IN response to Concerned Townie (CT) and his comments on the countryside, which has sparked a debate in Viewpoint, I think CT and I must have crossed paths recently on the Caistor High Street.

The farms we pass are well maintained and many of them produce both high quality crops and, I believe, top class field sports.

The field margins he cannot find are out there. With approx 300,000 thousand acres, they are not always where you or I can see them.

As for the brown hare population, well, there are a lot less I am afraid than 50 years ago but still about one million.

Again they are there, as most of us have seen the terrible amount of road kills, far more than are ever now shot.

The area at Habrough you describe, I was at that very place the other day. It is mainly oilseed rape, but I did see a flight line of wood pigeon feeding on a poor area of it, two skylarks, a goldfinch, some rooks and a carrion crow.

Not too bad for five minutes on the roadside, no foxes though, but you don't usually see them in the middle of the afternoon.

So CT, don't despair, we all know there are not as many trees and hedges filled with birds as we all would like because our homes are on that space.

Ken Wilkinson (full address supplied).

I HAVE read with interest the recent debate in Viewpoint on the state of Britain's countryside and must admit that I am left wondering just where the respondents to Concerned Townie's letter are burying their heads.

For hundreds of years the face of Britain's countryside remained unchanged but since the late 1940s, and mostly as a result of Government policy, it has faced an ongoing destruction.

In the last 60 years, 95 per cent of traditional hay meadows have been destroyed and at least half of those remaining have been damaged; 99 per cent of lowland heath has vanished, half of our fens and mires have disappeared, four-fifths of limestone grasslands and chalk downlands have gone, 90 per cent of ponds have been filled in and half of Britain's ancient woodlands have been turned into farmland or conifer plantations.

The truth is that the traditional farmer with his knowledge of the land and seasons tending his patch of land is now largely a myth. He has been replaced by the Agri-business. Agri-business farming demands that anything which stands in the way of crop production is destroyed and treats the land as nothing more than a factory floor to be used for the most intensive methods of farming and liberally sprayed with a cocktail of fungicides, pesticides, herbicides and fertilisers.

These intensive farming methods are leading to an unprecedented degradation of agricultural land. The production and quality of any crop is dependent upon the quality of the top soil in which it grows.

Top soil is often only a few inches thick and it takes hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years for nature to produce just one inch of it. Once the top soil is gone the land becomes desert capable of producing nothing. Britain's temperate climate means that there should be no erosion of top soil and yet erosion is occurring across the UK at a rate of between one and 11 tonnes per year, a direct result of the overuse of fertilisers and lack of crop rotation.

The agricultural policy at the start of this destruction was put in place immediately following the deprivations and rationing of the Second World War with the aim of creating a self-sufficient nation capable of feeding itself with the produce of its own land. Yet now we are probably further from self sufficiency than we were in the 1930s.

Take a walk along the fruit and vegetable aisles of any supermarket and see how much of the produce is actually grown in the UK.

Angela Greenfield, Edge Avenue, Grimsby.