Ep.40 Sarah Morris "...we basically exist to amplify rural voices."

I'm listening to Minette

Batter's book

at the end.

And just the very bit that I was listening to yesterday, I think she's referencing that period of time when she first became president of the NFU and the backlash around that from male farmers and things like that.

But she cites the Brexit vote and said something along the lines of farmers are electing to vote Leave because they assumed it would mean less bureaucracy being imposed on them from the EU.

And I guess in broad terms, that'd be right, right?

Yeah, yeah, I think so.

Yeah, I would say that's the main reason.

And it certainly wasn't because they were ignorant or racist or both.

I could see from social media that that was the assumption that anybody who voted Leave was sort of, you know, lacking... lacking, certainly lacking empathy or cultural awareness, if not outright ignorant and racist.

And that did annoy me because I thought, no, no, no, my new friends and neighbours are not the people that you think they are.

They've just got a massive issue with unnecessary bureaucracy and loads of paperwork that they don't have time time to do.

The irony being that actually hasn't proved the case, has it? It's in many ways

become harder, more difficult to operate now that we're out of it for farmers and facing those challenges.

So did you find there were other areas that starkly pointed out that the rural community acted or behaved differently in research terms?

Yes.

In terms of research findings.

I mean, our clients, so just to put FieldMouse into the context of the industry, because what we do, it's not very well understood beyond the industry.

It's a quite niche sector.

So we sit within the operations sector of market research.

And as a fieldwork agency, our job is to find people to take part in paid qualitative research, which can be focus groups, in-depth interviews, something called an online community where people log on to a website and complete tasks over a week-long period.

So we don't conduct the research and we don't always actually see the findings of it either.

So it's hard for me to comment authoritatively on our clients' findings.

Of course, we do see a few reports that come out, but I would say no. that the issues that affect the entire country are not distributed evenly and they impact rural communities in quite different ways.

So transport, healthcare, employment, opportunities, education, connectivity.