I noticed yesterday one of my favorite seasonal smells: that crisp whiff of freshly fallen oak leaves heated by the sun and blown by cool, dry wind. It brought back fine old memories of college footb all weeke time in the woods, and backyard cookouts.

About the time I was savoring the memory of steaks on the grill, however, another smell broke in - the odor of chicken dooky.

The smell started out subtle, but a shift of the fall wind brought it fully into eye-watering focus. A mile away, a neighbor was spreading fertilizer on his hayfields. Since this fertilizer pretty much came out the back ends of a zillion chickens, then dried and spread into fine particles over acres of ground, well, it puts up quite a cloud of stink.

It's ironic that I should have smelled the fertilizer just when I was thinking about putting a nice steak on the grill, because fertilizer on the field is just a part of the agricultural mechanism that brings that magical Angus to my grill. You can't have the steak without the stink.

A lot of folks think that the beef for hamburgers just magically appears at McDonalds, not realizing that their Happy Meal is at the end of a long food chain that runs through those lush green fields of hay. Rural folks are less ignorant because they get to see it up close: the fertilizer helps the hay to grow, the hay is cut and baled up to feed the cattle, the cattle go to market, to slaughter, then to stores and restaurants.

So there's a straight line between that stink and our steak, and all along the way working people are making a living by raising or selling or cutting or cooking that beef. The fertilizer comes from nearby chicken producers, so local beef producers can get it delivered cheaper, thus lowering their costs and increasing their chances, please God, for a little profit.

But some people - visitors and newcomers, especially - are shocked to smell that odor and other rural intrusions. Some city people's nostalgic images of rural Georgia, their back-to-nature fantasies, fail to include any clue about the realities of farms and farming. One New York City man, who may be city smart but is definitely country dumb, honestly said to me, "You mean all that grass is grown on purpose? It looks like a total waste of land, like all those pine trees."

(I just nodded at him, by the way. Some ignorance ain't worth fixing.)

The reality is that, although nobody likes the smell, it's part of the price we pay for living just down the road from heaven. This is and has always been a rural, agricultural county. Agriculture is the biggest industry here by far, and that fact makes it what it is, a little bad with all the good.

What's more, while it's wonderful that people are moving here from cities and suburbs, I hope they don't expect the vital agricultural industry to change just to provide them an odor-free retreat from city life. It just won't happen.

Sorry, folks. That's life in the country and it is what it is.