However, his grandfather and father put in a lot of work before him – including getting an agreement from the Coal Board, as was, to make up for the fact that a corner of Hazel House Farm subsided below the level of the River Calder when the tunnels under it were abandoned.

The Lodges and their landlords – a trust related to Viscount Pollington, Earl of Mexborough – could have taken a straight compensation payment but invested in the future instead, so the Coal Authority, which inherited what was left after privatisation, is still obliged to run a pumping house shifting up to 15,000 gallons an hour from the sump field.

The farm is an oasis in the West Yorkshire conurbation – crossed by the Calder, a disused coal-truck track, a network of drainage ditches and the habitual short cuts of estate dwellers on the edge of Methley, just off the M62 between Leeds and Castleford. It was the need to come to terms with all this which took David Lodge down the stewardship route. He is another Yorkshire finalist for the Tye Trophy for good environmental practice, to be presented at the Great Yorkshire Show. The nominations are made by the Farming & Wildlife Advisory Group, FWAG, from among its members.

Some farmers still get a bit irritated by media gush about environmental heroes. There ought to be an award for reliable production of food, they think. But the point of the Tye competition is to recognise farmers who qualify both ways and Mr Lodge is a good example. When it comes to crops, he does it straight and simple – winter-planted wheat, "horse beans", barley and rapeseed, all sprayed as required and sold through the usual dealers, without branding or a website or a niche market.

His progress in stewardship has been similarly practical. He has a tenth of the farm in the higher level scheme, HLS, but he made his first moves in 1998, when even ELS was not invented but it was clear future farm support would depend on some environmental effort. One of his boundaries is a mile and a half of flood levee along the Calder, which needed a better sward to hold it together.

That need suggested sheep to scratch away the moss and drop some fertiliser. Sheep meant fencing and fencing might as well have a hedge growing up for when it falls down.

The levee top was a natural footpath. Bowing to the inevitable, Mr Lodge made it easy to access and hedged off a cross-farm link to the old railway line. Where stiles were necessary for walkers, he built little gates underneath for dogs. He invented a simple way of shutting the dog gates off to sheep, with a diagonal stick, but the public keep taking the sticks, so he has to think again.

The public are the main problem in public access. Mr Lodge watches their dogs putting up ground-nesting birds and wonders if all the money and effort on behalf of the RSPB have been worthwhile. But generally, he gets some satisfaction out of stewardship and says the administrative side is "not that hard".

The satisfaction comes in the form of kingfishers zipping over his drainage becks, for example, and a partridge population healthy enough to give up the odd one for the pot.

The money is well earned, he feels – and reckons you would too if you had planted 900 metres of hedge with a spade, to mention just one job.

A nice little eccentricity of the farm is a line of "cricket bat willows", planted by a local bat maker in exchange for a share of the products when the trees are harvested at 15-20 years old. See kippaxcricket.co.uk/ for details of the offer.

Mr Lodge, 51, did an HND in agriculture at Cirencester and worked with his father until it was his turn to take the tenancy.

But he has encouraged his sons to qualify for something else before they even think about it. His wife works in a school. He can call a neighbour's lad for occasional help but manages most of the work himself. The good times ended in 1994, he says, after the EEC became the European Union and somehow knocked down the price of UK wheat. He started a business teaching forklift and digger skills to make up the loss.

"I quite enjoy the company it brings," he said. "It can be lonely sometimes, growing crops."

He is into minimal cultivation as far as possible – simply because he has a lot of sticky land – and can no longer think of anything about traditional ploughing that he misses. He deals with the problem of slugs in the rape trash by chopping the material and burying it as part of the surface preparation.

He sells his wheat for fodder, starch and alcohol, having decided milling wheat is not worth it when price is set against yield. And he will not be surprised if others come to the same conclusion now the mycotoxins problem is added to the equation.

DH Lodge & Son, the farming side of Hazel House Farm, and A1 Forklift & Plant Training, are both at 01977 515384.