How much does it cost to get rid of a dead calf? What if you had to shoot it first? On his daily "flesh run" Ian, a farm worker in Cornwall, gets £2. Having to kill the animal earns him an extra bag of fudge.
A show of hands before the screening of Molly Dineen's film, "The Lie of The Land", established that most of the crowd at Hay were city-folk. Perhaps it was no surprise, then, when they collectively winced as Dineen's pictures showed Ian skinning a cow; or when she filmed another farmer, Paul, calmly shot bolts into the heads of two calves. Their message: this is the countryside, death is the simple inevitable result of life.
Dineen's film began as a story of the ban on fox-hunting. Watching parliamentarians debate for more than 700 hours on how foxes were killed during a hunt, Dineen wanted to find and follow a group of amateur hunters in Cornwall, in a bid to follow the lives of the people who had campaigned so vociferously that a ban would disrupt their traditional way of life.
A day with the hunters quickly threw her portrait of the huntsmen into a new direction. She met Ian as he led a fox hunt but it was his day job, the "flesh run" clearing away dead animals from neighbouring farms to provide food for his hunting dogs, that unexpectedly peaked her interest. A day driving around with Ian as he carried out his macabre task gave Dineen a window into a much larger tale of neglect and decline, a story of despair in the once-powerful British farming industry.
Dineen lays bare our hypocritical attitude to animals - why was so much time at the highest levels of government spent on protecting foxes when thousands of pheasants and calves are culled every year because they are simply not economically viable? Why is the value of one animal life so much higher than another's?
Many of us, perhaps wilfully, shield ourselves from the reality of the food we eat - dead cows helpfully appear as abstract chunks of flesh squashed into cellophane wrappers, no extra thinking required to throw it into a frying pan. The effect of that ease of consumption, where supermarket monopolies mean that it's cheaper to import cows from Venezuala than to rear calves born in England, is given a human face in Dineen's film.
Dineen said that her main aim was to tell the story of the hidden characters who live and breathe Britain's countryside. She told her Hay audience that her own opinions were carefully tempered in the film. But perhaps because her central argument is already beginning to strike a chord in Britain, her film's message remains forceful.
Our refusal to pay an extra penny or three for a pint of milk forces farmers to stop farming; it ends in the conversion of farms across great swathes of the country into second homes for the wealthy. And it isn't helped by a government policy that is indifferent about whether the food Britain eats is grown here.
