Whenever I read a report on farming it invariably concerns - usually as its main subject - farm subsidies (Food subsidies face cuts to pay for conservation, 7 December 1999).

The impression conveyed to me is that farming is a pitiful occupation that we could really do without, but which, out of the kindness of our hearts, we feel obliged to support with subsidies from taxes derived ultimately from our really essential, mainly high-tech industries.

It must be terrible being a farmer, working in an occupation held in such contempt, producing goods and services of such low value that he must beg whose of us doing more worthwhile and profitable jobs for support.

We have learned to associate "progress" with developments from an agrarian to an industrial society (the proportion of the workforce employed in the two sectors is commonly taken as a measure of how "advanced" a nation is), so it is no wonder that farming is so little appreciated.

Yet we have managed for hundreds of years without the produce of any of the high-tech and service industries in which most people nowadays are employed, while without the food that farmers produce we are dead within days!

As we are about to enter the next century and the new millennium, I cannot help feeling that there is something terribly and dangerously wrong.