Beauty is in the eye of the potato

For half-a-crown a day, and all the taters you could carry home, Jack Mace's call for volunteers never went unheeded. In fact, the regiments of spud collectors would invariably be over-subscribed, such was the lure of a day spent following the rotary cultivator.

A typical day's toil would start with a ride on the back of the trailer to the fields. This was the standard mode of transport for our giggling gaggle of country lads and lasses as they were transported to the site of their day's labour.

It is an abiding memory. The trailer had a peculiar, strangely pleasant aroma of muck and oil, mixed with hay. The cultivator threw up great clods of earth that flew past your head as everyone scrabbled about in the furrows, gathering Sir Walter Raleigh's apples as if there was no tomorrow.

The small and mediums all went into bags on the trailer, while any sliced potatoes were laid in the hedge for collection later.

Believe me, there was nothing better than a whopper of a spud born in a Warwickshire field, 18 inches long, mortally wounded by the blades, and destined for mother's chip pan. And fried in lard, naturally.

Leap forward more than 40 years and take a look at those fields now. Monoculture has reigned for a quarter of a century, the hedges are fewer and where Friesian and Hereford cattle once roamed in great herds, sheep now graze.

The other fields are either oilseed rape, bright yellow duvets spread across the landscape, or seas of wheat and barley rippling in the summer winds. Not a spud in sight.

We tell ourselves that the farmers are responsible for all the ills that industrial practices have wrought. From the decline in birds and small mammals to the BSE crisis, and latterly, foot-and-mouth, the man on the tractor is to blame.

And as we nod our heads smugly and take that ever-so fashionable sideswipe at the farmer, no one ever looks beyond a surface that is muddier than a farm pond. Yet did we not demand cheap food? So are we not, therefore, the guilty ones?

It has for long struck me as a monumental injustice the way the British farmer has been vilified during the last few years. And as the latest misfortune manifests across our green acres in the form of smoking pyres of diseased livestock, the usual suspects are wheeled out to join in the national sport of stuff-the-farmer.

Yes, foot-in-mouth has devastated Britain. After the first confirmed outbreak in Hampstead, it flew like thistledown on a September breeze, infecting Islington and then spreading to all points of the compass. Particularly at risk are the cloven-faced middle classes, although it has been known to cross species and contaminate lesser mortals.

A classic symptom of foot-in-mouth is the reciting of well-rehearsed declarations of belief that usually follows its inevitable cliched course. People should become vegetarians because a) meat rearing is a wasteful use of protein resources b) it's cruel to animals and c) you'll contract bowel cancer if you eat steaks.

These are old, outdated arguments. For stock rearing is actually beneficial to wildlife. The landscape that is the British countryside, with its hedges and copses, came about because of the enclosures in the 17th and 18th Centuries. The purpose of enclosures was to keep sheep and cattle from straying, hence the use of hawthorn and blackthorn. This is where birds make their nests.

As far as cruelty is concerned, the great and the good are selective in this department. For example, I see that the current Hunting Bill allows rabbits to be killed.

The exclusion of the poor old coney from protection by the Bill, slipped in as if no one will notice, strikes me as being a classic bit of New Labourite hypocrisy.

As it happens, I'm not a fan of any kind of hunting, yet I fail to see the difference between chasing and killing a fox with dogs and chasing and killing a rabbit with ferrets. I would be fascinated to learn of how such a distinction is made.

However, the idea of the Bill is not so much to do with the welfare of the fox, rather with the consolidation of the power of the urban elite now ruling our lives.

This is the same urban elite now reshaping the British countryside into one gigantic theme park, where parents with children called Tabitha and Hector will soon be running freely across nitrogen-gorged grass in matching green wellies en route for the farm restaurant that sells veggie burgers at inflated prices.

Meanwhile, the Welsh hill farmers have been forced out of the sheep business and must compete with each other as the farms become guest houses and horses for pony-trekking now replace their culled compatriots on the mountainsides.

I have this horror of what the future holds for the countryside when the urbanites and their friends in Brussels finally deliver the coup de grace to British agriculture.

Mad cow disease, fuel prices and latterly foot-and-mouth will, I am certain, irrevocably change farming in Britain - which means that the face of the countryside will also irretrievably alter out of all recognition.

We should look to ourselves. For we are indeed accessories and accomplices. Is it not ourselves, the consumers, who have dictated the pace of events? Do we not complain if the price of staple foods increase by a few pence and then go shopping around to find even cheaper deals in the thousands of supermarkets that have now replaced the street corner greengrocer, butcher and fishmonger?

Look at the food we eat now. We complain about foxhunting, yet readily eat meat reared in misery and killed by strangers. At a thousand Saturday night dinner parties, the righteous wring their hands and then tuck into their prawn cocktails, forgetting or ignoring that for every little pink crustacean that goes down their throats, a thousand other sea creatures must die, casualties of wall-of-death fishing nets.

Up and down the land, hypocrite carnivores trade the latest morality across the dinner tables of the nation, their minds awash with red wine and platitudes. While not far away, a distant light on the horizon betrays the farmhouse where its occupant can be found contemplating rack and ruin.

It may not be too late for the British countryside, but the big hands are definitely hovering near midnight. The pace of change in my lifetime the disappearance of the bullock hedges, the elms, monoculture reigning supreme probably far exceeds the speed of the transformations of 200 years ago when the great landowners decided to make their fortunes in wool and enclosed the fields.

One thing is certain. Those lost days of hot Septembers when tousle-haired village children set off on the back of farmer Jack Mace's trailer to go spud-picking may as well be light years ago. And I mourn their passing.