I grew up in the village where I now live again and where I lived in an apartment before building the house; 700 inhabitants, about 400 of them with horns
So very rural.
Until last year, we lived in the village center, between the inn and the church (it doesn’t get any more central in a Bavarian village!) and now a few hundred meters away as the crow flies in a former new development area without agriculture.
You hear the agriculture, yes. But we still do that now too. When mowing is underway and rain is impending, the farmers sometimes work through the night until the hay or grain is harvested. The noise doesn’t come from the farmyard but from the field. So we hear that too.
Our previous neighbor, the innkeeper, raised pigs himself. You only rarely smelled it, but it wasn’t a large pig farm, just a few sows for personal use and the slaughter bucket in the inn kitchen. It was rather funny when the sows escaped and we all went pig hunting *g*.
You can smell agriculture. We still can, because it smells the most when the fields are fertilized. That smell also comes more from the field than from the farmyard. You just have to live with that in the countryside, I think.
But there is definitely one really big difference for us: flies and mosquitoes!
In our apartment, as I said, VERY centrally located, we really had a plague every summer. Sometimes so bad that we preferred to stay inside in the evening because during the blue hour the mosquitoes just practically ate you up. They just laughed at Autan, Anti Brumm (much better than Autan!), and other mosquito coils, etc. They only gave us the illusion that we were doing something against those pests rather than actually helping. Sometimes it was really unbearable.
Here, a good distance away from any farm or stable, it’s much better. We sit outside relaxed, often even without spraying ourselves first (which was definitely not possible in the apartment in summer). It may be that the mosquitoes aren’t as bad this year as in previous years, but we notice a clear difference. Also with flies. In the apartment, I sometimes acted as a mass murderer and killed 20 or more flies – and we had fly screens! But those beasts are so fast that if you open the door to go in or out – whoosh, they’re already inside. Here a fly occasionally buzzes in if the front door (of course without a fly screen) is open for a while. But by now we are very relaxed about it because the situation is much more pleasant.
Would I therefore not move next to a farm? No, probably not. If the property otherwise fits and is well located, and the price is still great, then I would accept that. The only consequence: professional mosquito protection from the start. So order it with the windows right away. But you just have to be clear that you will be a bit more bothered there than without the immediate proximity of a farm.