Simon Fairlie: ‘People are so detached from the land’

‘We’re fighting a rearguard action against the forces of technological greed. But we can keep a check on these idiots’: Simon Fairlie at Monkton Wyld, Devon. Photograph: Leon Foggitt/The Observer

This is my dream yard,” sighs Simon Fairlie, standing in a small quadrangle of rough stones strewn with hay, surrounded by low redbrick barns, where swallows dip in the summer. With its pair of soulful Jersey cows and folds of Dorset hills beyond, it resembles an idyll of long-lost farming life.

Fairlie, one of the most interesting and influential activists you may never have heard of, has had a long and varied career. But the latest chapter in the multi-storied life of one of the fathers of Britain’s environmental movement sees him as a farmer. Which might sound at odds with his background, but Fairlie – true to form – is championing an alternative type of farming, in the shape of the micro-dairy.