ABSTRACT
The countryside and farming have long been tied by numerous links. The importance of farming for rural areas varied throughout history. Modern equipment and technologies combined with the development of trade may make rural areas independent of agriculture and its importance may continue to decline in the future. However, it is hard to imagine a society completely dependent on outside food supply, while it is impossible to see a society ignoring its natural environment in the cultivation and preservation of which farming has always played both the positive and negative roles. Agriculture is understood here to imply the people who have invested their skills, experience and feelings in farmwork, and in the improvement of the rural areas where they live and engage in agricultural as well as non-agricultural activities. These people live in a network of social ties which have, more or less, allowed them to adopt a certain type of social and economic behaviour. Further development of the countryside is not sustainable without a working social structure. This chapter focuses on how the farming population's working and living conditions have been evolving and, through the prism of sociology, tries to identify correlations between the long-term evolution of certain elements which have influenced the social structure of the countryside and farming.
