The farmscape: resource conservation

The two foregoing papers have dealt with land‐use conflicts that invade farmscape and convert it into rurban fringe. The present paper looks at farmscape which is still viable and discusses the importance of keeping it so. The keynote here is conservation, both of productive potential and of wildlife habitats. The Second Land Utilisation Survey showed that improved farmland occupied 67 percent of England and Wales during the 1960s and Ministry of Agriculture statistics suggest that it has now contracted to 63 percent. Figures for Scotland and Northern Ireland are about 21 and 62 percent respectively. A substantial fraction of the improved land is distributed in a fragmented pattern in rurban fringe and marginal fringe but about three‐quarters of it is concentrated to form farmscape. Jim Hall farmed in Cambridgeshire from the end of the war until 1970, when he became National Adviser to the Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group (FWAG), which he had helped to pioneer. FWAG draws its members from a wide range of organisations with rural interests; it believes in the cross‐fertilisation of ideas about the countryside and seeks to convince rather than to direct or control. It recognises that farmers and landowners are the practical managers of over 80 percent of the United Kingdom's land, including woodland and moorland as well as improved farmland, and that their interest and goodwill will be far more effective than official coercion. In this philosophy FWAG is in harmony with the aims of Land Decade (Guest Editor's introduction).