A NORTH Yorkshire farm is celebrating 25 years of wildlife conservation.

The late John Webster's pioneering work of mixing conservation with conventional farming was an inspiration to countless others and his work has been carried on by his sons, Simon and Henry.

Last week, a conference and farm visit marked the anniversary.

Mr Webster agreed to his 275-acre Hopewell House Farm at Knaresborough becoming one of the original ten Countryside Commission demonstration farms in 1979.

At last week's conference, the chairman Bill Cowling paid tribute to Mr Webster whom he first met many years ago: "His enthusiasm for conservation and working it into conventional farming was amazing. He sowed the seeds in my mind as to what a wonderful thing it was, and it appealed to a huge number of other farmers at that time."

The Countryside Commission involvement ended some years ago, since when the farm has been supported by the Yorkshire Agricultural Society, co-ordinated by North Yorkshire Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group.

Mr Cowling is chairman of the YAS grants and education committee. Its involvement has included arranging surveys of the flora and fauna over the years.

"It is very valuable to know what the overall effect is for the wider community and wild-life," he said, adding that Mr Webster had a great impact on changing attitudes to conservation among both farmers and government.

Mr Cowling said farmers had to work with the Government, whose new schemes were potentially very important as sources of funding. It would provide an incentive for some to get on board with conservation and for others to get involved with greater enthusiasm.

On a wider issue, Mr Cowling said there was no doubt many consumers bought on price, but there was a growing group willing to pay a little more for food produced in a transparent way. He did not necessarily mean organic, but conventional farming, where fertilisers and sprays were used correctly.

By including conservation in the farming system there could be scope for it to be included in the British food label, which could provide a small premium.

"Most of the imported food which comes into this country is not transparent," said Mr Cowling. It was difficult to get supermarkets to say where it was from and they often had limited knowledge of how it was produced.

"If we can get our conservation involved, it will be a great bonus because we need to sell our food to the British consumer," he said. "We are not self sufficient in most types of food, we import great amounts - beef in particular, where we are probably not quite 50pc self-sufficient, which I think is very sad."