to wonder why people have become so detached from the countryside?

[petswinprizes]

Inspired partly by the badger nests mentioned elsewhere, and partly from a question about the 'dead, black crop in the field' from the head teacher of a rural school (field beans, in case you're wondering), why is so little known about the countryside?

When children are small, its all Tractor Ted, Big Barn Farm, stories about animals in farmyards, then as soon as they get to school, whoosh, nothing.

How can we all consume so much, and have so little knowledge about where it comes from and how it is grown?

I think the gulf is really worrying. A farmer friend had problems recently with people riding quad bikes on an 'empty' field. The fact that it had been seeded passed them by.

Conference, that is AWFUL!

It certainly is Catkisser. To some extent I blame the adverts on TV. All those words like wholesome, fresh, pure and so on disguise the reality.
I've lost count of the number of visitors I've had who got out of their car and make remarks about 'fresh country smells'. The nearby farm has livestock and sometimes they pong a bit.

My city dwelling mates do this too. I grew up on a cattle farm and now live right next to one. The smell is homely and natural to me. But when my mates get out the car it's "what the fuck is that smell?" Fair enough if they aren;t used to it - but I don't see what's so dreadful about it.

As a previous poster said - If I had to choose between stepping in cow/sheep/horse shit and dog shit I know which I'd choose!

Conference, your post inspires me to speak my mind!

I'm often really shocked by the apparent arrogance that goes with general ignorance about rural life and farming.

I guess there's long been urban snobbishness towards rural people and derision of rural life. Cheap food (cheap meat, in particular), food wastage, etc. probably contribute to ideas that food 'just is', rather than is because it is produced, at no small cost and effort.

I think that popular children's literature, or the fact that for many people, consuming that literature at an appropriate age for it (as toddlers!) is the last they really 'learn' about rural life possibly plants some kind of seed of belief that rural life really is that 'simple'! I think possibly the fact that that's the last that many people 'learn' about animals may also contribute to sentimental, uninformed views about animals that do little to help animal welfare.

I also think that for many people, agricultural communities have become an easy scapegoat: an idea of a folk-devil bogeyman responsible far all sorts of evils: backward looking, lazy, killing pretty foxes whilst the crops grow all by themselves, etc, etc.

... unless, of course, them townsfolk get a bit rich, in which case the countryside becomes a cute little playground for the weekends a few people really do pop out of town in the 4x4s to sit and watch the flowers grow...

Yes, those enormous fucking things that fall to pieces if you get the wheels dirty! Oh how I love those.

I have lived in the middle of nowhere, single lane tracks, snowed in, frozen in, flooded in. I drive a little sports car and have never got stuck. But I have had to rescue a 4bee from a snowy verge.

Lots of people driving those enormo-car things recently (the ones that look like Stormtroopers from Star Wars). They have no idea on how wide they are. Can be really, really scary to drive passed.

Actually, cities and the suburbs are a great introduction to the worst kind of fox, so at least we've got that in common!

Got to admit that I am surprised by the lack of knowledge about where chips come from.

Though am equally surprised that people don't often realise that a cow needs to have a calf to produce milk, but chickens don't need a cockerel to lay eggs.

How can a bottle of milk be cheaper than a bottle of water?

Why is full fat milk the work of the devil, when other foods that are less than 5% are a fantastic, healthy, low fat option?

And does anybody else worry that we're only a couple of days away from massive food shortages? And if imports were compromised, how long would it be before all of the animals/crops were stolen to eat with no thought put into sustainability?

I live on the outskirts of my town, I could get in my car and drive to a farm in ten minutes but that doesn't make me an expert on farming or the countryside. When I was a kid I had parents who taught me things, what the things I ate were, where they come from and more importantly, how to cook them. Perhaps other parents could do the same and if they don't know themselves, make the effort to learn! If parents did that maybe we wouldn't be facing an obesity epidemic with children brought up on a diet of Turkey twizzlers etc.

I was brought up in sheep farming country and I now live in arable countryside.

In 12 years of schooling I don't think, DD1 (or her slightly younger sister) have had one lesson or one visit connected to the farming activity going on all around them.

Much of it is large scale commercial farming, so most of them aren't from farming families, so they don't know about what's out their windows from their parents.

Wheat, forage maize and strawberries don't appear in children's books likes sheep and cows do.

I've looked in our local library and on the web for basic stuff on arable farming and how a combine works, it's really difficult to find.

I also have feeling I've seen field beans and wondered what that 'dead' crop is too.

I do know the basics of sheep farming because I had two DFs one who had about 20 sheep and another who had 500!

Petswinprizes wrote
And does anybody else worry that we're only a couple of days away from massive food shortages? And if imports were compromised, how long would it be before all of the animals/crops were stolen to eat with no thought put into sustainability?

I do. I've mentioned it lots of times when we've had threads about population and housing. Fellow posters have often pointed out that there is still lots of countryside left that hasn't yet been built on. The trouble is that the land that is best to build on is often the most productive agriculturally. If I had my way there would be no building at all on grades 1 & 2 land and I'd have a presumption against 3a too. We've seen how vulnerable western Europe is to fuel shortages and it could easily happen to food too.

Sheep can be fucking scary in numbers. I had a load of them chase me and a friend across a field once when out jogging! They're mostly lovely though I do love the smell of cows. Not cow crap, but that sweet smell they have :)

It is scary how much people don't know, or just don't think about. A few years ago there was a program on the telly about a project a farmer ran where some of the poorer disadvantaged kids were sent to the farm for a week or so, not to do hard labour or anything like that (unless bottle-feeding lambs is hard labour, in which case I'll do it all day!), it was a break / holiday type thing. Some of the kids had absolutely no idea that meat came from these animals or that things like carrots grew in the ground. They were totally detached from it. All they saw was meat in plastic wrapping from a supermarket, and their parents had never taught them.

The rural 'idyll' is seriously fucking muddy with millions of insects and grotesque looking slugs.

I've had my allotment about 8 years now and I'm still regularly grossed out by just how filthy everything gets.

And that's an allotment, real countryside is all sorts of filth

I'm a total woose but even I do not find a field of sheep remotely scary! But my friend does and I try not to laugh (sorry - I'm not being mean, it's just they are so scared of us)

Am I the only one that finds a field of cows scary?

I understand why people think knowledge of the countryside is important. I think a well rounded education should cover the basics. Sadly our education system in the UK seems to be about practising to pass an exam to obtain an advantage at job interviews. Learning about things is not a high priority.

It's not just ignorance about the countryside either. I've had to explain the difference between a gas and electric cooker to an adult who just knew you pressed things and it got hot.

Personally I'd love to reduce the population and have us live in villages and small towns where the kids would be able to roam amongst field and woods with animals everywhere. (though of course someone has to work in a factory to produce wide screen TVs and such). Kids need freedom to explore and to get dirty sometimes. You can always hose them down when they get home.

But as others have touched on it's just not like that. You live in a city and you don't have access to all that and never will. Most of the countryside is either someone's estate or an open-air food factory.
Do landowners even want more people tramping round their fields and getting in the way?

For most of us, knowing how to get milk from a badger or when to pick the fruit from cheese trees is for specialists, just as knowing how to fly a plane is. Some basic knowledge is important - which end of the plane is the front end and not to stick your head in the engine, but that's about it.

Do urban people think foxes are pretty? You're much more likely to get close to a fox in the town than the countryside.

I don't think people in general know much about the business of farming, but when the dc were little it seemed that every other birthday party was at a 'farm park'. Never have so many children fed so many goats.

I think the main difference between now and 30-40 years ago is that food is more likely to be cleaned and prepared before it is sold. Food is available out of season, but on the other hand every time you turn on a TV or open a colour supplement, there is somebody to tell you about seasonal food or foraging.

It is partly to do with lack of respect.

Food is cheap now. In the 1950s people would spend 30% of their income on food, 30%! A leg of lamb or a few chickens to roast was an expense, many people could not afford to eat meat every day. These days I think less than 10% of our income goes on food.

It is cheap now, we don't respect it, or its source

I have had people in our village complain about noisy cows (they ARE noisy when their calves are removed from them, poor cows), but these are the cows on the field that everyone campaigned to keep rural, and undeveloped.

Same wight eh chicken farm, the smell in summer was quite...strong (and the flies!), but IMO that si part of country life.

A lot of people would like to live in a sanitised version of "the countryside", not the real thing.

I always saw the big Countryside march (against banning fox hunting) as a moment where country people and city people realised they did not see eye to eye. Many country people do not feel represented by the government (even the Tories are all urbanites)

Sad really.

I dunno. The "countryside" is pretty much trampled into my kitchen floor, at the moment.

And irony of ironies, we were only able to afford to live in a nice village in the countryside because of 10 years of hard slog in the big city, working in finance and IT....

It's a bit different up here in the Northeast. Even in the big towns and cities, you're never far from the countryside. Where I lived in Gateshead, though it was suburban sprawl, looked over a valley (full of industrial estate and the A1) to fields and woodland on the far side. My halls of residence, right by the centre of Newcastle, were on town moor land, which was populated by cows for much of the year.

And here in East Durham mining villages, houses are dirt cheap. Cattle are probably outnumbered by horses and ponies (the tradition of pit ponies has been maintained and some people still use a pony and cart as transport!) but we have lots of sheep and fields are mostly bright yellow in Spring. I do wonder how many people are aware of what the bright yellow stuff is, mind.

Just to add - the countryside here isn't postcard pretty. It's quite gnarly.

Countryside ain't fashionable innit?

When did you last see a product described as having rural styling - as opposed to the ubiquitous urban styling? Unless it was a John Deer tractor perhaps...

I'm north east too and IMO it's the most stunning countryside in England. The moors on the Durham/Northumberland border are beautiful and the closer you drive to the Scottish border, the more rugged it becomes.

Yep, we have a view as we leave our village and swoop down a pretty steep hill, right over towards Durham, with the cathedral poking up in the air from the middle of it all - in the morning and evening, the way the light catches everything still makes us go "oooh"!

Then we go round the bend and can see B&Q on the right.

When "contemporary rustic" comes into vogue, we were the trendsetters.