Farmers face challenges while people focus on noisy social media - Yorkshire Post Letters

Jill Thorp’s column in Country Week (August 28) encapsulated so many of the challenges we currently face in the farming community.

As a still fairly ‘visible’ industry we are a target for negative comment and judgment, so often based on assumptions and information which are simply not true.

Despite our best efforts to open our farms to the public, engage with social media, put on agricultural shows and feature on both radio and television, there still appears to be a number of individuals and groups who are loathe to give us any credit at all.

We live in a world of noisy, sensational social media where those who shout the loudest seem to be the ones who get noticed (and believed!).

This has created a new generation of ‘influencers’ who promote ‘stuff’ most of us can live happily without and certainly don’t need, but they are persuasive and we have come to believe that ‘stuff’ comforts us. We are less prepared to look at things objectively or read any level of detail to understand the reasons for particular requests/recommendations.

We selectively believe what suits us as individuals.

We no longer see the bigger picture and don’t always want to have to consider others. It seems that despite the hardships and sorrows of the past 18 months, some of us still remain unbelievably selfish and incredibly blind to truth and prefer a glossy, fantasy world.

We have abdicated personal responsibility and prefer to blame others for anything from littering to generally disrespecting the countryside and the livelihoods of those who live and work hard within them to create the landscapes we all enjoy for recreation, health and wellbeing.

Jill made so many relevant points in her column and with current food (and other) supply chains stretched to the limit, due primarily to staff shortages, we might all do well to consider how much we are really willing to pay for good and nutritious food to ensure a domestic supply (rather than feeding our insatiable appetite for all that ‘stuff’ we don’t need from far flung places, travelling thousands of miles to get here and lining the pockets of faceless and often invisible vendors) and therefore, how much we pay those who grow, produce, harvest, process and deliver the daily food we have all taken for granted for far too long.

Surely there has never been a better time to reassess priorities and support our domestic economy at every opportunity?