We saw scores of farms just like this, in the course of a two-week walk through the mountain passes of the French Alps. Some of them, it is true, had acquired gleaming new tractors with rotary mowers to help with the harvest and to supplement the scythe. Others had formed co-operatives, which seemed to be doing well. Compared with the average British farm, however, they were tiny. Pretty, pastoral, and long past their sell-by date, they — most Euro-critics would argue — represent precisely the kind of small-time agriculture that is holding France back. Inefficient and widespread, they could not survive without the injection of massive subsidies from the Common Agricultural Policy.

That, at any rate, is the myth. The truth is exactly the opposite. Long after Britain’s highly efficient but unpopular farming industry has been brought to its knees by a succession of policies that discourage food production in favour of the environment, the French peasant farmer will still be standing there, stolidly tending his small herd of doe-eyed cattle and his flock of muscular sheep, pocketing the subsidies and producing cheeses like the Tomme de Savoie, the Beaufort and the Boucheron, or those eye- watering sausages that extract teeth and ambush taste buds. He is on the side of an unbroken tradition, which is not only as umbilical to the French as the Marseillaise, but is absolutely in tune with the new direction in which ministers want the CAP to go.

Of course, France has its industrialised farming — intensive, chemicalised and in some ways more environmentally damaging than anything in Britain. Its huge agricultural businesses soak up 90 per cent of the French share of the CAP and has attracted furious criticism in the press. But all that is beginning to change. Politics are running heavily in favour of the small producer as France, a net exporter of food, begins to assess the cost of centralised production, not just in economic terms but also as a factor that contributes to global warming.

Those who want less intensive farming and a reduction in pesticides and chemicals point to le petit fermier, who does without them already. A policy that demands species-rich grasses and mixed woodland rather than acres of uniform wheatland finds it in spades on France’s small farms. If you decide to encourage regional produce rather than flying in strawberries from Israel or apples from New Zealand, then out there in the scattered hamlets of rural France it’s embedded in the culture. If you want food to be produced on the spot rather than dispatched hundreds of kilometres by lorry, eating up “food miles” and spewing out CO2 emissions, c’est déjà là. The French are wedded to their spécialités régionaux. In every village we passed through, tiny shops advertised locally produced food, not as a cute tourist attraction but as an intrinsic part of daily life.

It is the biggest single difference between rural attitudes in Britain and France. Here we expect cheap food, readily available from supermarkets, without caring much where it comes from. We have become, almost without being aware of it, a net importer of food, preferring foreign produce to the home-grown variety because of its price, running down our dairy industry, buying 95 per cent of our fruit, 50 per cent of our vegetables and 39 per cent of our beef from abroad.

Our farmers are having to adjust from the fat years, in which they were encouraged to produce enormous quantities of wheat, barley, meat and milk so that postwar Britain would never again go hungry, to one in which the idea of production is discouraged and farmland is to be managed with an eye to its natural balance, sustainability and ecofriendly qualities. Abandoned fields, which once waved with corn, stand empty and sterile; sheep, which traditionally kept the grassy hills of places like the Western Highlands cropped and springy, have been taken off the land, leaving bracken to encroach; the education of a new generation of young farmers has been run down. Politically, farming is yesterday’s story.

In France, by contrast, from the orchards of Brittany to the alpine slopes, le terroir — the territory on which a community stands, and from where it draws its sustenance — remains a pre-eminent concept. No politician worth his salt will ever abandon it; more importantly, the French housewife, prodding her locally grown tomatoes with suspicious fingers, or weighing up the qualities of a filet mignon, will always insist on it. The local farmer is not just a part of the scenery; he is the scenery.

That makes it easier for the French to wean its consumers away from cheap imports. It is a process that will have to happen sooner or later in Britain too. We cannot forever continue to jet in fruit and vegetables from improbable places in the name of choice and cheapness. If we are serious about the environment, we cannot turn a blind eye to the ranching conditions or the deforestation in countries like Brazil or Argentina, which supply our beef. Above all, we cannot simply allow our farming heritage to melt away because it is out of fashion. Sooner or later we will need it back again. When that time comes, I have no doubt which country will be better placed. My money is on the old man with the scythe.

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