Too much has changed to turn the clock back to an age of low input, low output farming, and I should know. The countryside is in play as a commodity. Everyone is now expecting the CAP to change but without an agreed policy to supplant the current and admittedly flawed system. In this vacuum land management philosophies have become a good deal less cohesive. It is easy to destroy land use utility but much harder to recreate it.
Land managers are understandably a little confused.
Doubt represents cost and risk and affects management and land use. The response becomes more short term and tends to be opportunistic. Where fragmentation of farms and estates results, they frequently default to high value second or retirement homes with a few acres and capital starved ranch land beyond. Therefore the entire level of expectations within society as a whole and among land managers in particular has shifted. The rights of ownership from which much management control derives its authority are said to be a social construct.