We treat food as a given, like sunlight or air, when in reality it is a daily miracle wrought by farmers – the last alchemists who still turn earth into life. Their labour 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 labourer – 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 patronised 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.
The farmers I meet don’t ask for statues. They don’t demand parades. But they deserve more than our indifference. They deserve our respect – not as charity, but as the only rational response to those who hold the actual keys to our survival.