Examples of this happening are like in the Lake District or the highlands of Scotland.
There are key areas where farming is creating problems for the rural landscape. Such as, GM crops, hedgerow loss, eutrophication, deforestation, salinisation and stubble burning.
These aspects are all affecting the way that the rural environment is developing. And they are all of a bad aspect, it is important that these points are focused on before the rural landscape is ruined.
Because of higher demand for food production in farms, the farmers have turned to machinery instead of people; this resulted in a huge drop in people employed in agriculture. Over the last 4 years the amount of people evolved has fallen by 550, 000. This is in replacement of manual labour. The machines were introduced into the farming industry because they allow for much faster spread of fertilizers and pesticides over large areas of land.
These machines have usually only been specialized to one crop. So therefore, only one crop is made, increasing monocultures. The reason farmers only make one type of crop is because of the vast amounts of their money have been put into the machines which are specialized to only one crop.
The problem with these new machines was that they needed large areas of land to work by. And farms became bigger. This caused problems because in order to make the field bigger many hedgerows fell. They were no longer needed to separate the fields up. These changes resulted in fewer habitats for animals, an increase in soil erosion and average wind speed increased and a reduction in the aesthetic quality of the landscape.
This intensification also resulted in a huge increase of artificial fertilisers such as nitrogen and phosphorus that resulted in eutrophication.
The amount of phosphorus used was a quite big increase, but the use of nitrogen was even more. Over 1 year the used of nitrogen had increased by a vast amount.
The problem with more nitrogen in the soil is that it is very soluble and therefore was easily leached. The nitrogen in water can lead to problems such as blue baby syndrome or if converted into nitrates, stomach cancer.
The phosphates and nitrates also contributed to eutropication, which wasn’t helped by the fact that hedgerows were no longer there to stop excess drainage from the fields.
Therefore, phosphates and nitrates ended up in aquatic ecosystems.
They encouraged algae to reproduce more quickly and the algae blocked out sunlight to the other plants in the lower regions. The algae, which dies, is then broken down by aerobic bacteria, which use up the oxygen in the water to do so. This creates a very high biological oxygen demand that led to the suffocation of other animals and plants in the water.
In conclusion to this there is an obvious problem with the farming today. Not only are farmers not making the right amount of money, but also for most farmers 80% of their income comes from the government, which helps their farm to carry on with production.
The main changes I can see that are occurring in farming are that machines seem to be taking over. They may be quicker and more efficient, but they also seem to be causing big problems in the new attitude taken to farming.
Farmers have to do other things to their land to increase the amount of money they are receiving. It seems that in the future, farmers are turning to tourism and other money earning activity, usually evolving accommodation and the use of their land.
It appears that the way of farming has changed forever. Farmers are struggling to receive the income they need, and are having to use up rural land to fulfil their money problems. The way of traditional farming has defiantly changed.
