Housing: put simply, where will more people live, and won’t more buildings spoil what they came for? Farmers’ views on house building vary. Robert Helliwell favours strict planning controls, lest villages get too big and lose cohesiveness.

Mark Hudson wants small villages to grow incrementally, adding affordable and social housing. Simon Gourlay is with Hudson, and upset at how often the planning process gets in the way of balanced development. Environmentalist Chris Baines, concerned about rural services, looks forward to larger rural settlements that can sustain shops, jobs, schools, social support systems, waste management and so on, giving the countryside greater self-sufficiency.

His vision chimes with the emphasis on market towns from Richard Wakeford at the Countryside Agency . Looking to the future from under “a hat of extreme optimism”, Colin Tudge “can see a vibrant countryside again: real rural communities built around small mixed farms, with all the things that real communities need and a rich wildlife too”. While acknowledging that it’s “extremely expensive to make the countryside as comfortable as the cities,” he insists that this is still “the sine qua non for all the world”.

New technologies can make things easier, particularly modern IT, which “puts everyone in the world in touch with everybody else, and can remove the sense of isolation that country people now suffer from – not so much in Britain, where isolation is a luxury, but certainly in places like Brazil. And many more people live in places like Brazil.” Tudge’s “enlightened agriculture” is all about “working to the strengths of landscape, crops, and livestock; and producing the kinds of foods that meet human nutritional needs, and can support the world’s best – meaning local – cuisines”.

More locally produced fruit and vegetables certainly feature high on the menu for Vicki Hird. And farmers of all hues fume that domestic produce suffers in a price-dominated market against imported goods grown without the same quality controls. Sam Fairs, afraid we could all be eating only imported food by 2030, warns that “to keep food safety and quality you have to pay for it”.

And Wakeford, for all his belief in linking our farmers’ support payments to the public benefits they deliver, knows this still entails producing saleable products. Which depends, ultimately, “on consumers being willing to revert to a more seasonal diet – and pay for quality produce” under initiatives like the Countryside Agency’s Eat the View campaign. Peter Melchett, banging the organic drum, is another advocate of more local procurement.

“The disaster that has been agricultural development over the last 50 years,” he says, will continue unless we change what and how we farm. Besides calling for action on higher nutritional standards, he favours taxes on pesticides and nitrogen fertiliser (based on its high cost in carbon emissions). So does Rupert Howes. What’s more, Howes wants the proceeds “recycled to farmers through targeted support for the delivery of specific environmental goods”.

Which would beef up the impact of shifting EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) support payments from price and production subsidies to agri-environment schemes. Our panellists agree that this ‘decoupling’ – which Howes sees as “absolutely critical” – is part of the current CAP reforms. But is it being taken fast or far enough? Hird wants 70% of CAP funds spent on agri-environment measures, compared with 10% at present.

You’re not just what you eat

There’s more to farm incomes than food prices and subsidies. There’s rural tourism. It’s part of the mix in Alistair Leake’s ‘village of multiple income sources’. For Baines it’s a big opportunity to promote local produce, while Melchett looks forward to the spin-off in demand for higher animal welfare standards as consumers come more into contact with how their meat is made.

Other ‘non-food crops’, besides tourism, include farming for energy – a bit of an ‘apple pie’ issue for our panel. No voices raised here against biomass, growing fuel oil crops or harvesting the renewable wind. And rural sustainability doesn’t stop with farm incomes.

There’s the whole issue of local services. There’s the question of cutting energy use, and reducing emissions. Or what about conserving wildlife in the countryside? Strong claims can be made – and Melchett makes them – that organic farming is best for biodiversity.

Helliwell, meanwhile, emphasises that mixed farming is a tremendous help here, and is concerned at what he sees as its possible disappearance (on grounds of economics) from the Peaks. Hirst, however, is adamant that what we’re seeing isn’t farming making the landscape barren, but just a shift in what wildlife our farms support. Much fertile ground for debate. And just as fertile, our panellists came up with suggested actions on a range of other topics too. Here’s a flavour of what else they put in the pot:

Chris Baines, environmentalist
Sam Fairs, Suffolk farmer
Sir Simon Gourlay, former president of the National Farmers’ Union
Robert Helliwell, Peak District tenant farmer
Vicki Hird, policy director of campaign group Sustain
Richard Hirst, farmer and director of the Forum for Sustainable Farming
Rupert Howes, head of Forum for the Future’s Sustainable Economy Programme
Mark Hudson, president of the Country, Land and Business Association
Peter Kindersley, publisher turned organic farmer
Alistair Leake, project manager of the Game Conservancy Trust’s Allerton Project
Lord Peter Melchett, policy director, Soil Association, and former Greenpeace director
Colin Tudge, science writer
Richard Wakeford, Countryside Agency chief executive