Resource information
Hill farming in UK is experiencing very difficult economic circumstances and many farmers rely on subsidies provided by the government for a large fraction of their income. The Peak District National Park is used as a case study to examine how farmers might respond to current policy changes – in particular, the move from area- and headage-based payments to the Single Farm Payment. The objective of this paper is thus to develop production models that predict how farmers will respond to changing policy framework conditions. For this purpose socio-economic surveys were carried out on 44 sample farms. Based on these surveys six representative farm linear programming models was developed, which represent typical farm types in the uplands in the Peak District. These models are used to calculate the effect of different policies, carried out under CAP reform, on incomes, land use and the intensity of production. In this study the focus is on typical sheep and beef farm type, the most common in this region.
