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 materialise 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 civilisation together, performing work so fundamental we’ve forgotten to see it.
Consider the sheer improbability of your last meal. That coffee you drank without thinking? A crop cultivated across continents, harvested by hands you’ll never meet, transported through supply chains stretched thinner than spider’s silk. The toast you buttered? Wheat sown in autumn, surviving winter’s bite, cut down in summer by a man squinting against the sun. 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.
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?
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: we need farmers far more than they need us. Even The City of London could vanish tomorrow and the world would adjust. Wall Street could collapse and life would go on. But let the farmers stop – really stop – and within months, the veneer of civilisation would peel back to reveal the Hobbesian nightmare beneath. No algorithm can replace them. No app can replicate their work. They are the irreplaceable class.
Yet we’ve built an economy that treats them as disposable. We’ve created a culture that prizes influencers over cultivators, that pays even average professional footballers millions while farmers drown in debt. We’ve normalised the absurdity of valuing estate agents more than those who create the very substance of existence.
This isn’t just ingratitude – it’s civilisational suicide.
Respecting farmers isn’t about nostalgia for some mythical pastoral past. It’s about recognising the foundational truth that all wealth, all power, all culture, begins with full stomachs. Every great idea, every scientific breakthrough, every moon landing was built on top of a mountain of grain.
So the next time you eat, pause. That meal cost someone their sleep, their health, their youth. It was bought not with your money, but with their life.
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.
The great cities may boast their towers, but it’s the fields that feed them. The powerful may strut and fret upon the stage, but it’s the farmer who keeps the lights on. We’ve forgotten this basic arithmetic of existence. One day, we may remember it too late.
This article appeared in Country Squire Magazine on May 28, 2025, and is republished by kind permission.
