KEY POINTS:
Fields and hedges roll away towards the mist over the English Channel - La Manche - 8km away.
There is a charming, little, medieval church in the Norman style.
Almost all the buildings in the village of Videcosville are old, grey farmhouses. Almost all of the farms are still working.
This is the French countryside that the world adores: rich, green, unchanging. This is the picturebook image of farming that the candidates in the French presidential election celebrate - and promise to defend.
Even the incurably urban centre-right candidate Nicolas Sarkozy - the favourite to be the next President of the Republic - says that agriculture is part of France's soul, "a way of life, almost a form of civilisation".
The centrist candidate, Francois Bayrou, a son of farmers, likes to be photographed and filmed driving his old, red tractor. Bayrou suggests that his cautious, reformist politics are rooted in the values of the soil.
He promises that, if elected, he will defend the "family" farm. He rants against "1000-cow" dairy ranches, agriculture on "an industrial scale" that will destroy the beauty and social tissue of the French countryside.
With the French voters going to the polls on Sunday, the battle for rural voters is heating up. If nobody gets at least 50 per cent of the vote, the two frontrunners will face off in a second round on May 6.
Hubert Beaugrand, 39, a dairy farmer in Videcosville, dismisses Sarkozy and Bayrou as "hypocrites".
"They talk about defending family farms and traditional farming. They talk about defending the environment. It is all blah-blah. If elected, they would continue the existing policies that are destroying traditional and environmentally friendly farming in France."
We are sitting around the farmhouse kitchen table on a beautiful spring day. The hedges are blooming. The Norman cows, in psychedelic patterns of white, brown and black, are chomping peacefully in the fields.
Beaugrand's farming partner, Olivier Couture, 51, looks up from his lunch of bright pink steak and haricot beans. He says: "The French Government says it defends farmers. It does not defend farmers. It defends agriculture, yes, but not farmers. It defends agri-business, which is vital to the country's trade balance. It does not give a damn for farmers."
The campaign debate - or non-debate - about agriculture and the French countryside perfectly illustrates one of the oddities of this year's presidential election. Much of the political argument seems to take place in a vacuum, sealed from the realities of the world outside. Much of the debate also centres on an imagined or "virtual" France - sometimes absurdly idealised, sometimes over-vilified - rather than the realities of the changing, hybrid, muddled France of 2007.
Last Autumn, Beaugrand and hundreds of other small farmers in France - 50 here in the department of Manche alone - organised a rolling hunger strike. They were protesting against the way that the French Agriculture Ministry had decided to allocate European Union subsidies under new rules adopted in Brussels.
In theory, some of the vast subsidies paid to the biggest, most intensive and most polluting farms were to be re-directed towards traditional and ecologically-friendly farms.
In reality, Paris found a way of interpreting the rules to preserve the flow of subsidies to big, intensive farmers - the powerhouse of the "agri-industry" which makes France the second largest food exporter in the world. Smaller, less intensive and less polluting farms got little extra.
There were more than 2 million farmers in France in the 1970s. There are now 600,000. About half may disappear in the next 20 years.
"To me, it's simple," said Beaugrand. "The future of farming and the survival of the countryside are the same thing. I choose to farm without chemical fertilisers and without pesticides - without burning the grass by over-grazing it - because that is what I believe in.
"That's what I believe our future must be."
Beaugrand and Couture - who merged their farms this year - have 50 dairy cows on 78 hectares. Most of their neighbours have twice that number per hectare. Intensive farms elsewhere have up to five times as many.
Because of the way France interprets the EU rules, the Beaugrand-Couture eco-friendly farm receives only one third of average subsidy per hectare of farms in La Manche.
"We went on hunger strike to draw attention to the fact that French governments say one thing about farming and do another," Beaugrand said. "What do we see in the campaign? Both the centre-right candidates, Bayrou and Sarkozy, talk about the soul of the countryside. Then they follow the line of the big farming federation, the FNSEA, which promotes the high-production, high-intensity agriculture which is destroying small and medium farms."
The only leading candidate to talk of the need for a radical shift in farm policy, to support "traditional" farms, is the Socialist, Segolene Royal. She has the smallest proportion of the farm vote of any of the leading candidates: smaller even than the veteran far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen.
Beaugrand and Couture, who belong to the small farmers' union Confederation Paysanne, will probably support their union's former leader, Jose Bove, in the first round and Royal in the second round - if she makes it. They are virtually alone among their farming neighbours in even considering a vote for Royal.
How to explain such a paradox?
"Most farmers, large or small, will vote for Sarkozy or Bayrou even if they don't trust them," Couture said. "Farmers, even small and struggling farmers, are conservative in their bones. They could not bring themselves to vote left. Still less for a woman. Yes, they are suffering under the present policy. Yes, they want change. But they also fear change, desperately."
- INDEPENDENT
