Around these parts the farming community still helps each other out as a matter of course. People are liable to just turn up and start stacking hay when we're baling (as above), neighbours often stop and help if we're struggling with livestock on the road, a lot of the local farmers just collect, treat and return small flocks of sheep for their smallholding neighbours when they are doing their own larger flocks, and so on. Our nearest farming neighbour regularly visits to borrow bits of our equipment - and now he's bought a shiny new flatbed trailer we will return that familiarity! We keep an eye on any of their cattle that are close to calving if they are away, and they do the same for us - although the first time this happened we hadn't realised how different it is handling a beef suckler cow to a dairy cow, and apparently the neighbour and the farm-sitter had a right old night of it trying to get just the one calving cow in. (You would normally expect to bring a friend with a suckler cow, they are very herd oriented.) When BH lost his collie unexpectedly a few years back, just at lambing time, a local farmer who was having a dog trained by the local sheepdog trainer let it be known that if it suited BH then he could buy it. When my friend and I moved up here to the moorland sheep farm, our neighbours were incredibly kind in terms of putting us in touch with potential buyers for our lambs, helping us with transport when it was too big a job for our little trailer, and clearing snow from our lane when we were blocked in. One neighbour from a few miles away just kept turning up and mowing, wuffling and baling our grass - but when I tell you that he is now referred to on here as 'BH' we shall all wonder just how selfless all that haymaking really was...
The closeknit farming community thing is one of the reasons items often fetch way more than their face value at farm 'displenishing' sales - everyone wants to send the neighbour on his way with a bit of money in his pocket, and will bid some items up to ridiculous prices.
This kind of looking out for and helping each other, without expecting return or reward, is how I remember neighbours when I was growing up. The word 'neighbourly' meant exactly that. I don't think we've lost it all completely, far from it, but I do think it is less widespread than it used to be and that in the fast-paced 'rat race', some people would even wonder what you were after if you did them a favour.
