By Sarah Mukherjee BBC environment correspondent, in Lincolnshire

Margins are tight in the modern British countryside

A study by the Commission for Rural Communities has found living in the countryside costs �60 a week more than in towns and cities and that rural communities are changing faster than many people can adapt.

Local people say there's a lot of sky in Lincolnshire.

Noel Coward may have famously commented on the flatness of Norfolk, but for true eye-level countryside, you have to come here to the Fens.

Towns and villages rise like islands from an ocean of peaty soil, dark as espresso and fertile as the Garden of Eden, soil that has been clawed back from the Wash by everyone from the Romans to the Dutch - whose windmills still dot the countryside. The soil is so rich that it perfumes the air for miles.

Wealthy past

These days, there are other, more modern symbols of the soil's bounty. Large, boxy processing and packaging factories, brightly illuminated against the slate-grey sky (there's also a lot of rain), where the broccoli, cabbage and other produce is washed, packed and sent across the country.

There was a point when this abundance made Lincolnshire a wealthy county - the great spires of the churches, like the Boston Stump, the largest parish church in the country, are testament to that.

Many believe migrant labour is putting a strain on resources

But, as anyone on the "field-end" rather than the "fork-end" of the food supply chain will tell you, these days margins are tight and competition fierce.

There's very little money around in this part of the world, and, as Alison Fairman from the Boston Citizens' Advice bureau points out, limited incomes don't go far.

"There are targets to reduce car use by 30% - you simply couldn't do that in the countryside" she says. "A lot of the work around here is shift-based.

"There are very few buses altogether, and certainly none that will get you to work at five in the morning. And if you're elderly, how do you get in to get your pension when there's hardly any public transport?"

Some community workers say they're depressed that the same problems - affordable housing, transport, lack of services - come up year after year, with nothing really being done to address them.

Others say it's difficult to get policy-makers to take rural poverty seriously, when it's often dispersed among attractive and mainly affluent communities.

'Hidden away'

"Figures suggest nearly one in three people in rural areas live in poverty," says the Reverend Graham Jones, the Rural Dean for the Methodist and United Reformed Churches.

"That's almost the equivalent of a city the size of Birmingham. If all those people lived in the same area, there would be an outcry, but because they're hidden away in the countryside, not a lot is done."

One way local employers keep costs down is through cheap, transient and migrant labour - and this touches at a huge, but little discussed, rural issue.

Local people say that immigration has put a huge strain on the community - on local health and education services, on the small amount of available affordable housing, and on wages.

But it's an issue they feel politicians are not addressing.

Tuesday's report says the number of non-UK migrant workers in rural areas doubled between 2002/3 and 2005/6 - and there are those here in Lincolnshire who fear the tensions such immigration creates may soon become the biggest rural problem of all.