Many years ago, I had subscriptions to the UK’s Country Life and Country Squire magazines, which, as their names suggest, are dedicated to that country’s rich rural heritage. Yes, I know the mags’ main emphasis was (and still is) dedicated to the landed gentry, but the mags also contain gems, like this one from Country Squire :
We walk on concrete, but we live on bread. The modern world hums with the illusion of self-sufficiency – our smartphones deliver groceries with a tap, restaurants materialize meals on demand, and supermarkets present endless abundance as if by nature’s own hand. Yet this is a collective delusion.
The truth is simpler, starker: every society rests upon the bowed backs of farmers. They are the uncelebrated linchpin holding civilization together, performing work so fundamental we’ve forgotten to see it.
Their labor defies romanticism. Farming is not some bucolic idyll; it is mathematics written in mud and sweat. A farmer must be gambler and scientist, prophet and laborer – calculating risks against fickle weather, coaxing growth from stubborn soil, fighting entropy itself just to keep the fields productive. One missed frost, one unseen blight, and a year’s work vanishes. Meanwhile, they’re patronized by 5-days-a-week urbanites who’ve never dug a ditch, who speak of ‘sustainability’ between takeaway lattes, who’d starve in a week if the lorries stopped running.
And for what?
To watch agribusiness conglomerates and supermarket oligarchs siphon away the profits? To hear deadbeat politicians lecture them about ‘efficiency’ while folding to trade deals that undercut their livelihoods? To be treated as quaint relics in a world that venerates guff videos on TikTok?
There’s more, much more in the piece, and I urge you all to read it.
There’s unexpected humor, too. This from Country Life:
And of course, there’s property:
…a snip, at only $120,000 a year rental.
