Supporting brown hare populations in agricultural landscapes requires specific farming practices that create habitat and reduce mortality from agricultural operations.
Brown hare welfare in agricultural landscapes depends on the sum of many individual farm management decisions made across thousands of holdings. A farmer who leaves field margins uncultivated, delays cutting until after leveret mobility, and maintains hedgerows provides welfare support for hares at the farm scale. An entire watershed of farms making similar decisions creates genuinely viable hare populations. The welfare benefit is real and measurable but depends on critical mass — isolated islands of good practice in a hostile agricultural landscape cannot sustain viable hare populations. Landscape-scale coordination through agri-environment schemes is therefore the most impactful welfare intervention for agricultural wildlife.