Before there were hospitals, there were farmers who kept the working class alive through winter.
Before there were factories, there were cattle pulling the ploughs that broke the ground, hauling the carts that moved the harvest, doing the draught work that no human workforce could have replaced.
Before there was a National Health Service, there was a lamb on a fell somewhere in the Lake District, producing nutrition that the industrial worker in Manchester depended on without knowing it.
British livestock farmers built this country. Not metaphorically. In the most literal possible sense. The iron workers of Sheffield, the weavers of Manchester, the dockers of Liverpool: they ate. Because someone, somewhere, on land that nobody else wanted to work, decided at 4am that the animals needed feeding and went out to do it. Every day. Without complaint. Without recognition. Without any particular expectation that the people eating the result would know his name.
They built dry stone walls across Cumbrian fells in weather that modern people would call an emergency. They lambed through Scottish Februaries that had no interest in cooperating. They drove cattle down drovers' roads from Wales to London markets, weeks of walking, sleeping rough, arriving with animals that were still alive and still in condition because they knew what they were doing.
Nobody wrote them into the history books. The history books were written in cities.
And now the cities have opinions.
The cities have decided, on the basis of a documentary they watched between their third and fourth food delivery of the evening, that the British livestock farmer is an environmental villain. That the fields where the cattle graze should be rewilded. That the man who has not taken a proper holiday since 2009 because the lambing schedule does not accommodate annual leave should perhaps consider a different career path.
The cities have never watched a ewe die in the dark because something went wrong and you could not get there in time. The cities have never done the arithmetic on what a month of poor weather does to a hill farm's margin. The cities have never had to make the decision between fixing the roof and buying feed, knowing the animals do not care about the roof.
They have opinions, though. Very confident ones.
Buy their beef. Buy their lamb. Buy their eggs.
Not as charity. As recognition of what these people are, and what they have always been, and what this country will be without them.
Tomorrow, same job--different store. 
It will be good to get back home!
