Agri- Environmental Policy Development and Change

The modernization and intensification of farming in the same time needed concern on conservation of nature including management of rural land and agricultural policy support. Approaching in rural land-use management that combines strict control over urban development to safeguard productive agricultural land with an expansionist farm support policy bereft of any environmental safeguard.

Throughout western Europe the intensification and growing specialization of farming has operated on an a number of levels, fragmenting and simplifying many farmed landscape through the removal of hedgerows, tree, small woods, ponds and the reclamation of wetland and unimproved grassland. From a nature conservation perspective, this and other symptoms of change meant a substantial reduction in the biodiversity of agriculture land and the increasing ecological isolation of the nature reserves and other key sites which remained. In The United States researcher at resources was accumulating evidence for the future suggesting that offsite damage resulting from the sedimentation of watercourses and from pollution far outstripped those direct on-farm costs due to a loss in soil productivity.

Programs for resources conservation formulated earlier in the century by progressives like Theodore Roosevelt and Giford Pinchot. They began with the creation of the soil conservation service in 1935. 　For the next 30 years British nature conservationist would devote much of their resources and expertise to creating a conservation estate made up of national nature reserves and sites of special scientific interest, they would show little inclination to influence the course of change in the wider countryside.

Recently in some Europe country and US Agri-environmental policy had become a permanent feature of the agricultural policy scene. The greening of agricultural policy reflects a profound public reassessment of farmer and the relationship between agriculture and the environment. Rather than resort to government regulation and control, however, the approach followed has been to subsidize farmers so they can better fulfil their stewardship obligations.