French Letter: A metropolitan élitist considers the mysteries of rural life
Like most people who have been raised in big cities, I find living in the countryside – in my case central Brittany – has obliged me to look at the world in a different way.
I have become used to, if not inured to, the fact that there are cows in the field next door to our house. Most are dairy cattle, steamy but docile. But in spring the bullocks show up, leaping and butting heads, en route, if only they knew it, to the abattoir. I am aware that at different times of the year huge machines show up, like motorised mastodons, ploughing, planting, reaping and harvesting. And I have come to expect to be stuck behind tractors pulling trailers laden with manure, hay and maize that proceed at a leisurely pace along the back roads, oblivious to the frustrations of mere motorists like me.
But while I am familiar with the sights and sounds of rural life, I no more understand what is really going on than I did when my wife and I moved here permanently from New York in the summer of 2015.
I find it odd, and disturbing, for example, that I have yet to see a pig — despite the fact that Brittany is Pig Central, with a porcine population at any one time numbering twelve million. The poor animals lead miserable lives, confined to vast sheds that between them produce not only pork, ham and bacon but enough pig muck and nitrogen to sink a fleet of battleships.
Poultry is another hidden aspect of the Breton economy. When you drive past one of the chicken “factories” that are a common sight in the region’s backwoods, the noise is deafening. Feed is delivered by silos every fifty metres or so. At the far end, plucked birds appear. What goes on in-between is not exactly a mystery, but something we from the metropolitan élite prefer not to dwell on.
On the arable side, the most common crop hereabouts is maize, which, as I understand it, is used almost exclusively as animal feed. Thus, the provision of meat and animal products, including milk, cream and cheese, is what Brittany is built on – that and food processing. If France ever goes vegan, the region will be in deep trouble.
And yet, only a tiny percentage of the Breton population is actively engaged in farming. A century ago, when farms were smaller than they mostly are today, entire families were employed, plus, at seedtime and harvest, an army of itinerant workers. But in the twenty-first century, machines do most of the hard work so that, typically, the only people engaged in food production are the farmer, his wife and the son or daughter to whom the business will eventually be bequeathed.
Behind our house, a path that my wife calls the Hobbit Run, winds upwards between at least half a dozen farms. The fields are worked and in prime condition, with electric fences increasingly taking the place of hedgerows. Yet not a single farmhouse is to be seen. Though the horizon extends at least a mile in all directions, there is no evidence of human habitation.
I have never once spoken to a farmer. In the Spring, as I struggle up and along the Hobbit Run, I will doubt spot the occasional tractor doing whatever it is they do. I may even wave. In October, in the middle of the night, awakened by the roar of heavy machinery, I will see the ghostly lights of combine harvesters taking in the maize. Just this week, from the window of our bedroom, I was able to spy, a good half-mile away, an excavator at work, gouging up the land for some mysterious purpose. But of the farmers themselves, neither hide nor hair. They might as well be aliens.
But I tell a lie. I have in fact met one farmer, called Hervé, who owns the land next to the second home of two friends of ours from Wiltshire. You might think that if you lived a couple of miles outside Devizes, you would already enjoy all the peace of the countryside. But apparently not. Anyway, Hervé is in his fifties and has had enough of getting up at dawn to milk his 50-strong herd of Friesians. He has bought a house in a nearby town and plans to spend the next 25 years reaping the harvest brought in by the sale of his farm to a neighbour whose existing holding lies half a mile to the east. He is relieved to have concluded a deal beneficial to both sides and anxious to get on with it. Having neither wife nor children, he could see the day coming when he would no longer have the strength, or will, to go on.
I was reminded of another, much older farmer who I occasionally exchanged words with twenty years ago, long before we moved full-time from America. Yves, in his late seventies, was bent over like a hoop. His wife was usually surrounded by chickens. The pair were survivors from another age, who milked their cows by hand and were desperate to sell up so that they could move into the local maison de retraite.
Their farmhouse, a traditional longère, was bought by a British couple who, so far as I know, has never actually lived there. A new roof was put on, solar panels were installed and the barn was renovated. But the new owners remained ensconced on the far side of the world, where they worked in the charity sector and, in any case, have since divorced. Ten years on, the roof is sagging again and soon, if nothing is done, all that remains of the property will be the view across the valley that is probably the reason they bought it in the first place.
According to our local paper, Le Poher, the number of people living in central Brittany has fallen by more than 4,000 over the last twenty years, which doesn’t sound much until you realise that this is one of the least densely populated corners of France. In 1914, just before the outbreak of the Great War, 161,922 people were recorded as residents of what the tourist office calls l’Argoat (literally “inland”). Today, there are just 80,552. At the same time, the population of Brittany overall, which includes the cities of Rennes and Brest, has risen by one-and-a-half million, meaning that people like me, who know very little about the sustaining rhythms of rural life, now make up the overwhelming majority.
Perhaps soon, everyone will work either in retail or in the supply and installation of home insulation. Then at least I will be no more ignorant than the next fellow.