Sir, – Your issue of March 6, page 27, showed the tensions which many farmers must feel. The first article on precision farming using an example from the US, spoke of continuous maize-growing, for which the technique could save some 35 per cent on herbicide.

Continuous cropping has never been shown to be viable in this country, though I remember an example from the north Oxfordshire uplands of a nine-year rotation of seven years barley and two years tick beans. This was in 1962, and I never heard how successful the farmer had been. The older systems of rotation, beginning with the Norfolk four-course rotation, were set against continuous cropping – from experience.

The second article about Environmental Stewardship showed how tenant farmers seem to become the victims of a combination of political and economic forces. Surely the farmers are the best persons – knowing the land intimately as they do – to operate environmental stewardship. The tensions must arise when economic pressures urge the farmers to take more out of the land than they put back; that is, to be poor stewards of the environment which they would rather be nurturing according to their best farming skills.

ADRIAN BULL

Guisborough.