© 2017 the Authors. Sociologia Ruralis © 2017 European Society for Rural Sociology. This article investigates aspects of farmers’ wellbeing in the context of their participation in an agro-environmental scheme (AES), the North Yorkshire Cornfield Flowers Project (CFP) in the North East of England. Recent developments in wellbeing studies have informed data collection and analysis. Ethnographic data was gathered via observation, field notes and semi-structured interviews with farmers and non-farmer volunteers. The article discusses how farmers’ social activity, identity, status and place belonging are enhanced through participation in CFP, and how this might promote their continued AES work. Recognising the potential for AES participation to enhance farmer's wellbeing may demonstrate added value of AES and strengthen the argument for AES funding once the UK leaves the European Union. There is currently little existing evidence in the literature to support this since with only a few exceptions, wellbeing has been characteristically neglected in rural studies research.

In the last two decades academic and policy interest in the economic growth potential of the cultural sector has risen
sharply in UK, as well as in other OECD countries. Alongside this there has been a shift in cultural policies away from
a focus on the public value of culture to the economic value of creativity. Where public funds are allocated to arts and
culture this is heavily and increasingly skewed towards London. Although there is wide recognition of the intrinsic value
of the arts and the inequalities of provision, culture is increasingly invoked as a narrowly instrumental concept for other
policy aims. The new discourses of creative economies have been slow to reach rural studies and where discussions of
the 'creative countryside' have taken place, notions of rural cultural value remain largely within an instrumentalist discourse.
This paper is an attempt to shift the discussion to new ground by exploring cultural value through the lens of a
social justice approach to wellbeing, based on the capabilities approach, using material from an AHRC funded year-long
knowledge exchange project with rural arts organisations in Northumberland. The paper argues against the narrow instrumentalism
of culture as a delivery mechanism for other policy agendas and offers a different conceptual framework based
on social justice for considering the value of culture in conceptions of a 'good life'. It finds that using such an approach
allows a different conceptual space and a clearer normative basis for understanding and arguing for the intrinsic value of
culture in rural development.