Hazlenuts and Farmers

I have in my hand a little hazelnut which I picked up on a walk between Almeley Parish Church and the Friends Meeting House. As I picked it up during the Harvest Festival Season it became the basis of my thoughts for Harvest, which we have now completed.
Human beings in their present form came into being some 200,000 years ago. If you were to compress the whole of this length of time into a 24 hour day, then the last Ice Age finished around an hour before midnight. In all the 23 hours prior to that point there was no agriculture. People lived by hunting animals and gathering berries, roots and nuts like the hazelnut I have in my hand. It is around that point we find the beginnings of Agriculture at the start of the New Stone Age.
This revolution did not reach these islands until some 6000 years before present. It was during this time that our ancestors were able to develop the skills and technology to build the Megalithic tombs such as West Kennet Long Barrow and Arthur’s Stone. It is Agriculture that made this possible. No-one who spends most of their time hunting and gathering will have the leisure to organise society in such a way that these things can begin to happen.
Of course, our technology has moved on. I am writing this on a computer; my third! Something I would not have dreamed of, even in my young adulthood. None of this, however, would be possible without the thing that made the first technology possible. Our very lives still depend on Agriculture; on farmers taking the risks with their resources, sowing their crops, not knowing what the weather will be doing during the Harvest season.
All our human activities are wonderful things. But the sustaining energy for them all is provided by agriculture. So the next time you are passing a farm, take a moment to give thanks for our farmers.