A friend - a farmer’s daughter, as it happens - holds the theory that in 100 years’ time everyone will be vegetarian and will look back with horror at the time when we kept animals in conditions that would amount to torture if they were human, fed herbivores old bits of rank, random meat, thereby turning them into cannibals, and then slaughtered the unhappy results in order to eat them.

I am a carnivore, but I think she may have a point. There’s something strange - or perhaps just unspeakably hypocritical - about the British, who are more likely to compliment you on your dog than on your child, who can reduce themselves to tears at the plight of “abused” donkeys and bears, but who happily chow down on water-injected, antibiotic-laden battery chicken, knowing that the debeaked, declawed chicken in question, caked in its own ordure and covered in open sores, has known nothing but stomach-churning cruelty since it had the misfortune to hatch. It is a source of amazement to me that battery farming isn’t a national scandal but that people become hysterical about killing a fox.

Anyway, foot and mouth, which affects sheep, cattle and pigs, is back. Sixty cattle were found to be infected at a farm in Wanborough, Surrey - the first outbreak since the disaster of 2001, which crippled the countryside, resulted in the culling of 6.5m animals, and cost the economy £8 billion.

It nearly finished off the countryside, a position from which it is, or was, only just recovering. Foot and mouth is highly contagious and all livestock within 1.8 miles of the Surrey farm, reportedly an organic one, is being tested.

The government has reacted quickly - the prime minister and the environment secretary cut short their holidays - in contrast to 2001, when a three-day delay in halting the movement of cattle was seen by many farmers as responsible for the ensuing crisis. The hope is that this is an isolated outbreak, but with an incubation period of up to 14 days, nobody’s holding their breath.

What with crops devastated by flooding, it feels like there’s never been a worse time to be a farmer - especially given that new Labour has hated (and misunderstood and ignored and undervalued) them, seeing them as Tories in disguise, and as greedy beneficiaries of Thatcherism, thanks to those bumper cheques from Brussels in the 1980s.

The root of the problem seems to be gigantism - consumers’ and supermarkets’. Farmers, organic or otherwise, are rewarded for overproduction by the common agricultural policy, so they overproduce - it’s not like they’re doing so fabulously that they can wave the money away. I know someone who culls and buries his cattle - having been subsidised for raising them - because the cost of the fuel involved in taking them to market, and the price he would get there, don’t make it worth his while.

His is not an isolated case. I know it’s easy and commonplace to blame supermarkets, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it: they have forced yields up to such an extent that everything is about quantity (at the predictable expense of quality). The economic factors they impose on farmers show no regard for culture, or tradition, or landscape - when was the last time you saw a cow grazing in a meadow?

Outside the imagination of urbanites, they’re mostly in industrial pens, and the British countryside is beginning to look like the prairies of Kansas. The odd herd of organically raised cattle graze in fields, but simply being organic doesn’t make them immune from gigantism: it is easy to protect and supervise a herd or two of cattle; less so 200.

Farms aren’t farms any more: they have been forced to become huge factories, with too many cows and chickens packed into too small a space - and, hideous irony, not enough takers when it comes to buying or eating them.

Everyone who buys the aforementioned horror-chicken at a “bargain” £2 a pop contributes to this state of affairs, and to the desecration of the countryside and of a way of life once noble and afforded proper respect.

It’s also a way of life that most city-dwellers fail to understand, even if they’ve just spent two weeks in Devon wearing Boden clothing and feeling at one with nature. No matter what tourism bosses would have you believe, the countryside is not about rosy-cheeked farmers’ wives baking biscuits on their Aga, or cuddling newborn lambs.

The countryside is depressed, poor, angry and at the end of its tether. Farmers are on their knees; an alarming number are living on income support. Even those parts of it seen to be “doing well” are holding on by the skin of their teeth. Take a certain family-run yogurt-making company in the West Country: the product was so good that they were approached by a supermarket. Hooray, they thought. A couple of years on and they’re up to their eyes in debt because they had to buy machinery they couldn’t afford, multiply their workforce, work 20-hour days - and there’s no subsidy. If the supermarket changes its mind, they’re finished.

A version of this story plays itself out on thousands of farms: either they’re small, poor and forgotten, or they’ve been forced to become huge and terrifying.

We seem to have an unusual number of food scares in this country, and a chequered past when it comes to the food we eat. Foot and mouth, BSE, the still-present possibility of avian flu, Bernard Matthews’s contaminated turkeys, and now this, again. I’m not a vet or an agricultural correspondent, which must be why I don’t understand why we can’t simply vaccinate our livestock, or rear fewer of them - rear only what we need, say: now there’s a wild idea - both obvious solutions to farming’s crises, it seems to me. Why was this not done after the debacle of 2001? There must be a good reason, but I can’t find it.

We should remember that every time we tear open a packet of Turkey Twizzlers or any of the other repulsive “meat products”, we are not only endangering our children’s health (and our own), but the health of a whole culture, tradition and environment.

The sad truth is that if people continue to display an appetite for meat that’s cheaper than some vegetables, they shouldn’t reel in horror when that meat and the way it is produced results in health scares. If this has happened to organic cattle imagine the devastating speed of infection for cattle penned in side by side.

Treat farmers with respect and they will treat their animals with respect, and by extension the planet with respect. Treat them like trash, and trash is what you’ll get on your plate.

india.knight@sunday-times.co.uk

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