The march planned this month in London by the Countryside Alliance to demonstrate concerns about rural problems has been cancelled because of foot-and-mouth disease.

There is a certain irony about that.

What we townies should be organising, if we are allowed to tread between the corpses of diseased animals, is a march to farms to see what is happening.

The outbreak of foot and mouth follows a series of health scares including BSE, swine fever, E coli and salmonella.

While the agriculture industry may pretend these outbreaks have nothing to do with modern farming practices, the suspicion is there's a strong connection.

Factory farming has brought us cheap food, but at a price.

I have seen production methods and some were not a pretty sight. Many people who have been to an abattoir, even a well run one, would not eat meat again.

Have a look at cows and you will often find their udders distended through carrying far too much milk.

Go, if you are permitted, into any broilerhouse where chickens and turkeys are being kept, and you will be shocked.

Conditions are sometimes so appalling, I am convinced the next major health scare will emanate from them.

You do not have to be an animal rights fanatic to be deeply disturbed at the way in which many farm animals are kept these days. More antibiotics are used on farm animals than on people.

Likewise, you don't have to be an obsessive health bore to be concerned about the cocktail of chemicals poured each year upon the crops we eat.

Farmers may be suffering financially now but many of them have grown wealthy since the Second World War thanks to these modern methods, including grinding up the remains of animals for feed which led to BSE.

Salmonella is common in chickens because of the cheap conditions in which they are kept. While there are plenty of decent and honourable farmers, there are some who are a disgrace.

In the past, most folk were in closer communion with the land. Far more people worked in agriculture and farmers were part of the community.

I can remember being brought up in a village and buying bread baked by the farmer's wife. While waiting for the hot loaf, I watched hens running loose in the yard and pigs literally in clover.

Now only a few people are employed on each farm. Animals are transported over huge distances, both for export and to reach British abattoirs.

Few strangers, apart from ramblers, ever see much of what is going on.

But the French system is infinitely better than ours, with a strong emphasis on smallholdings and locally produced food.

Foot-and-mouth may not directly affect our food but it will encourage the speeding up of a consumers' revolt which started about five years ago.

There are hundreds of farmers' markets in towns such as Lewes where people can buy local goods.

Huge counters in Sainsbury's and Tesco are now devoted to organic food while smaller outlets, such as Infinity Foods in Brighton, are booming.

There are farmers, such as the Passmore family at Coombes, near Lancing, who have for years been encouraging natural methods and inviting people to see what they are doing.

More must follow suit, otherwise there is always the danger that the next health scare might be so nasty it will not just be the animals put on pyres for burning.