I know a farm up country from here pretty well. I won’t identify it, and you won’t be able to either. I have known the family for quite a few years, and enjoyed getting my knees under their table. Their farm is just like a hundred others in that area, but what is different is that I know them well, and like them, and have very good reasons to respect them. I found myself thinking about them after a conversation in another rural kitchen, where my hosts were trying to counter what I think they see as my prejudice against farmers by quoting various books much in circulation just now. The author of one of these books even spent some time travelling around in the smelly cab of a local knacker’s wagon, picking up ‘fallen stock’, and she produced an excellent work that you may find very helpful if you want to know what it is like to be a farmer, though if you feel tempted to empathise with any of their difficulties it would be well to remember that many of them are very rich indeed, in land, which always goes up in value, and very well supported by a subsidy system which guarantees them an income. There may be loneliness and depression in some far-flung farm houses, and sadness when they send their animals off to be sliced and ground up, but there is much money to be made, and you might find it utterly astonishing to look up on the internet the eye-watering subsidy payments that you and I have made to some of your very substantial farmer neighbours. In a country where most of us don’t own enough land to park a doormat, there has to be a limit to the possibility of empathising with subsidised landowners.
Peak Chicken
Peak Chicken
Peak Chicken
I know a farm up country from here pretty well. I won’t identify it, and you won’t be able to either. I have known the family for quite a few years, and enjoyed getting my knees under their table. Their farm is just like a hundred others in that area, but what is different is that I know them well, and like them, and have very good reasons to respect them. I found myself thinking about them after a conversation in another rural kitchen, where my hosts were trying to counter what I think they see as my prejudice against farmers by quoting various books much in circulation just now. The author of one of these books even spent some time travelling around in the smelly cab of a local knacker’s wagon, picking up ‘fallen stock’, and she produced an excellent work that you may find very helpful if you want to know what it is like to be a farmer, though if you feel tempted to empathise with any of their difficulties it would be well to remember that many of them are very rich indeed, in land, which always goes up in value, and very well supported by a subsidy system which guarantees them an income. There may be loneliness and depression in some far-flung farm houses, and sadness when they send their animals off to be sliced and ground up, but there is much money to be made, and you might find it utterly astonishing to look up on the internet the eye-watering subsidy payments that you and I have made to some of your very substantial farmer neighbours. In a country where most of us don’t own enough land to park a doormat, there has to be a limit to the possibility of empathising with subsidised landowners.