop of competition from cheap foreign imports.
The rural Westcountry economy is a big beneficiary of the handout, so any cuts to the overall budget are likely to have a profound impact on the region. While the CAP has been steadily falling as a proportion of the total EU budget for many years – in 1970 it accounted for 87% of the budget – some countries want deeper reductions.
The UK eventually wants farmers to stand on their own two feet, but ministers concede it is unlikely to happen this decade.
Sceptical EU leaders, though, face resistance from countries that take the biggest slice of the budget, notably France. Due to its vast countryside, the country's farmers pocket 17% of CAP payments, compared to just 7% in the UK.
So when talks on a new EU budget settlement collapsed in Brussels on Friday, it left CAP reform in the balance. Without an overall figure to work from, and in turn how much of that is divvied up to farmers, the mechanism for giving out the farming subsidy is up in the air.
The most contentious reform on the table is increasing the proportion of funding given to farmers in return for environmental measures, at the expense of direct payments for food production alone, which is opposed by the National Farmers' Union.
But talks risk hitting the buffers after an alliance including Prime Minister David Cameron and German chancellor Angela Merkel rejected a seven-year budget of 940 billion euros (£756 billion) for 2014-2020, which was nearly five billion euros (£3.8 billion) lower than 2007-2013.
The pressure is now on. Friday's breakdown of talks makes the timetable for agreeing CAP reform by the unofficial deadline of June 30, 2013, the end of the Irish presidency of the EU, even tighter. Plans by EU agriculture ministers to reach agreement on elements of the reform at a meeting in Brussels this week have also been put back.
If talks go beyond June, negotiations would fall within the Lithuanian presidency of the EU and with German elections looming, threatening to derail the CAP reform timetable completely.