Clasificación de la industria

Example Two. Mr and Mrs Grayson own 38 acres which had originally grown wheat 3ut now is under the FS-a. Mr Grayson had worked on a neighbouring farm and had a contract with this farmer to crop his land. Mr Grayson is now semi-retired; he now drives children to school, helps his tree surgeon son-in-law and does other odd work. They had entered the Five Year Set-aside Scheme (FYSS) in 1988 because this would give them a greater and more secure return on the land than if it remained under wheat. If the FS-a had not come along they would have sold the land. Under the

YSS they had also entered the Countryside Premium Scheme which gave them a ligher premium for allowing public access. The access option was not part of the FS- a scheme but they 'liked sharing it with other people' and still allowed access as they

feel that 'its fo r the public and there fo r them, and if they can't enjoy it then maybe it's a waste o f m on ey. The Graysons have not approached anyone else for

conservation advice because 'we haven't set out to be conservationists it ju st sort o f happened. Mr Grayson noted that 'when I was at agricultural college you got paid to fill in ditches and cut hedges and that was right as fa r as I was concerned. It was a

bit difficult to change one's attitude'. But, 'as I get older the more conservationally minded I'm getting'. Mr Grayson now only has limited contact with other farmers, and when he does talk to them he feels they are more concerned with the amount he is being paid and the management of the land rather than the benefits to wildlife or the local community.

Example Three. Mr Smyth owns 550 acres approximately divided between 200 arable, 160 woodland, 90 grass and 90 set-aside and there are also extensive

ornamental gardens and a large Georgian house to maintain. Other income from the property is drawn from a livery yard, fishing lake and the rental o f cottages. The farm has to make enough money to 'keep the rest o f it going'; by this he means the upkeep of the house. The area which is now under the FS-a is an interesting historical

landscape feature of wooded fields, which he suspects had been paddocks for stags laid out in the 1720s or 30s. This land is very heavy, shaded and now wet because of old blocked drains. The land has never returned good wheat yields and needs to be

Box 5.1 Continued

fenced if it is to be put under grass. The area has always been interesting for wildlife because of its situation. Mr Smyth had originally been advised by an agricultural consultant to plant trees on the area but was reluctant because 'it would lose its

charm and historical background'. The FS-a Scheme has therefore allowed Mr

Smyth to 'keep it like that, with a small return to do that'. Without this unusual

feature Mr Smyth would not have gone into the scheme 'because you want to make money out o f the land and to grow food' and he noted that 'very fe w people will go in

with good agricultural land because it will only be a tiny percentage return on the land. Mr Smyth has taken advice from the FS-a PO and has had occasional visits

from FWAG. He thinks the most influential advice has come from ADAS 'because they run the thing'. He also seeks advice widely for the woodland and the arable areas. He is keen to mould the advice he is given to meet his own objectives. Mr Smyth has spoken to other farmers about the scheme on an informal basis, but he noted that 'you don't influence farmers, they are very independent and they have a living to make'.

It can been seen that each of the farmers has a very different approach to farm management, influencing their motivation for enrolment and how they use advice. Each farmer had to passed through a 'passage point' to enter the scheme. For Mr Mayfield, this focused on the realisation that he would not be able to grow organic vegetables on the land and the FS-a scheme has offered him a means o f increasing the wildlife on the farm whilst maintaining some income. Advice for the most part has been easily obtained and, because of his limited knowledge of farming, readily accepted. For M r and Mrs Grayson enrolment has been encouraged by retirement. The scheme will provide them with a reasonably secure income and they enjoy giving the local community access to the countryside. Because they are retired and not in the scheme to further the conservation potential o f the land p e r se, they do not feel the need for additional advice. M r Smyth's enrolment is based on a personal desire to maintain an interesting historical feature on his land. The FS-a scheme serves him well for this purpose. Advice has been taken from a number o f different people and used

to strengthen Mr Smyth's own objectives, but when it does not fit he has no problem in ignoring it. In each case, enrolment into the scheme has been easy. There were no major concerns or questions to be overcome and the scheme matches each farmer's personal objective for the land. The relationship between the farmers and the advisers is developed very much on the farmers' own terms, aided by the voluntary nature of the scheme which relies on the farmer replying to a mailshot from MAFF, rather than being approached by an adviser, and the resulting relationship between them and the adviser is very open^. Additionally, the loose prescriptions of the scheme, the ability of the farmers to match these to suit their own needs and the discretionary freedom available to the advisers (see Chapter Seven) also facilitate enrolment.

It is often thought that farmers have a tight, closed community through which they disseminate information amongst themselves (see Carr and Tait, 1993; Lowe et a i,

1997, Newby et a i, 1978); this is another important dimension to the network. Respondents were asked what contact they have with other farmers. Because of their low membership of formal farming organisations, most contact with other farmers is with them as neighbours and none of the sample spoke of members of their family, or indeed friends, as being farmers. The contact they do have with other farmers appears very superficial and they seem somewhat removed from the farming community. This suggests that these farmers are marginalised from the farming community. This can be explained by a number of factors. Firstly, many of the farmers are retired. Their lives no longer revolve around farming and this has removed them from regular contact with other farmers. This is compounded by the increasing fragmentation of the farming community as small farms have been amalgamated into larger holdings or sold to newcomers who use the land for non-agricultural activities. Secondly, three of the farmers have recently inherited the land and have moved back after a considerable time away. Thirdly, farmers with very small holdings have never been fully integrated into this particular local farming community because they have derived most of their income from elsewhere and these off-farm activities have shaped the community to which they feel they belong.

^ Lowe et al., (1997) have found that the relationship between farmers and advisers is very different when dealing with the enforcement o f regulations.

Even though their relationships with the rest of the farming community are limited, they were asked if they had attempted to enrol other farmers into the scheme, especially given that the scheme has proved beneficial to them. Most of the farmers have mentioned the scheme to neighbours but conversations tend to be based on payments or the management of the land rather than trying to encourage them to join. As one farmer said, and many others implied, 'I'm not a great one to try to encourage

anyone to do anything'. More importantly, these farmers feel that the scheme is only

applicable to farmers in similar situations to themselves with odd pieces of land which will make a better return placed in a long term scheme than if they are left vulnerable to the price fluxes of arable commodity markets. When these factors are coupled with their marginalisation within the farm network, it is easy to understand why they have not been great advocates of the scheme to other farmers. It is also interesting to note that none of the farmers have had any contact with other FS-a agreement holders, even allowing for the low uptake of the scheme and their diffuse distribution across the counties (see Figure 5.1).

These farmers appear to be an 'outsider' group within the otherwise 'close-knit' farming community. It is important to note that, whilst the farming community in general is becoming less closed because farmers live in a more urbanised society and the pressures on farming are increasingly coming from outside the agricultural sector, it is likely that these marginalised farmers will remain outside even though the shift in the community to a more open state is expected to continue further.

In Chapter Three it is argued that those who are charged with the implementation of policy are often viewed as being at the end of the policy chain. W hen the respondents were asked if they knew how agricultural policy is drawn up, opinion varied widely from 7 haven't got a clue...stuff comes through the post and you comply with it or

not', to more informed and sophisticated analyses of the continuing pressures to reform the CAP, rapidly evolving markets o f products linked to the demands of supermarkets, and mounting concern for the environment. But these replies do not place them in a position to answer questions on how policy is made which helps to explain why only two think they can influence policy development. More cynically.

Figure 5.1.

Distribution o f Participant and Influential Farm ers