AMONG the letters I have received over foot-and-mouth is one from a farmer who asked my opinion on the future of farming after the outbreak. In particular, he wanted my view on how far farming should be tilted towards the environment.

I replied that I believed farming's main task should always be what it always has been - the production of food. Since prehistoric times, when Bronze Age nomads herded the first domesticated animals, and their Iron Age successors tilled the first fields, no one has ever farmed to produce a landscape or help others enjoy it. That fact alone should highlight the dangers of upending the priorities after all this time. Nor do I think any farmer would ever get out of bed to create or tend a rustic Disneyland.

Our deep attachment to our countryside tempts us to believe that farming in the past was always at one with nature. In fact, it was more often brutally at odds.

Our national parks are ecological disasters. North Yorkshire's heather moors, for example, resulted from ruthless tree clearance. Pickering was the centre of a Royal hunting forest that would equal of the New Forest if it still survived. There was another up Wensleydale, so dense that they took to blowing a horn in Bainbridge to guide travellers.

Today, however, intensive farming brings change fast - and not always replacing one appealing landscape with another. Wildlife and good views haven't been the only victims, since farmers and farmworkers themselves have been driven off the land - 300,000 since subsidies began in 1947.

I believe it is our national parks and the extensive land holdings of the National Trust that provide the most promising pointers to the future. In both, the aim is to balance "proper" farming with care of the environment and its enjoyment by the public.

The expertise and experience built up in the national parks and National Trust should be tapped in the interests of the wider countryside. OK, the kinds of farming there are often very different. But a perhaps pertinent fact about foot-and-mouth is that it has had very little impact on the availability or price of food. That shows the scope for placing more emphasis on the environment. But not the whole emphasis, or even the most. If we get it right, good farming itself should bring harmony with nature.

MY recent reference to the go-ahead for grouse shooting in areas where footpaths remain closed brought three disbelieving phone calls. One was from a farmer facing difficulty getting permission to move a bull a few hundred yards.

Now preparations are in hand for the start of lowland shooting in October. Jeffrey Olstead, spokesman for the British Association for Shooting and Conservation, announces: "We are telling Defra that an efficient licensing system has to be in place well before the season starts.'' Note the language - "telling" Defra. Never mind that walkers are still waiting patiently to get into the same fields and woods where the shooters will be tramping. Or that the gooseberry growers of the Esk Valley cancelled their famous show "out of respect for the feelings'' of foot-and-mouth farmers - though to exhibit their gooseberries required no greater contact with farmland than a trip from their back gardens to a church hall.

Published: August 17, 2001