Confessions of a failed farmer...

There is a line in Lady Chatterley's Lover - not one favoured by prurient schoolboys - when Sir Clifford Chatterley surveys what remains of a treasured piece of woodland on his estate that has been destroyed to make trench props for the Great War.

'What is my England, where is my England now?' he asks bitterly.

Today, the same question is being asked by farmers the length and breadth of the land as a combination of pitiful agricultural incomes and high property prices forces them in greater numbers than ever from their homes and traditional livelihoods.

This week, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors revealed that as many as two-thirds of farms sold in the past three months have been to non-farmers.

Professional city types are buying them, not to continue farming themselves - there is little or no money in that - but to use their houses, barns and a little surrounding land as a pleasure dome for their families and children, for ponies, ornamental gardens and refuge from other humans that only money can buy.

Farmhouse kitchens, far from being the rural hub of family and local community where lilting rural tongues once discussed animal husbandry and falling cattle market prices, are today filled with chatter of Riviera holidays, of Bond Street fashion and of how 'reasonable' are their £3,000 Agas.

It is hardly surprising given the recent levels of City incomes and bonuses, and the high prices of properties in London - even if they are now beginning to fall.

Or when farm incomes outside the shires are little more than £8,000 a year per household.

Locals can't buy into farming; the average farmer's age is 58 and fewer than 40 per cent of farming children want to enter this hard and impecunious vocation.

The National Farmers Union says 18,000 farmers and farm workers lost their jobs in 2002; in the past six years, nearly 70,000 have abandoned the land.

We have rural communities being replaced by incomers from disparate areas with little sense of community, no yeoman blood and no feel for the soil or the local village.

Let me declare my hand, for I am a 'failed' farmer. I am one of those who, faced with mounting debt, threw in the towel, let out my farmland and took a job in London as the only way to keep a hold on the property.

That I, from a farming family, should have upped sticks and gone back to an office has led to me being labelled 'the weekend wellie' and the 'one-minute countryman'.

Such, however, is the parlous state of the rural farming economy outside the corn prairies of Cambridgeshire and Yorkshire - foot-and-mouth merely accelerated the decline - that all small farmers face diversification or financial death.

Some have made a good go of bed and breakfasts. Others, like my neighbours, have desecrated the land with another, unnecessary golf course.

Still more farmers sit hoping that some field or other near their village will one day attract Mr Prescott's rural housing plan and bring them the windfall that farming never did.

I own a field surrounded by houses and away from the farm, which I (and the bank manager) see one day as a visionary oasis of low-cost rural housing - not to mention a fat cheque from the building developer.

For more than a year, when I inherited my father's Devon farm on his death six years ago, I lived a farmer's life.

A farmer's life, let me tell you, is not the countryside of weekend National Trust house visits or a summer's day totter to the church. It is a tooth and claw fight against the ravages of economic uncertainty.

My day began at 7am. I had one farm worker doing the work outside and, on a good day, I had the luxury of helping him.

Normally, I was sitting at my desk dealing with the remorseless tide of bureaucracy and paperwork and 'farming' bills.

This is not a whinge but the simple economic fact: if you are not well off through other means, a farm is going to haemorrhage money. We weren't replete with the latest machinery and equipment.

On one occasion, when I took some ewes to Exeter market, I was stopped by the police in the farm's Citroen Diane. One of the sheep had jumped into the front of the car and was working the gearstick.

The land agent who advised me on how to let out the farmland said you need 500 acres in Devon for a farm to be a viable economic entity.

My farm was losing £17,000 a year. It did not attract the big subsidies that give farming a bad name. I was faced with selling up or renting it out.

So I sold the flock of 130 Suffolk Clun ewes and all the farm machinery down to the last rusting fence post. I let my land on a farm business tenancy to my neighbours, real farmers who have never moved to the city or off the land.

They retain the kudos of being countrymen. As for me, I was left with the opprobrium of having let down the rural side.

The rent from my tenants for my land is nothing in comparison to its value. I would get more from renting out a small flat in trendy Notting Hill Gate.

While I have grimly held on to my farm for the time being, there are plenty nearby that have fallen into the hands of City professionals.

I can think of doctors, barristers, bankers and company chairmen, all of whom have moved into the area to enjoy their rural idyll.

They are wondrously generous at local garden centres and are putting the price of a rural nanny, daily or gardener well beyond the means of normal men and women.

New owners, like owners of the great estates in the 18th century, have bought their land and are entitled to do with it what they will.

But outside their girdled grounds the countryside is dying.

They may profess an interest, but the last thing a professional who buys a farm wants is to get involved in the social round with true locals. He doesn't want to trouble his Sunday luncheon of imported friends with half an hour in church.

Have now moved on from trying to save the village postoffice and shop. Because today's incomers want the convenience of supermarkets; they want minimal contact with the local populace and their alien concerns.

I admit that I am just as guilty. Living during the week in London, I find I have no time or money to devote to those local rural institutions and causes that make my neighbourhood so, well, neighbourly and maintain the rural traditions that I adore.

Last Sunday, just as I was about to get my train to London, a woman came to see me unannounced and asked if she could stable 20 ponies in my disused barns.

'How has it come to this?' I asked.

'They have been grazing on a farm but the owner has decided to move away,' she replied. The owner was a fund manager who had decided to move on after just four years, taking his family and the profit he made from selling the farm with him.

I quickly gave her the name of some neighbours, more rural than myself. The truth is, I was as useless to the rural community as the fund manager.

But at least he's not living in my farmhouse. Yet.