Feature: Campaign to grow farming awareness

Neil Thomson, a tall, strong 45-year-old in blue overalls, farms at Caverton Mill, near Kelso, with his younger brother Keith. They are the umpteenth generation of Borders farmers in their family.

At Caverton Mill, the Thomsons have been tenants of the Dukes of Roxburghe since 1927. They rent 650 acres and own a further 250 acres three miles away.

They grow cereals, brassicas and keep around 300 beef cattle. There are also two small pigs – Nick and Dave – though these are basically pets, a porcine coalition of two, unlikely to end up as sausages.

I am going to spend a day working here at this typical modern Scottish farm, before going on to do a second day's work at a small organic farm. "Right," says Thomson, "put your pen and paper down. Back to the Dark Ages!"

What actually happens on a farm? Very few people can say for sure. Though farmland takes up three-quarters of the British landmass, agriculture employs less than two per cent of the total labour force; and according to research by the charity Linking Environment and Farming (LEAF), one in three British adults, 44 per cent of Scots, has never visited a farm.

There also seems to be a real lack of public understanding regarding the amount and type of food produced by the countryside. Research suggests that more than 20 per cent of us do not realise bread and bacon originate on British farms; anecdotally, it appears that some children from the inner cities believe milk is made by supermarkets rather than by cows.

In an effort to reconnect town and country, about 500 farms across the UK will open to the public on 13 June in an annual event called Open Farm Sunday.

Neil Thomson is one of the farmers taking part. "There is a real need for us to be telling folk what is going on beyond the farm gate," he says. "How do we make silage to feed the cattle? What is silage? What's a cow, what's a bullock, what's a heifer, what's a ewe, what's a gimmer? These are all things that we talk about in farming and people just haven't a clue."

But what does it matter? Really, what difference does it make if people don't know much about farming?

In answer, Thomson sweeps an arm around at his farm. "That landscape out there is the factory floor of this country. People drive past it every day, and it's incredibly important they realise that it's being looked after and is providing their food. We are custodians of the land." For him, it's about being understood and appreciated.

Though I spent most of my childhood living on the fringes of the countryside, I am as guilty as anyone of lacking any insight into what happens on a farm.

And no doubt I share the vague cliched prejudices of many city-dwellers in regarding farmers – when I regard them at all – as unsophisticated, reactionary men with ruddy cheeks, muddy boots and bloody minds. However, I would like to experience the farming life. There's something very attractive about the idea of working outdoors, producing stuff that is necessary, and experiencing physical as well as mental tiredness.

The success of the television programmes Jimmy's Farm and My Dream Farm, and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's River Cottage series suggests that a great many people share my rural fantasy. It's by no means a new feeling either.

In 1940, the academic John Stewart Collis, then 40, climbed down from his ivory tower and became an agricultural labourer on farms in the south of England as part of the war effort. Though the work was hard, it was no chore. He wanted this new life.

"I had hitherto regarded the world too much from the outside, and I wished to become more involved in it," he wrote. "I gained the opportunity of becoming thoroughly implicated in the fields instead of being merely a spectator in them."

I can very much relate to how Collis felt, and so – in addition to old jeans and newish work boots – I pack a copy of his memoir The Worm Forgives The Plough for my two days as a farm worker.

It's a fine day in the Borders – cloudless and hot. The Cheviot hills are absurdly green, the sky absurdly blue. Low-flying swallows and house martins skim the farmyard before disappearing through a broken skylight in one of the 18th-century buildings.

Though much of the structure of this place is very old, and notwithstanding Neil Thomson's joke about the Dark Ages, Caverton Mill is a typical modern farm in that it is technology-driven.

Everywhere you look there are machines: a colossal combine harvester, two huge irrigation drums and – Thomson's pride and joy – a tractor with a satellite system that can be programmed so it drives itself in precise straight lines, a godsend for ploughing. Robert Burns could not have written To A Mouse if he had been farming now; he would have been too busy fiddling with the GPS to notice the tim'rous beastie.

I've been at the farm only ten minutes when I'm put to work driving a forklift. "The handbrake is really important," says Thomson, not altogether reassuringly. "I've seen two people killed when these things rolled away and hit them."

My task is to lift silage – fermented grass – from a gigantic mound, then drive over and dump it into the MixMax, a machine that churns it up with barley for cattle feed. The silage smells sweet and rotten, not unpleasant, though it catches the back of the throat. The barley, as it slides into the MixMax, puffs up into the air in great dusty clouds, hazy and languid in the sunlight.

It feels a bit daft, effete even, to be noticing these things when there is work to be done. But being a farmer does not mean denying your aesthetic sense. "Farmers take a great deal of pride in making the place look good," says Thomson.

As he drives around his farm, he groans and grimaces at thin patches in his fields. Farmers, however, seem to perceive attractiveness differently from the general public. To them, aesthetics are bound up with economics. After all, a field of crops which is full and even is likely to give a good yield, thus pleasing the bank manager as well as the eye. Collis sums it up: "A farmer is a liberator of the energy in the earth, ceaselessly creating what is good, and adding on a vast scale to the beauty of the world."

Neil Thomson's working day begins at about 7.30am and he usually works until about 6pm, except at harvest time when he can be out in the fields until 11pm. He has worked on this farm since he was 13 years old. There was never much question that he would take over the running of the place from his father. "The truth is that I didn't try that hard to do anything else. This is all I know."

Last year, the farm produced roughly 1,500 tons of wheat, 500 tons of barley, 400 tons of broccoli and 200 tons of oilseed rape. Remarkably, there are only three full-time workers – Neil, his brother Keith, and another man. The high level of mechanisation allows them to cover a lot of ground, but it requires a great deal of investment for no quick return.

"The economics of farming are pretty tough," says Thomson. "The return on capital is peanuts. It's pathetic. There used to be hundreds of people working on the land, but now we can only afford ourselves and we're very hands-on.

"My grandfather wouldn't lift a shovel, but that's all changed. The Common Agricultural Policy has been very successful from the point of view of keeping food cheap. I remember when I was a laddie, my father was selling wheat and barley for 120 a ton. Well, we're not getting that now. So that's why we've had to become more efficient."

This reduction in staffing levels has been happening everywhere. In 1982, there were 44,044 people working full-time on Scottish farms. By last year, that figure had fallen to 24,379. This has meant a change in the whole culture of commercial farming. Much of each day is now spent on your own in a tractor or some other vehicle, making it an anti-social, boring and even lonely job. You have to be at ease in your own company and in your own head.

I get the chance to experience driving a tractor in the company of Keith Thomson. We're in a 52-acre wheat field and our task is to spread it with fertiliser – tiny white pellets of ammonium nitrate. Operating the tractor doesn't seem too difficult, but I'm extremely nervous at the thought of damaging such an expensive bit of kit, damaging the wheat with my dodgy cornering, and damaging Keith's dog Bob, a spaniel with a death-wish that insists on running in front of the vehicle.

This one field will be fertilised five times in each growing season, and sprayed with pesticide five times again. That can be monotonous work, but on the other hand, there's something to be said for really getting to know a piece of land, for tilling the same earth on which your father and grandfather toiled.

"The older I get, the more content I am, relatively, with the whole job," says Neil Thomson. "Years ago I used to think, 'Christ, there's folk making thousands and thousands of pounds for doing very little, while we're buggering about in amongst the shit and the glaur and not getting anywhere.' But let's face it – I have fallen in love with the place a wee bit."

Talking to Neil and Keith Thomson, there's a distinct feeling that they felt compelled to live the farming life. Call it following in their father's bootsteps, call it genetic destiny, but there's a sense that they had little choice in the matter. The husband and wife who own the second farm I visit were following a different sort of compulsion when they bought their land ten years ago.

Pete Ritchie and Heather Anderson, a couple in their early fifties, were compelled by an urgent sense of anxiety about climate change and a desire to reduce the distance between food producer and consumer, cutting out the supermarkets.

So they sold their semi-detached home in Edinburgh and bought 140 acres on a steep north-facing slope near West Linton. They had previously run a disability charity and had no professional experience of working in agriculture, but now Whitmuir is a busy organic farm, shop and restaurant. So far, 254 people have signed up to a farm supporter scheme, paying an agreed amount by monthly standing order and being supplied with organic meat and vegetables directly from the farm. They deliver within a 20-mile radius, Princes Street being only 16 miles away.

It's hard to believe, while spending time on the farm, that a major city is so close. Whitmuir feels remote from the world, especially when the farm work is intensive, which seems to be all the time. Pete Ritchie starts work at 5.30am and is often hard at it until very late, though he'll take a break to shout at Newsnight.

He and his wife laugh at the notion that theirs is some kind of lifestyle business. "No, a lifestyle choice would be to have a little garden and a nice cottage and a pet lamb," says Anderson. "A farm is merciless."

Whitmuir is home to about 40 pigs, including one large Duroc boar named JP after local MSP Jeremy Purvis. The previous boar, Barack, succumbed to arthritis. "He had a good first hundred days, but then he went off the boil," says Ritchie. There are also around 400 laying hens, 60 cattle and 100 sheep. Fruit and vegetables are grown in the fields and within a polytunnel.

Getting up for work at 5am is not too difficult, I find, as it's already light and I'm curious as to what Ritchie has planned for me. The farm looks beautiful in the pearly morning light; from the top field you can see Fife.

The first thing we do is visit the cow shed check on a two-day-old calf that has been rejected by its mother. "Oh, it's on its feet – a good sign. I'm not struck by this snot on its nose, though. The biggest cause of death in calves is pneumonia."

I am given the job of bottle-feeding the animal. Ritchie is worried that without the colostrum in its mother's milk, the calf will be weak and at risk of infection. Although it is his intention to fatten the calf and have it slaughtered for beef when it is two, Ritchie's concerns for its health are not entirely economic. He feels responsible for the animal's welfare.

That is something you would expect on an organic farm like this one, but I am surprised to notice a similar sort of double-think at Caverton Mill. Even though the Thomson brothers can happily visualise their animals in terms of joints of meat, they also have genuine feeling for them. "When I have a calf that's died, I get so pissed off at myself," says Keith. "I think, 'Have I made that animal suffer through my own stupidity?'" Neil, similarly, tells me that he can't bear the thought that the cattle might have any notion of their eventual fate; he is fairly sure they don't.

By 6am, I'm on my hands and knees in the polytunnel, picking salad leaves and spring onions for use that day in the restaurant; then it's out to the fields to dig leeks. There's something very pleasant about being outside, putting foot to fork, while a cockerel crows in the background, at an hour when I would normally be asleep.

The next task is helping Jamie Sommerville, an 18-year-old farm worker, bring the sheep down the hill to the pens. There's an intense satisfaction in getting sheep to go where you want them to go, moving them en masse through gates and along the line of fences simply by walking in the right direction and waving your arms a bit. It feels rather abstract – the adjustment of shapes within space, like a sort of woolly Tetris.

Once the sheep are within a pen, my job is to catch the lambs so that Sommerville can inject them with vaccine. Some of them are already quite large and very fast. Catching them involves running at full-tilt and often falling into slippy patches of dung. Before long, I'm red-faced and panting. I feel like an ageing midfielder trying to tackle Lionel Messi. Once caught, the trick is to hold the lamb steady while it is injected, then I lift it over a fence, the barbed-wire digging into my stomach, and place it in a different pen.

Vaccinating 50 lambs in this manner is dirty and exhausting, and it feels great to be finished; not because the work is over, but because I've used my body to achieve something tangible. There's a sense that this is the sort of work people ought to be doing, and that all the other stuff to do with e-mails and typing and artificial deadlines is really a distraction from the true business of being alive. That's very romantic, perhaps deluded, but I do feel it with every ache of the muscles.

Of course, it's one thing to spend a day doing this and another to spend your life doing it. This is no bucolic idyll. It's a tough way to make a living. "We've spent all our savings and now we're mortgaged up to the hilt," says Ritchie. "Farming is like having a cocaine habit – it's God's way of telling you you've got too much money."

Still, working out in the weather, bathed in natural light and in touch with the changing seasons sounds to me like a genuinely meaningful way to live. So as I drive back to Glasgow and the waiting, ever waiting computer on which I'll eventually write this article, it's with a heart that's almost as heavy as my limbs.

Open Farm Sunday is on 13 June. See www.farmsunday.org. Caverton Mill, near Kelso, will be open between 11am and 3pm. Whitmuir, near West Linton, is a Soil Association open farm. See www.whitmuirorganics.co.uk for further information.

This article was first published in The Scotland On Sunday, May 30, 2010