A Farmer’s Life
Imagine driving through the countryside and the fields are no longer filled with livestock, tractors no longer roaring up and down, and farm buildings demolished to make way for never-ending housing estates and supermarkets and retail parks. Imagine a landscape once scattered with yellow rape seed, golden barley stems dancing in the breeze, vibrant red poppies depicting a silence from bygone times. No lambs frolicking or feeding from their mums, no cows lying down to tell us rain is on the way; no real indication of how the seasons are changing from the new life of spring and the harvesting of summer, to the seed drilling of autumn and the water-logged fields of winter. The farm shops would close, as would farmers’ markets, and farmgate egg sales would cease, along with hay bales being provided for livery yards.
When I was a little girl, I owned a toy farm, like so many children still do these days, I’m sure. I remember it vividly with its little pink pigs and cream-coloured sheep, black and white cows and ISA Brown hens, ducks and horses and a miniature farmer and his wife. It was a wooden building, and had a couple of barns or outbuildings where the farm animals lived. There were little plastic gates and bales of hay and I knew even back then that farms fascinated me. I wasn’t born into farming, but Mum and Dad took us to farms for holidays in the 1970s - Cornwall, Devon, Wales, and I recall them with fondness. On one of the farms we stayed they had a bull, and I stood at the barn door on tiptoes, watching it and thinking how big it was, and scary, too. All the farms we stayed at supplied their own fresh eggs, and when I moved to the farm in Northumberland, I kept hens of my own, around 40 of them, and sold the eggs at the backdoor, though I gave most of them away to friends.
But now, farmers are faced with uncertain times, wondering for how much longer their land can continue thriving, whether one day the younger generations of farming families will be forced away from the life they might have inherited. These families have often been living and working on their farms for generations - the one I lived on was taken over in 1919, with three generations running it over the years. Farming is in their blood; for many, it’s all they know. Of course, there are so many opportunities out there to be discovered, and the younger ones will have no choice but to explore them. And the older ones, the farmers who’ve worked their land for decades, who never retire because farming is a 365-days-a-year job and takes a massive amount of commitment, dedication, hard graft, and love for the countryside?
Who knows.
Me? I’ll support farming always; ever since being a little girl, sitting on the floor in the living room playing with my farm animals to cleaning out the hen house and collecting the eggs (once a day in the winter, twice a day in the summer). I might be a writer and an editor now, but farming will always be in my heart, even if it isn’t in my blood.
