I wanted to check the status of large landowners, so by way of Member State websites providing information on beneficiaries of CAP payments (shared management) I found the UK Payments search. Searching for (total) grants larger then one million pounds in 2016 gave mostly what looked like government organisations and companies, but also Sir Richard Sutton Limited. Sounds posh.

Searching for more information yielded this article.

Sir Richard, 66, who inherited the estate with his baronetcy in 1981, lives in Dorset. Last year he was ranked 321 on the Sunday Times' rich list with a fortune estimated at £120m, having slipped from a ranking of 279 the previous year.

In the same year, his estates in Berkshire and Lincolnshire attracted a £1.1m European union subsidy, the 14th highest payment on a list of 100,000 EU subsidies paid to enterprises in England last year.

No one on the estate was keen to discuss the subsidy yesterday.

That was in 2005, guess they stopped letting in journalists after that.

So the definition of active farmers apparently doesn't exclude large, extremely rich landowners as long as they own agriculture. That the UK can also set rules is a good point, but I don't think Monbiot is wrong on the particular point that "the rest of us are taxed to subsidise the richest people in the land".