I know how important it is to connect to consumers - our ultimate customers - and to be patient with them when they fail to understand what goes on on farms. But I find this rather difficult when, as over the weekend, some of them dumped about a hundred worn out car tyres in one of our gateways.
OK, the yobs who did that dirty deed don't deserve to be described as customers and I should discriminate between them and proper people. But it does make relationships with the great unwashed that much more tetchy so that when, as I often do, I find walkers with loose dogs on our conservation headlands I have to bite my tongue as I politely ask them to put the animal on a lead.
We phoned the District Council yesterday and to be fair to them they have undertaken to collect the tyres and take them away to one of their dumps. But the cost of that will have to come out of local Council taxes and I ask myself why we should have to pay the cost of what amounts to criminal behaviour.
I'm sure I'm not alone in developing fly tip rage when this happens. And sadly its a regular occurance.