ABSTRACT
Public, professional and scientific opinion has become increasingly critical of dramatic changes, and the dispute between farming and conservation interests reached a high point during the tortuous passage of the Wildlife and Countryside Act through the Houses of Parliament in 1981. Most contentious were the provisions which dealt with nature conservation, the countryside and National Parks, provisions that were intended to strike a balance between the needs of agriculture and those of the conservation of the semi-natural environment. Conservation planning and management agreements on individual farms may be even less enthusiastically received if quotas on production, reductions in grant aid and falls in the value of land occur. Non-landed capitalists continue in their attempts to reduce the dependence by substituting industrial inputs for land in the production process and by capturing a growing share of the value added in the food chain through the processing of farm products. Britain's countryside owes much of its variety to the actions of farmers.
