Cold comfort farm

Is country life really under threat? On the eve of the Liberty & Livelihood march, David Aaronovitch, an inveterate town-dweller, goes back to Shropshire to meet his childhood friend, Farmer Phil

It is more than 35 years ago that I first saw Phil Harding. At 11 – the same age as me – this red-cheeked, red-nosed boy with thin, wind-whipped hair was driving the grey tractor that was to carry our kitbags and rucksacks up the farm path to the field his father had put aside for us. Actually driving! He carried this divinity with an insouciance that made his life seem even more attractive to the city kids come to camp on the farm that belonged to his family. Phil didn't seem to hold our obvious inferiority against us, and, most nights, he joined us at the camp fire. After 1972, I never saw him again.

I don't really understand the country vs town antagonism. Although I was a townie, I shared some of that left thinking that had grown up between the wars and that still persisted into the jet age, which was that we all needed some better relationship with nature. We were taught how to light fires with wet wood and one match, how to make a tepee, how to cook porridge for 60, how to make a dam, how to abjure materialism – and to long for the days of primitive communism before the Normans enclosed the land and built country parks. I sat out one night, all night, alone in a wood. Phil would doubtless have thought I was mad.

In England, the city may be exciting, but rural life has always been seen as best. There are several old folk songs – usually featuring an encounter between a husbandman and a serving man – which contrast the lives of country and townsfolk. The countryman drinks ale, has bluff manners and a simple honesty; the effete serving-man drinks wine and is both pampered and obsequious. The Industrial Revolution changed much of that – the class-conscious proletarian was far more potent a figure than the squire-pecked agricultural worker. Even so, the English left saw them as brothers, the town labourer and the village labourer, both seeking livelihood and liberty.

Not in 2002. On the road from the Smoke to Shropshire, someone had daubed "Liberty to Hunting" on a bridge over the M6. Someone else had painted "Jesus Saves" on the next. When the M54 ended, I took a back road and crossed the Severn at Cressage, making for Church Stretton (www.churchstretton.org.uk, as it now says on the signpost), then skirted the low, wooded slopes of the Long Mynd, before heading back north through villages from long ago: More, Wentnor, Norbury, and – finally – Ratlinghope.

I had phoned Phil up the night before. Or, rather, his daughter, who was not at all taken aback by having someone ask whether her dad was the same Phil Harding who had driven the tractor on Near Gatten Farm long before she was born. He got back to me within half an hour. "Come up," he said. "It'd be good to see you. Do you remember..." And he rattled off a list of names of dead or forgotten friends.

Phil is Farmer Phil now, of Farmer Phil's Rock and Country Festival, held over two August nights in the same field where I once woke up in a snowed-in tent one Easter. Standing in a sloping farmyard full of old cars, lorries, caravans, rubble, a workshop made out of corrugated iron and, standing around, several young men, Phil was immediately recognisable. He's balding, shorter and thinner than I thought he'd be, getting about on small, strong legs. But the nose, mouth and eyes are just the same, and he smiles a lot now.

We walked together looking across the lower fields, and up to the road that runs along the valley. Baled hay in yellow cake rolls occupied one field, sheep were grazing another, and the detritus of Farmer Phil's last festival lay around in a third. "Who's in the post office now?" I asked Phil, remembering visits for sweets and stamps from the red-brick villa that sits just where the farm lane meets the Pulverbatch road.

"Bunch Jones sold up to some people from Kent," said Phil, adding, "they don't like me. They complained about the festival. I invited them down, but they wouldn't come. And they complained about the old cars parked down there..." (Phil has about 50 vehicles in various stages of rusty decomposition.) "So I moved 'em to this field here, where they could get a really good view of them from their back window." He sent his finger down the line of the road, recalling better neighbours. "And that's where Jack Williams lived. Remember him? He died edging."

His beef against the incomers is twofold. The first is that he believes that they don't understand what a working farm looks like these days, with its inevitable eyesores and noises. The second is that they – wealthy people as they must be, having bought an expensive property, and with their three expensive cars and touring caravan in the yard – are trying to stop him doing the things he needs to do to, as he puts it, "survive". This is the theme that – almost unconsciously – is repeated again and again during my visit. Liberty and Livelihood.

What Phil does to survive is almost anything. He is the Del Boy of the Ratlinghope valley. Apart from looking after 200 sheep and 40-odd beef cattle on the farm (more, interestingly, than in his father's time), he also contracts out to do baling, drives an "artic" (articulated lorry) around Europe in the winter, operates two fish-pools, and has had sidelines in ventures such as importing and selling surplus French army lorries. That's apart from earning money from the festival and planning to get more by converting the old farmhouse (he lives in a bungalow he built himself) into places to rent. He has permission to convert the barns. The only thing he doesn't do is sell his body at Oswestry market.

But the thing with Phil, I feel, is that he won't really do anything that he doesn't like. He loves the festival, which easily attracts the 600 or so campers, each paying £22, that he needs to break even. Bands like the Yardbirds come down to his field to send their music over the secluded hills. It must be surreal. He enjoys the house conversion (which is presided over by an Irish builder exactly like the one from Fawlty Towers), pointing out where a previous occupant had painted the stairwell wall with sheep raddle applied on a shaving-brush. Improvisation has always been important here, because money has always been tight.

"You can't make a living in farming any more," he says, "unless you're one of the big boys." He has written down some examples for me. Organic milk, which fetched over 29p per litre three years ago, now earns just under 19p. The baling pays just 5 per cent more than it did 20 years ago, but the machinery is five times as expensive. The price of diesel is higher. Earnings are down, costs are up. Except for lambs – prices there have recovered. And taxes!

It's true that there is much that Phil says that is either contradictory, or that has gone unchallenged for too long. Income taxes are much lower than they were, and, in any case, farmers are exempt from some duties. And actually, the farm couldn't support both him and his father when, at 16 – right back in 1970 – he left school. That's how the baling started. Also, while he is blunt about the problems, he can be coy about the benefits. He has a largely new herd, because of foot-and-mouth. Not that his cows ever had it – the nearest case was eight miles away. No, they were "Welfare Cows", sold to the Government because movement restrictions made it hard to feed them. Phil got paid for them. "How much?" I inquired. Pause. Laugh. "Don't ask!" replied Phil. He also gets money for being in an environmentally sensitive area, to compensate him for not being able to use certain pesticides and chemicals.

But it isn't enough, and subsidies come at a price, as we will see later. We climbed steep Gatten Hill, above the farmhouse, past the old tree where we used to light fires and sing songs. All round, if you know where to look, are the reminders of past failures. From 1887 to 1948, there was a barytes mine here, employing five men, two of them working down a 200ft shaft. Phil finds small pieces of the pinky-white rock that was used in explosives and paint, and hands them to me. The valley on the other side of us, as we stood on top of the hill, was once full of lead workings, and the remains of the buildings are still there.

The cattle live on the hill, and this is Phil's magic kingdom. The sun rises over the Long Mynd in the east, and sets behind the natural quartzite crenellations of the Stiperstones, rising above the moorland to the west. At night, you can see the lights of Shrewsbury a dozen miles off. His best moments, he told me – the ones that stop him selling out to more people from Kent – are the early mornings when he feeds the cattle on Gatten Hill. When he was very little, and he lived in another farm nearer the Stiperstones, he used to walk with his mother over Gatten Hill to school. His attitude, he said, is: "We've got this, we should share it."

Even so, he doesn't like the Right to Roam. "It's as if I came into your garden," he puffed. "We bought this land, paid for it, why should someone else be able to walk over it?" But what happened to sharing? I told him that I didn't agree with him, which he accepted with perfect grace. But this disagreement led to a more generalised complaint and – eventually – on to hunting.

"They're just trying to change the way we live," he complained. Who is? "The Government." But Phil knew that that wasn't quite good enough. Why would the Government want to change the way he, Phil, lives? No, his feeling of encroachment seemed to have two distinct origins. One was the incomers again, who would buy cottages next to milking-parlours and then complain about the early-morning noise. The ones who raised planning objections to new buildings and new uses of farmland. The ones who moaned every time a perfectly nice and wildlife-friendly bypass was planned. "They join the council, join the WI, and take over. It's like the way communism infiltrated. Though not quite so extreme."

Then there is regulation and bean-counting. Every animal accounted for, every carcass buried, everything measured, every plan scrutinised, everything interfered with. And it's his land! But, of course – I didn't tell him – this is the inevitable consequence of subsidy. You want the money, you have to fill in the forms. The alternative to counting and regulation is massive fraud (and one suspects that it's pretty rife anyway) and a countryside full of burnt-out vehicles, oil-spills, chemical dumps, rotting corpses and housing estates.

Then you add hunting, the most unnecessary provocation of all. Phil doesn't hunt, and he doesn't even pretend that hunting does much to curb the fox population. Yet that weekend, two hunts had gone through his farmyard, and Phil's view is that this is a traditional activity, and why are some people so keen to tell other people what to do?

We went down to the bungalow. Phil's mother-in-law, who is staying there before emigrating to Spain, was in the kitchen talking to Phil's girlfriend (he and his wife, who lives a few miles away, have an amicable separation, and have jointly brought up their two daughters ). Two young farm-workers, who obviously adored Phil, came in for coffee. Five other people were around the small farm. It was like a commune, held together by Phil's energy and entrepreneurship. There are not many places like it.

Phil doesn't like crowds, and he won't be on the Liberty & Livelihood march, he told me before I left. But he doesn't like being told what to do, either, so he'll be cheering them on. And he invited me back for next year's festival. He's the last, though. His daughters, he said, will probably not want to farm, there are too many things that they would rather do; and in 30 more years, there won't be Hardings at Near Gatten.