FARMERS who are young, fit, prepared to weather the financial storms of farming and keep in tune with new conservation ideas are few and far between.

There are only 15 in Worcestershire receiving grants under the farm stewardship scheme and one of them is Andrew Nott, who farms 285 acres of land at Rock.

Mr Nott is the youngest in a large well-known farming family, but is beginning to feel he is a rare breed.

At the age of 32 he finds ''hideous'' the national statistic that the average age of British farmers is 60.

For his own part, and despite the present difficulties for farmers, he would not have any other life.

He felt the same as a student at Stourport High School and Harper Adams Agricultural College, Newport, between 1986 and 1989.

It was not that he was not interested in financial security. As a single man he had relatively expensive tastes like skiing and motorcross racing.

Now he is the father of 17-month-old twins Alice and Joshua.

He also admits to a tinge of envy when, with the Astley Discussion Group of farmers he joins outings ''to see how other people earn a living'' running breweries and other businesses more lucrative than his own.

But Mr Nott has a natural enjoyment of his surroundings and believes this essential to surviving the present-day stress of farming.

It led him this summer to win through to the second round in the 1999 CWS Farms Group Silver Lapwing Award of the Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group (FWAG), a competition to find the farmer who had achieved most benefit for wildlife and landscape on a commercially run farm.

His interest in conservation was reinforced at college when he wrote a thesis on farm woodland management and conservation.

The farming tradition previously in his family, as dictated by the Government of the day, was to produce as much food as possible from every inch of land.

So Mr Nott is today putting back the hedges and trees that were pulled out then.

So far he has planted a kilometre of hedging with 6,000 plants of all varieties as part of a ten-year programme he is committed to under the stewardship scheme.

Working 12 hours a day running the commercial side of the farm, he has also set aside time to plant 5,000 hardwood trees on top of his 50,000 commercial Christmas trees he has planted as a crop.

Other schemes to encourage insects, wild animals and herbs include retaining strips of grassland between hedges and arable areas, a system which he believes reduces the need to use insecticides on crops.