IN A bumpy field in Fife on a morning when the sun has decided no longer to be coy I am looking into the eyes of a steaming black bull who is not pleased to see me.

In a space of four feet he and I are separated by a flimsy aluminium fence and he has thrown me a baleful, sidelong glance that seems to say; "You're next, soft city boy." He is being led by the nose by a farmer in a white coat whose nimble footwork keeps him just out of the way of a head that could stookie an oak tree.

The bull, 2000lbs of prime Angus beef standing five feet tall, has been defecating its way around a small enclosure so that a blue rosette can soon be pinned on him by an allotment of tweedy adjudicators. Curiously, the hair between its massive shoulders looks like it's been braided to suggest a Mohican. Little wonder he looks mad as hell. These superb beasts demand respect though, and not only because of a report, widely circulated last week that one of them broke his penis in the act of obtaining vigorous congress with several cows during a demanding siring session.

For a few seconds I imagine that I am Johnny Morris, 1970s presenter of Animal Magic, whose conversations with big beasties in farms and zoos all over the country captured my childhood imagination.

"Hello, big man, how are you keeping?"

"How does it look like I'm keeping, walking around in circles for the edification of tubes like you?"

"I'm just trying to be polite."

"Well, go and be polite somewhere else before I stick the nut on you."

"No need to be like that."

"I'm warning you ..."

SUCH is my introduction to the Fife Show, a bucolic, one-day extravaganza of Scotland's rural and farming bounty spread over 100 acres of lush, east coast pasture in a group of fields up beyond Cupar. The people I meet here are the ones whose presence barely registers with many as they speed by on the way to a weekend break somewhere in the East Neuk. In shows like this all over rural Scotland persistent urban lowlanders like me have a chance to observe how Scotland feeds and nourishes its people. In the course of several hours in these fields and among these people my shoddy preconceptions of farming folk, seemingly inscrutable in their idiosyncrasies, is challenged. And I encounter a rebuke for my wilful ignorance of a community and a terrain that describes another glorious Scotland.

The origins of this show are embedded in the wraiths of a time occasionally hinted at here and there among stalls, enclosures and pens. Just over there in a rudimentary grassy arena horses are pulling those two wheeled traps that you only seem to see these days in My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding. Yet they recall a time, stretching back to the 18th century, when farmers rode to market bearing the fruit of their toils and seeking society with others of their kind. And what could be more natural than the desire to measure their sheep, pigs and cattle against those of their brother farmers? Last Saturday's event essentially may not really have changed that much from the Spring gatherings in fields like these hundreds of years ago. There may be a paddock selling the obligatory four-wheel drives beside an annexe with a mechanised army of gigantic and shiny agricultural hardware, but the show is still really all about the animals, large and small, which power this economy.

And so, with 10,000 others you pay your £10 and immediately find yourself in a verdant boulevard enclosed by stalls and tents selling the meat of everything that seems to move and breathe and have its being in Scotland's hills and glens. Overhead you fancy there ought to be a banner declaring: Abandon Hope Any Vegetarians Who Enter Here. Soon you encounter a canopy of smoke in which are mixed the thick smell of roasting animals garnished with the salty splendour of 500 Arbroath smokies being sweated over tubby wooden kilns: this is a carnivores' bacchanal. A spry old gent with a chihuahua tucked under his arm wanders past; it's an incongruous sight. You fear that, if left unattended for long, a wee thing like that might soon be hanging from a hook in a place like this.

Hilary Lumsden, secretary of the Fife Show organising committee, is hopeful that today will break all previous attendance records. "We're hoping for 10,000," she said. The month of May has chosen to favour the show with its most glorious day so far and, by lunchtime, a new record looks a safe bet. "The Fife Show is of vital importance, not just to the farming community but to the whole area. For farmers and their families and those who derive any sort of living from agriculture this is an opportunity to meet and socialise and assess the events of the last year.

"But just as important is that it gives us a chance to educate those who are barely aware of us and who perhaps don't really know what goes on inside a working farm. It's important that people gain knowledge of where they get their food from and some of the challenges that the farming community must overcome to provide high quality produce for a return that allows them to sustain a viable living."

There are endless challenges for working farmers, as opposed to the gentleman, aristocratic farmers who, already rich beyond imagination, can still access European farming subsidies or use their land as a superannuated theme park for windfarms. The price of milk is lower than it was 10 years ago and the eternal struggle to obtain sustainable prices from supermarkets mean that more hours have to be worked to produce a yield. Hugh Gillan, a farmer of 43 years in Ayrshire and Fife, told me: "It's been like running up a down escalator these past 20 years. Consequently, fewer children from farming stock are maintaining the family business. They see the hard, physical graft of their fathers for diminishing returns and say 'No thanks'.

"The pressure to supply food cheaply and maintain a high degree of quality and health in our animals is getting more intense every year. Meanwhile, bread and milk are deployed as loss leaders by the supermarket chains and consequently there has been a huge drop in the numbers of dairy farms in Scotland." Old, but essential, skills are dying out due to the march of mechanisation and, with it, gentrification. It seems that the raw, physical act of milking cows is increasingly being done by seasonal immigrant workers because local farmhands are turning their noses up at such an elemental chore.

In France an ombudsman ensures that supermarkets don't force prices too low. Gillan would like to see the farming community better represented where power resides. "The farming vote in France is formidable and it tends to be well-represented in government. I'd like to see rural and farming concerns better represented at government level in Scotland, although Richard Lochhead has been an excellent cabinet secretary for rural affairs and environment."

As Gillan muses on the passing of an era, outside there is an ironic little apercu. Two young women wander by with T-shirts featuring the ubiquitous logo of Tesco and bearing the legend: Tesco: Proud to be Supporting Our Local Community. If Johnny the Fox had traipsed along with a sign saying: Proud Supporter of the Poultry Community, it couldn't have been more perverse.

Allan Bowie, recently-appointed chairman of the National Farmers Union in Scotland has stressed the importance of a healthy agricultural sector to the Scottish economy. In an article in The Scottish Farmer, the bible of rural Scotland which is celebrating its centenary, he said: "Whether we are discussing agricultural holdings, land reform, supply chain, or milk pricing, there needs to be strong consideration of the contribution Scottish food and Scottish farming makes.

"For this industry to keep growing we need strong investment and profitability for the food and drink sector. Although we are currently in the Year of Food and Drink, I feel every year should prioritise our great produce. We need consumers to know where their food comes from and the story behind it. We have got to further work with the retail chain and we must work harder to engage directly with consumers about what we do, and the great story our farmers have to tell."

TO MY UNTUTORED and unkempt eyes, rheumy with pollution in a lifetime spent amidst concrete and tarmac, the scene in Cupar today is like stumbling upon some agricultural Brigadoon: you had heard tell of people like this and perhaps glimpsed them here and there as you passed through glens or jouked up the odd Munro. But here they were all gathered together in one place for half a day in their full bucolic raiment: cheery and formidable women in jodhpurs and swept back hair; men whose burnished, creviced features tell of a life lived outdoors and days spent working in our wild and unforgiving places.

In the space where the horses and their traps had been now there were hounds surrounding riders with red jackets standing tall in the saddle sounding notes from a horn: my first ever hunt, or at least a miniature approximation of one. An announcer describes the action for the benefit of the ignorant: me. He can't resist some gentle propaganda. "Some people say it's cruel to hunt," he bellows. "But my personal opinion is that it's surely better for a fox to go this way than to be shot, poisoned or trapped."

The opinions of foxes, presumably, went unsolicited.

In a patchwork of little pens nearby another strange sight: coloured sheep. Until then I had thought these creatures came only in white and grey but this seemed to be the Gianni Versace collection. I counted at least three other colours, including a few with orange fleeces and black faces from whom you supposed there must be at least a dozen Dundee United scarves.

My tour of the show's perimeter revealed an ethereal world of pursuits and societies which you had previously thought existed only in the novels of JRR Tolkien. There were clubs and associations represented here which belonged to a world half imagined and rarely glimpsed in daylight: the Scottish Beekeepers Association; International Raptor Research and Conservation (of which I heartily approve); the Equestrian Centre; the Woodland Trust and the British Deer Society (might there be a British old dear society?) There was a Scottish Ferret Club, part of a global network whose headquarters must surely reside in Wigan, I fervently hoped. And then this: Barking Mad, an organisation which encourages punters to volunteer to 'look after someone else's dog while they're away'. It's got to be right up there with babysitting your mate's pet tarantula or dooking for jellyfish.

And then, at last, a tangible reminder of blue-remembered childhood summers spent playing among cornfields north of Glasgow long since given over to the Chardonnay estates: a big combine harvester, refulgent in green and yellow; split new and waxed up. I was only slightly disappointed that it didn't come still in red. It's always been my dream to drive one of these grand and wonderful metal dragons, threshing corn into gold.

Around me children were clambering all over shiny, new tractors. In this strange world only previously glimpsed through a car windscreen surely no one would stir at one more strange sight; of a middle-aged chap in Doc Marten shoes and indecorous suit climbing into the cockpit to fulfil a boyhood fantasy..?