Sangam: A Confluence of Knowledge Streams

"The good guys are doing it anyway": the accommodation of environmental concern among English and Welsh farmers

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dc.creator Wheeler, RM
dc.creator Morris, C
dc.creator Lobley, M
dc.creator Winter, D
dc.date 2018-11-22T12:09:54Z
dc.date 2018-12-10
dc.date.accessioned 2022-05-27T01:02:29Z
dc.date.available 2022-05-27T01:02:29Z
dc.identifier Vol. 1 (4), pp. 664-687.
dc.identifier 10.1177/2514848618817487
dc.identifier http://hdl.handle.net/10871/34866
dc.identifier Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
dc.identifier.uri http://localhost:8080/xmlui/handle/CUHPOERS/241895
dc.description This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from SAGE Publications via the DOI in this record.
dc.description Farmers today are increasingly facing pressure from policy and market forces to improve their environmental performance. Yet – despite widespread recognition of the negative externalities of agriculture on a national and global scale - many farmers would argue that, as ‘custodians of the countryside’ they have always respected and cared for the local environment, and play a central role in creating and maintaining the countryside as we know it today. In this paper, we use evidence emerging from research with farmers across England and Wales to explore farmer accounts of environmental concern and action in the context of both traditional farming values and contemporary imperatives. We draw particularly on scholarly work around constructs of ‘good farming’ to consider the extent to which environmental concern has been accommodated within a wide range of farming contexts across England and Wales. Our findings highlight an intrinsic sense of care towards the environment among farmers and reveal how environmental management has in many ways become an integral part of farming discourse; recognised as synergistic with personal and business goals concerning i) personal respect for the environment and conservation; ii) countryside custodianship; iii) farm legacy and succession; iv) ‘good’ agricultural practice and compliance with regulation; and/or v) financial profitability. We discuss some of the issues arising from our findings and offer our thoughts on implications for efforts to encourage farmers to carry out environmentally beneficial activities. Whilst expressions of environmental concern do not necessarily equate to effective action on the ground, recognising that many farmers believe environmental management to be part of good farming practice provides a more positive foundation for engaging with them on this topic than assuming they need to be cajoled into action.
dc.description The research on which this paper is based was funded as part of Defra’s Sustainable Intensification Research Platform (Project LM0302).
dc.language en
dc.publisher SAGE Publications
dc.rights © The Author(s) 2018.
dc.subject Agriculture
dc.subject Environment
dc.subject Agri-environment schemes
dc.subject Good farming
dc.title "The good guys are doing it anyway": the accommodation of environmental concern among English and Welsh farmers
dc.type Article


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