Countryside noise - the price of mechanisation and efficient husbandry?

When did the countryside get to be so noisy?

As I try to work, I can hear birdsong - loud but good - tractors, diggers, chainsaws - loud, no doubt necessary and bad - and an extraordinary wail. As a child in the forties, this was the sound which would bring adults to a halt in the street, their faces waxy with fear. And now, it's coming over the garden wall from the paddocks beyond. 'Gregor' has a new toy, a vacuum cleaner for hoovering up the horse muck. He - short of leg and broad of shoulder - is leaping on and off his quad to apply this proboscis to any neatly steaming piles extant in the meadowgrass. The siren wail follows his rhythm. And it's the end of an era. Before he found this mechanised version, small girls would move peacefully among the horses at the end of the day - with buckets and shovels and the relationship of man and horse intact. The question is: is it right to insist that human beings continue to engage in physical labour - even though small girls love being with horses and this teaches them a lot - because the noise created by the mechanical alternative is just too awful to listen to comfortably for four hours a day?