Belle that’s really sad. Luckily that hadn’t happened where I live, most farms here are still secure family farms. When one if the little guys gives up and sells up, usually the neighbouring family farm will take on the land.
The fields are usually bought up by land asset companies, and then leased to agribusinesses who turn up with gangs of workers to plant and harvest cashcrops or throw up polytunnels. Other than that, and the occasional tractor / sprayer through the year, there's never a soul in the fields.
This^ will become more common though if the vegan activist/plant based diet brigade get their way.
Some people seem to have this idea that if we didn’t eat animals, they’d be able to live in peace and everyone would be at one with nature.
But the reality that doesn’t cross most of these people’s minds is that without livestock farming, we wouldn’t have livestock.
Without livestock, there’d be no grass. No fields. The only reason we have grass is to feed animals, either for grazing or growing silage.
Without the need for livestock fields, we wouldn’t need field boundaries, so goodbye hedgerows and associated wildlife.
We also couldn’t grow (anywhere near) enough food just by converting grass fields to wheat or something. You’d need hydroponics and polytunnels to even come close - millions of acres of them.
It’s quite frightening to think how stupid and short-sighted some of these people are.