MOST socialists who love the countryside and nature will have ideas about what a socialist countryside would be like. They may have model projects that they think prefigure that future.

For myself, those ideas would include the return of land-based labour on a large scale to the countryside and the long-term replacement of giant cities by a settlement pattern that combines the advantages of urban and rural living.

Something, maybe, like the pattern of the best of the old South Yorkshire coalfield, where industrial mining villages were scattered in a lacework of woods, rich farms of corn and pasture, lakes, small meandering rivers, grazing marsh and moor.

Food and industrial products would be made by the democratically self-managing communities of their producers and consumers and would be retailed directly to these local communities according to their expressed needs and collective decisions.

Nowadays lots of wildlifers I know (here in the south of England) look to the Knepp rewilding project as a sort of model for nature’s restoration. Knepp’s propaganda blinds them to the reality of patrician landowner control, rentier incomes from built estate properties, external dividends, public subsidy and marginalised food production of elite meats.

For myself, there’s a local farming project that models far closer to a democratic, sustainable multipurpose countryside producing all the temperate foods we can in harmony with nature. It’s only a partial model, but it’s an important one.

We first came across this project when, very tired after a walk struggling through soggy woodland tangled by rhododendron, we came out onto a hillside patchwork of small fields, where a slow-moving herd of brown and white dappled cows grazed. We spotted a man standing there with them.

“Oh no!” I whispered to Jane, “Please not some bloke saying ‘Excuse me, there’s no footpath here’.”

He turned, and in the friendliest tone called “Hello!” — and asked us where we’d journeyed. He told us all about the farm, saying it was a 200-acre community-owned farm that supported 12 people, had 15 acres of nursery crops, and made a profit! I struggled hard to disguise my feelings and not tear up, so moved did I feel to be welcomed, not challenged.

Upslope was a little bungalow and a grass-roofed roundhouse called Pericles, with a welcome sign on it, a totem pole, and a carved green man — a training project for learning-disabled youngsters. We passed a sounder of happy porkers (Berks/old spot/saddleback crosses) — and a small sheep flock. Near the farmyard are the polytunnels.

That mother of all local alternative farms is the community-supported Plaw Hatch Farm, twinned with its larger sister farm at Tablehurst, Forest Row, which looks south across the infant Medway to Ashdown Forest’s Winnie the Pooh country. Together they farm, own or rent about 1500 acres.

We’ve been on so many visits to the twin farms since then, once bringing Labour Party eco-activists and once bringing Brighton Labour and Green councillors, but mostly we come alone. Plaw Hatch’s friendly stockman, and both Neil Ravenscroft, that doyen of community-supported agriculture (CSA) and Chris Marshall have explained to us how the project works.

The twin farms are run according to “biodynamic” principles, which have their origin in the eclectic work of Rudolph Steiner, the German polymath who combined interest in science, politics and the occult.

Most of us will know him for the Steiner schools network, but he had strong and developed ideas about agriculture which came to be known as biodynamics. He was heavily influenced both by his own peasant origin and his scientific training. In the years of the contest for a German revolution (1918-21) he worked with the Marxist social democratic left, but diverged strongly later from the communist movement.

I share the widespread doubts about aspects of biodynamic farming, but my doubts about its adherence to the power of “preparations” (such as cow horns filled with silica and buried in compost, or the skulls of domestic animals filled with oak bark) and its adherence to lunar cycles and astronomical configurations, are dwarfed by my admiration for the holistic reality of its farming economies.

On the twin farms, some 40 people make their livings, either from farming, food processing or food selling  — for each farm has a shop — or from related activities dependent upon the farm, education, the small care home and the work with learning disabled folk.

A neighbouring conventional arable farm of the same size supports just one full-time worker and a part-timer.

If you look at Tablehurst’s cereal fields you notice that they are devoid of the “tram lines” — tractor tracks which typify nearly all modern cereal fields, made by repeated tractor passes to apply pesticides and fertilisers. The twin farms avoid all sprayings once the seed is drilled. That means the twin farms use just 10-12 litres of diesel per hectare, compared to c25 litres per hectare on conventional farms.

The soil quality at the twin farms rises year on year, while the soil quality on the neighbouring conventional arable farm goes down year on year, so that, if nothing changes, the latter farm faces imminent ruin. In Britain as a whole, about 90 per cent of soil organic matter has been lost in the last century.

The farms have created closed circular systems which use their own energy. Windrows of compost dot the landscape.

Virtually all their products go to the local community. The wholesalers and supermarkets are cut out completely. At weekends you pass local folk trudging up Tablehurst’s farm track armed with shopping bags and rucksacks to stock up with vegetables, meats, bakery and dairy products.

The farm businesses are each owned by community co-operatives. Tablehurst’s co-op has some 600 members, as of 2018, who are also its shareholders.

Plawhatch’s small dairy herd produces non-pasteurised milk, and its cheeses and other milk products are made on-site. There is a small beef herd at each farm and in the winter they are housed with the pigs. Both species get along just fine.

Free-range poultry units are mobile across the pastures, as are the sheep. All the cattle and sheep keep their horns. There are large apple orchards, and large fields and polytunnels produce a wide range of vegetables and salad products.

This is a model that can hold its own even within a capitalist economy. Yet at Brighton, where our council owns some 13,000 Downland acres, the reactionary senior land management and conservative (small “c”) political leadership have consistently stymied attempts to drive forward the estate’s democratic reorganisation.

In Brighton, where large-scale poverty co-exists with great privilege, that model of democratic, community-owned retail farming has far greater efficacy even than at Plaw Hatch-Tablehurst. 13,000 acres of co-operatively managed and retailed local organic food production could improve many people’s lives.

The rollback of the labour movement’s erstwhile drive for land reform — which was still encroaching on landowners and developers as late as the Labour government of 1974-9, which passed the Community Land and Development Land Tax Acts — has hugely withered the socialist imaginary.

Private landownership has been relegitimised by the advent of non-means-tested agri-environmental subsidies, and is now to be relegitimised again by the new Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) system of cross-subsidy from developers to private landowners and farmers.

Internationally the progress of the demand for workers self-management, which is the heart of the socialist project, has been hugely reversed from its peaks in the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the 1936 Spanish anarchist revolution, Tito’s Yugoslavian self-management system of 1948 onwards, and Ben Bella’s peasant and workers’ self-managed collectives in the Algerian revolution of 1962-5.

It may seem like a huge distance from twin biodynamic co-operative farms in the middle-class countryside of Winnie the Pooh, to rolling back the horrors of junk food, the “barley baron” deserts of eastern England, and dairy herds of 2,000 cattle that never walk on grass. But in the midst of dreadful food poverty, climate change and extinction, it’s a distance we have to close.

At the end of our first visit to Plaw Hatch, we walked back towards Sharpthorne village in the cool of dusk across the farm fields. On the horizon across the wooded ridges was East Grinstead’s tall church tower, looking like an East Anglian wool church.

The cows were being driven up the wood-edge track below to milking. There was a field of wet cabbages. Small bats foraged in the fading glow. The wooded edge of the western pasture was full of huge, glistening boletes and crimson fly agaric. A tawny owl flew by in silent silhouette. A bluish mist rose on the fields, only two feet high.

It was all so good and fine.