The phrase "severely disadvantaged area" sounds like it might have something to do with grim inner-city blight, crime and dislocation.

Oddly, it is the label attached to some of the most inspiring and exhilarating landscapes in Britain, and in Yorkshire in particular. The uplands are among our great national treasures for reasons that are practical and aesthetic. As well as being some of the best walking country in the world, they produce much of our clean water, their peatlands act as immense stores of carbon and they are home to some of our most prized wildlife.

To an outsider's eyes, the North York Moors appears to be more like an extremely advantaged area – picturesque, tranquil, dramatic, threatening – depending on the weather's mood, which can change in an instant. Ted Hughes said "moors are a stage for the performance of heaven" and the numbers who come here to relax and reconnect with nature vote with their feet to endorse that opinion.

Those of us who extract ourselves from agitating, smelly city snarl-ups to spend time in the serenity of the uplands see it as a free benefit. A lung-clearing ramble through the heather with only the birds for company does not cost anything, beyond the fuel
for getting there.

But the view and all the things we love about it – the sheep dotting the landscape, the heather, the sturdy stone farmsteads – has a price. We used to pay it indirectly through taxes to subsidise farm production. It helped keep the men and women working on land unfriendly to farming, managing it in the traditional way and in the sort of trim we outsiders delight to see.

From our perspective, it is an idyll. For the farmers, it's not like that. When you work in what is classified as a Severely Disadvantaged Area (SDA), making a living is hard. Compared with lowland farmers, the weather is worse and the soils poorer. Yields are lower and the remoteness means it costs more to get products to market. The growing seasons on the North York Moors last 190-200 days. On the flatlands of the Humber estuary, it's about 275 days. They are lambing in February down here – up on the moors, it's April.

So to compensate, in addition to the production subsidy, upland farmers received money from pots that were part agricultural and part environmental, such as the Hill Farm Allowance (HFA), introduced in 1975. This cash also had an implicit social function – to maintain communities at a viable level in these often remote parts.

That picture has altered. Subsidies were "de-coupled" from farm production. Public money is now used to give farmers the incentive to be "countryside stewards". This switch in strategy was rapid, despite the fact that it ushered in a profound cultural change requiring a process of adjustment that could last a generation.

The minimum farmers needed was a period of stability in order to minimise the difficulties of grant changes and bureaucratic costs. The opposite happened. It coincided with plummeting prices for sheep, finished beef and lamb.

Over a period of five years, average net incomes on cattle and sheep hill farms fell by 70 per cent. In the uplands of the Peak District, it was discovered that without subsidies the average hill farmer would be in debt by £2,300 a year.

But the new outcomes for which the hill farmer was to be rewarded were harder to quantify than in the old subsidy days of guaranteed prices. There is now a phrase "eco system services" – which must sound opaque even to the bureaucrats of the UN Millennium Assessment Board who invented it. It refers to the value of what a farmer provides for the public benefit. It might mean how his farm performs in a bigger picture, such as retaining carbon in the peatland, flood prevention or contributing in indirect ways to the tourists' enjoyment of the great outdoors.

This system within which hill farmers have to work is highly bureaucratic. What appears straightforward to someone sitting behind a desk may appear less so to people who work 24/7 dealing with livestock and whose lives are governed more by the exigencies of the weather. Red tape goes out in swathes to what on the moors are typically tiny enterprises. They have become practised at managing it, but they don't like it.

A new scheme has ambitions to turn round this often demoralising picture. It aims to put the focus back where farmers think it should be – on the production of food. This will not be like the old days when guaranteed payments, irrespective of demand, led to surpluses.

A different customer-oriented mind-set is required now. The challenge put to them is to co-operate in finding a premium product to launch a new North York Moors food brand. It will catch the shoppers' eyes because it embodies all those desirable qualities which are linked in the public mind with the National Park.

By a process of brand association, it will persuade consumers that it is worth paying extra for food whose excellence is derived from the unique landscape on which it was bred. All those feel-good impressions connected with the North York Moors will be brought to the promotion of a pound of lamb or beef or a packet of sausages.

To market and exploit it effectively, farmers will have to work together. This has not been their strong point in the past, but this is the challenge laid down by the Prince of Wales and his Business in the Community operation. Earlier this year, the Prince visited some of the farms up here on one of his "seeing is believing" trips. These invite senior business leaders to examine a difficult rural situation at first hand and think how they might bring their experience to bear on resolving it.

Prince Charles has tried to encourage a similar approach within other National Parks, urging their upland farmers to adopt a more enterprising and commercial approach. His message has been taken
up with greatest alacrity by the Peak District National Park, which is already selling local food under its Peak Food label.

The park is branding itself through the Peak District Environmental Quality Mark (EQM), the first of its kind in the country. The mark gives to the consumer the assurance that what they are purchasing has been produced under the umbrella of the best environmental practices.

If sales under the EQM mark increase, waverers will also be persuaded of the economic benefits of taking an environmentally-friendly approach to production.

The outcome of the Prince's visit on the North York Moors has been the forming of a steering group of suppliers, retailers and businessmen who have commissioned a scoping survey into what seems the best product to launch the new brand. The result is expected at the end of this month.

The Yorkshire Post supports Prince Charles's initiative on the North York Moors and will be reporting on its progress in the coming months.

New scheme will help to keep farms and the landscape alive

The Expert

Michael Graham is in a position to see both sides of the picture. A farmer for 18 years, managing upland farms in the Yorkshire Dales and in Northumberland, he is now the assistant director of recreation and park management for the North York Moors National Park. He moved into this job after 12 years in the conservation department, so he knows in detail about the tricky interface where the economic outlook of a farmer may rub up against the sometimes different priorities of those with the interests of the tourist or recreation-seeker at heart.

"We need to ensure businesses here are inherently profitable – we are about trying to sustain the local economy," he says. "The decline has been going on for decades, but you get to a critical point when something has to be done.

"These farmers have gone through a lot of pain. It's a huge amount of work when your livestock is on open moorland. You have to be dedicated. You have to give your life for your livestock.

"The moorland is a severely disadvantaged area. I'd say that here subsidies make up about 30 per cent of income. Remember that these payments are re-cycled in the local economy – the farmers are key players in the local economy.

"The Hill Farm Allowance continues to 2010 and after that, the same pot of money will be available, although how it will be divided has not been decided. There will be environmental payments like the Upland Entry Level Scheme and without some environmental payment a lot would be inclined to leave.

"Quite a few have taken flocks off the hills – that's either through retirement or ill-health, they are not going into other businesses. We lost 11 flocks during foot and mouth and only a handful of farmers put them back on. We have about 30 dairy farms – from about 300 we had 40 years ago.

"The nature of the job has changed. There was a social element to going to the market, but all the outdoor markets have gone, at least five since I came. They were not that profitable for auction companies, and foot and mouth saw them off. There's more deadweight selling direct to abbatoirs now.

"There are more part-time farmers – men going out and having another job – and there are far more working wives these days. When tenant farms do come up, not many are let as discrete units. The trend is for people with cash buying up smaller farms and doing something else with them."

How does he see Prince Charles's initiative progressing? "The first job is to find out what type of product we have for sale. Then we need to exploit a niche market by creating a strong quality label to get behind. It will be meat that's got a big quality welfare stamp and credibility – lamb from off the high moorland, fed on heather. The idea is to cut out the unneccesary middle man and lay the sales stress on better welfare, local abbatoirs and reducing food miles. It will start small in the hope that it will develop into a significant outlet – we've got to learn to walk before we can run."

The project is limited to the area of the National Park,
and from their conservation perspective, the big thing is to see the moors maintained by traditional management which means keeping sheep on the moors and the heather lightly grazed to stop trees from growing.

The product that is chosen initially will have to be assured to give customers confidence. But they think it's better to tap into an existing farm assurance scheme than go down the ambitious Peak District route and set up the equivalent of their EQM mark.

This is not a one-size-fits-all solution because each national park has its own unique issues. "We are all quite different, with our own strengths and weaknesses and challenges," says Michael Graham.

For participating farmers, he says the new North York Moors scheme should boost morale as well as incomes.

"It will help create stability and give them some control over markets. It will make them realise they can do things, rather than just have them happen to them."