Constant alarm about loneliness and boredom blighting young lives in rural areas must be tied up with regular calls for farmers to open up pastoral secrets to children who don’t know where their food and drink comes from.

It underlines a tragic loss of contact with, and appreciation for, the real world around us. Especially while thousands of hungry field-eaters are poised behind remaining hedgerows to charge in on the back of a highly dubious “build-out-of-recession” gospel.

As a lad of post-war years illuminated by gratitude for chances to rebuild families and communities at the heart of agricultural Norfolk, I hold dear countless impromptu outside lessons as much as the homely education on offer inside our small but vibrant village school.

Collecting eggs still damp and warm and fetching milk straight from a bustling dairy contrasted starkly with singling sugar-beet along endless rows and muck-spreading on mornings full of frost and chores, We knew bread and beer were glorious prizes for helping to bring in the corn harvest as well as a few bob towards a new school blazer.

Failure to put bullocks ahead of books or chickens in front of cricket could incur the puckish wrath of venerable sons of our soil anxious to convince errant rustic apprentices how three milk bottles in a hedge was tantamount to a cows’ nest.

At least we avoided chortles of derision saved for young lads from London who were evacuees on a Norfolk farm shortly before I came across he headlands. The farmer promised to take them to market by horse and cart. They waited expectantly by this new mode of transport before one little boy rushed into the barn yelling; “Come quick, mister, the flippin’ ‘orse is losin’ its petrol!”.

There are other yarns designed to emphasise the sheer ignorance of city and town dwellers when it comes to life down on the farm. Laughter is laced with pity rather than malice -  but just how honest if hat laughter these  days?

The drift from our land has turned into an unstoppable charge. How many people now living in Norfolk, still hailed as a predominately agricultural country could. pass a simple test on farming matters?  Precious few, I suggest, could argue coherently for or against set-aside schemes, milk quotas or nitrate levels.

Does it really matter while supermarkets spring up like weeds after a good rain to sell us everything we need at prices we can almost afford? Depends on how you rate the role of the farmer in any continuing story of a “dew diffrunt” Norfolk.

Long gone are days when the bulk of our rural  population could need merely a glance over a hedge to identify rye, oats, wheat or barley, to weigh up state of that crop and make instant comparisons with yields of the five previous years.

Virtually every family had close links with the land, some of them sinking deep into Norfolk’s past. Few of such roots remain in a world where prairie and lone ranger in a covered cab have taken over from meadows and posse of country thoroughbreds.

You can travel miles without spotting a single worker in the fields. Even the corn harvest. For so long our Coronation of the Year, can disappear in a brief squall of noise and dust somewhere over there. “All is safely gathered in” sing folk who have never had their toes tickled by golden stubble.

The farmer’s status in our communities has diminished alongside traditional dependence on him or her for employment and shelter. Mechanisation has hauled down  history’s hedgerows and elevated former tied cottages into the bijou residence bracket. How that lost army of land workers  must smile at so ironic a march of progress.

Ironically, advertising agencies still feed us rustic goodness, bucolic freshness and Mummerzet magic until it comes over the top of our new green wellies.

Estate agents lick their lips and preach “escape to the country!” with even more evangelical zeal. They forget to mention glorious noises and smells to go with truculent tractors enforcing speed limits  on pot-holed tracks flanked by extras from Watership Down.

It will take more than cosy images to carve out a worthwhile footpath into a rapidly- changing farming arena. Perhaps a need to explain modern methods, especially to the young, is now much more important than  a desire to employ them just to keep up with demand.

I suspect most farmers of the old school are too eager to condemn any criticism as nothing more than crass ignorance. Of course, some do stage open days and forge close connections with local schools. They all like to be called “custodians of the countryside," especially at a time when it’s in sore need of care and attention.

However, are too many involved these days with scary schemes for more massive housing developments or sprawling solar farms  on green spaces  for us to take that highly honourable title seriously?