The gap may be closing across the so-called "rural-urban divide", results of a recent study show.
Findings from research commissioned by the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (Maf) challenges the nature of the rural-urban divide.
The report was part of Maf's "Situation and Outlook for New Zealand Agriculture and Forestry" report released last month and was based on research carried out in May and June last year by UMR Research Ltd.
Maf said it commissioned the study in response to the perception that urbanisation had caused a growing misunderstanding and lack of appreciation for rural New Zealand among urban New Zealanders, and vice versa - the so called "rural-urban divide".
One of the study's key findings was that a high proportion of urban dwellers had a generally positive view of rural New Zealand and, overall, there was a growing appreciation by city folk of the economic importance of the rural and primary sectors, and how it was a key driver of their own prosperity.
However, in contrast, rural dwellers were less certain about the significance of urban New Zealand to their lives, the researchers concluded.
Federated Farmers provincial communications co-ordinator Alison Undorf-Lay agrees with most of the study's findings.
In 2007, Ms Undorf-Lay was the first non-farmer to receive a Nuffield Scholarship and last year used the opportunity to travel overseas to study how leading agricultural-producing countries dealt with the rural-urban divide.
Ms Undorf-Lay said when she gained some "distance" in perspective from New Zealand, she observed that in the main, conflict appeared to arise over environmental issues and the use of natural resources.
This prompted her to think about how farmers might "talk to" the ordinary city-dweller and this in turn saw her champion this year's inaugural Federated Farmers' Farm Day.
The whole point of Farm Day was to "create a stage" where farmers could tell their stories, Ms Undorf-Lay said.
"When a farmer explains to a non-farmer how to make baleage ... why you have to wrap it ... at that point the discussion starts.
"I think understanding grows on both sides."
In recent years farmers, for the most part, had found their interactions with non-farmers had been dominated by conflicts over how natural resources were going to be used and had mostly been with environmental lobbyists, she said.
"They [the lobbyists] take some moral high ground and they express that ... they find any way they can to articulate that."
Farmers had reacted to that by becoming self-protective.
Their defensiveness came from a sense of frustration, she said.
Ms Undorf-Lay said because of this she felt the response of farmers as reported in the study did not reflect the "authentic voice" of rural dwellers.
"If you are constantly being criticised, it's hard not to be defensive ... it's hard not to be interpreted as being arrogant.
"People become less open. It's a human response."
For a person whose feet were "solidly in farming" to live in a city for the past nine months, as she had done in Christchurch, was revealing, Ms Undorf-Lay said.
City-dwellers were insulated from the realities that were farming life - such as having to work outdoors in all conditions, she said.
"It is so hard in the city to imagine what life is like in the country ... life is so easy [in the city]."
The Farm Day events were going to stimulate discussion - "discussion to a point of reaching a common understanding," Ms Undorf- Lay said.