Even the one time I lived on the urban-rural border in upstate New York, though there were farms all around me, they were pretty much opaque to me. I just lived there and commuted in to Ithaca. I didn’t know any farmers socially or understand what I was looking at driving past.
Used to go on walks, but stopped after one time a farm dog attacked me unprovoked and another time I got lost down a gulch on a solo hike and couldn’t read the paper USGS map (this was before iPhones, and it was the hilly kind of countryside, with farms and woods intermingled)