Adventures in The Void #1: Life on the farm

So I've come looking for The Dream on some Welsh biodynamic/organic/generally ideological little farm, exchanging bodily labour for food and enlightenment. It's anywhere between 1.00pm and I guess 4pm and I’m on a train, shuttling hazily between non-descript Welsh towns. The weather is unsettling - we’re occasionally encompassed by gloom, only to rush into a bright sickly coloured sunshine which dries the arteries of rainwater streaming furiously across the windows like tears in a high wind. We do reach Swansea in the end - Cardiff’s strange, pale sister city and I pass straight through into welsh language speaking oblivion.

By the time I reach the farm I'm all jittery from having popped too many chocolate covered coffee beans on the bus. I don't really know what to expect from this nook of idealism, which has offered itself up to me via the medium of the excruciatingly named 'diggers and dreamers' website. I'm greeted by this serious looking, well spoken Gabriel Oak figure who emerges booted and capped from the farmhouse. He's on his way to get the cows in, and requests that I join him. The plot thickens.

This is 65 year old Dr of Forestry, David, and later I'm introduced to his wife, his five kids, and Luke, a guy with a learning disability who fitted into David's fierce philosophy that everyone has the right to work. They all co-habit in this strange insular environment. Close, tense, fractious and so familiar with one another, the well, well worn paths that trace their relationships are vividly observable to me as I rudely carved a space for myself in their day to day lives. Their familial history is exemplified in every small exchange.

There's not much work for me to do independently, so I spend the week trailing after David, hearing his views and ideas and opinions, his tales of this person and that person, spun with all the relish of a born conversationalist. Mainly I stand at the doorway to the cowshed, washing teats and shovelling shit, listening to him putting together his utopia, which looked something like this: Villages ordered around a central farm, from which each man woman and child would receive their food and sustenance. All needs locally and transparently provided, a kind of tribalism, though David would not hear the word 'communism' without looking disapproving and uncomfortable. David wants the means of production to be transparent to everybody. Everybody, he believes, should be aware of where their food comes from. Like a lot of people of his sex and generation, he is convinced of the merit of his ideas, and I enjoy hearing them explained with that solid conviction. He works and talks late into the night, exhausting himself. 'It's a difficult farm' he explained, and the weather wasn't helping.

Biodynamic cows, rather unnervingly, must retain their long curved horns. They lend a certain air of dignity to an animal very much in need of it, leading existences that largely consist of dribbling, humping and defecating. One of many biodynamic uses of these lovely weapons involves stuffing a cow horn full of manure and burying it for six months, before mixing with water and spraying it everywhere. (Flinging fertiliser over everywhere, incidentally, is just as scatalogically joyous as it sounds). I imagine the cows also use them to simultaneously spear the twin biodynamic evils of capitalist production methods and pernicious EU bureaucracy.

It's not quite the Utopian dream-world I've been looking for. It's lonely, the countryside is ragged and bleak, and the everyday stress of the large, stretched family is tangible. I often see Jane, David's wife, with her elbows resting on a gate, or the kitchen table, her thin head in her hands, looking close to despair. David frequently tells me that they have chosen not to be well-off. They both believe that the working week should be shorter, to allow time for personal development, and that they would like to see less emphasis placed on making money in general. And they pay for this - by working more than anyone else, and constantly worrying about money.

Also, it is difficult to gauge their sphere of influence. Their visitors book is full of fondness, with many, many 'I really learned something about myself's'. What they would really like is another family to help with the endless tasks as old age beats them into submission. I spoke to a prospective couple in another community - David and Jane had been eager apparently for them to fill the position. 'Too much milking', they had said. Which I took to mean that repetitive, isolated, back breaking tasks were not everybody's ideal utopia.

David's friends in the Welsh farming community considered him an amusing, yet baffling novelty. 'Why don't you use chemical fertilizer?', they had asked despairingly 'get some money coming in'. On the other side, for his 'progressive' friends, of which a surprising number emerged from the vast hills, organic food seemed more of a lifestyle-hobby. One party I was kindly taken to seemed to consist of one big hideous half joking competition over whose Bio Tunnel got the most airtime on Welsh speaking television.

And yet, thinking about about it, this as much The Dream as you'll find. Not perfect, but fucking determined.