Rural campaigner Colin Speakman considers how rapid technical, economic and social change will affect the Dales:

THIS is a beautiful time of year in the Yorkshire Dales, with abundant wild flowers in the limestone crannies and upland pastures, with the wonderful hay meadows at the top end of Wharfedale, Littondale, Ribblesdale or Swaledale at their colourful best.

It’s difficult to imagine that this beauty is not quite as timeless as it might seem. That special landscape of the Dales – so fittingly described as a careful balance between man and nature – is the result of centuries of careful husbandry. The complex patterns of drystone walls, scattered farms and isolated farmsteads represents a culture and system of agriculture and land management in the uplands going back to Anglian times.

But the labour intensive way of life that created this landscape is no longer economically sustainable. Efficient farming requires less people and greater economies of scale – large fields that can be cut for silage with bigger machines, fertiliser to improve grass yields but remove wild flowers and weeds. Two-hundred-year-old traditional stone barns may be picturesque, but if they can’t be used to store hay or stock, and are not in locations where they can be converted for housing or tourist use, they face inevitable decay into eventual unsightly dereliction.

Until recently in an area like the Yorkshire Dales National Park there were various schemes to help farmers to manage their land in ways to improve diversity and to retain key landscape features. Most important were the EU Common Agriculture Policy’s High Level and Entry Stewardship Schemes, covering 85 per cent of the National Park. Recent changes by UK Government mean that the scope and payment for such schemes have been drastically reduced and may disappear totally if Britain votes to leave the European Union.

Likewise the imaginative barns and walls schemes undertaken by the national park authority in partnership with English Heritage and the Yorkshire Dales Millennium Trust between 1998 and 2010 saved and protected over 500 traditional farm buildings and around 4,000 kilometres of drystone wall.

But with the exception of the current Heritage Lottery Funded Ingleborough Landscape Partnership scheme in the Ingleborough area and a much-reduced Rural Development Programme scheme, far less funding is now available to help maintain those iconic walls, barns and meadows.

So who is going to repair this cultural landscape in future years?

Britain is entering a period of rapid technical, economic and social change. Just as technical progress has removed millions of semi-skilled and manual industrial and engineering jobs, accelerating growth in new forms of computer technology, moist especially what is now called Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics means that computers can now do much of the routine thinking and decision making done by humans. Go into any large food store or stationers and you will find a machine to read a bar code and your debit card.

Already many thousands of white collar jobs are vanishing in financial services industries and administration. Even teachers may find that computers replace old fashioned classroom skills for certain kinds of learning. Driverless cars will be on Britain’s roads by 2020; not only cars but buses and lorries may soon be driverless, with huge implications for millions of driving and delivery jobs.

So how will people be employed? There will always be the wealthy and the elite technical managers – the computer programmers. Maybe Britain will move towards an 18th century model of a service economy, the equivalent of butlers, maids and gardeners to looks after the estates and yachts of the super wealthy. But there will also be an explosion of creative and innovative small businesses, including the arts. But not everyone can be a painter or a potter, a web designer, tourist guide or theatre critic with a cottage in the Dales and broadband.

What about the average person who doesn’t have specialist skills? There is already talk that rather than putting people on permanent job-seekers allowance, we should give everyone a basic living wage, and then encourage them to take on either lower paid jobs or voluntary work to give their lives purpose and meaning.

This is rather like we do with the over 65s already. Many older people now contribute massively to the real wealth of the United Kingdom in their capacity as carers and volunteers in a huge range of different organisations, including many different wildlife societies and conservation groups.

We also know that people with learning or physical disabilities can gain enormously from contact with the natural world, working in the outdoors, especially with domestic animals. Maybe the future in the Dales will be to encourage the national park and bodies like the Millennium Trust and other groups to develop schemes to bring young people out of the cities to work on the land, with farmers, learning new skills to develop their abilities. Not everyone should spend their lives, inactive, behind a computer screen. Restoring a wall or barn, planting trees or digging a pond requires a different, if undervalued, set of skills and intelligence.

And for those who take part share a growing sense of purpose, self-worth and achievement, reducing health bills and in some cases even costs of crime and rehabilitation.

A well as bringing purpose and meaning to lives otherwise blighted by failure and despair, such projects could help bring back the manpower that is so urgently needed to retain the barns, walls and flower rich meadows that help create our inspiring Dales landscapes.