In a TV programme that aired this summer, a leading spokesman for Sweden’s dairy farmers let it slip that agricultural technology had now come so far that farmers should be excused from letting their cows out to pasture during the summer.

This caused quite a furore. Elisabet Höglund wrote a scathing column in the tabloid Expressen, and the dairy farmer made a half-hearted apology.

The episode exemplified the paradox that characterises Swedish agriculture: the more “modern” farmers try to be, the more outmoded they are. Do today’s milk-fed, Disney-tamed, garden programme-loving consumers prefer assembly-line food to food from clover pastures? I don’t think so. But it seems agriculture still does.

A few months ago Filter magazine published an ambitious story on pig farming in Sweden and Denmark. The reporter visited places that included a large-scale intensive pig farm in Sweden outside Laholm. The owner gave a tour of the automated pens but made it clear ahead of time that he did not want to be photographed with any of his animals. Not because he was ashamed of his line of work. For him, it was instead a question of principle. “I want agriculture to be seen to be like any other industry. If a newspaper stops by to see an executive at a factory, they sure as hell won’t follow him out to take a picture of him surrounded by machinery.” Factory? Machinery?

For generations that have grown up on Swedish classics like Astrid Lindgren’s Emil’s Clever Pig, this should be rhetoric that is hard to swallow. People can of course protest that it is simply a question of metaphors when the farm becomes a factory and the pigs machinery, but metaphors are not harmless. There is always a dialectic between the world and images of the world; they shape and change each other. Agriculture’s leading provider of metaphors has long been industry. There has been a conscious effort to elevate agriculture to rational modernity, to streamline farming using the factory as role model.

I am leafing through the Swedish Tourist Association’s yearbook from 1960. The theme that year was “The Countryside.” In one of the articles, people can read about the development of modern agriculture. Mechanisation. Increased productivity. Specialisation. Brilliant progress which still, it must be admitted, has a downside. Overproduction. Depopulation of rural areas. A word like “de-horsing” sounds a bit melancholic, something that is quite discernible in the summary of the article “How we use the earth”: “The change that agriculture and thus the agricultural landscape have undergone in just a few decades is sweeping.”

“As late as the 1930s, farms teemed with people,” the writer, Gideon Saemund, notes, then going on to give concrete evidence of this teeming. Densely packed houses. Life and movement. Laughter and gossip. Quarrels and romance. (A bit like today’s romanticised city suburbs, it occurs to me.) By that time, as the 1950s gave way to the 1960s, technological development had produced a cultural revolution in agrarian societies.

“Nowadays, rural communities are sparsely populated and silent, when the clatter of tractors, cars and mopeds is not being expelled from exhaust pipes,” Saemund writes, continuing, “The number of workers has thinned out, and day labourers have simply vanished. The residences and way of life of farmers and agricultural labourers have improved, but there is greater distance between houses, and people who earn their income from the soil have become more isolated. Still, no one wants to return to the old way with its scarcity and toil, even though rural communities and human existence at that time were more alive and colourful than today.”

This ambivalence is typical of the relation that the Swedish welfare state in this era has to accelerating modernity. One can sense a tinge of loss in this yearning for the good old days, the farm back home but, after all, things were so much better, and the changes were nonetheless inevitable. One can’t turn back the clock. Nostalgia found a refuge in kitsch and popular culture.

The sentiment in wallpaper designs of the 1940s and 1950s, with their swaying hay carts, buxom milkmaids and cheerful pigs lived on in the infatuation with nature and peasant culture of the 1960s and 1970s – from shampoo ads to Top of the Pops and prog rock concerts. “Fields in bloom have become exhaust fumes and concrete,” Ola Magnell complained in his song “Påtalåten.” But no one seriously thought that there was a way back to the bucolic world of Astrid Lindgren’s Bullerbyn. Bearded hippies with similarly bearded goats were not a real alternative to animal factories. In his novel Vem älskar Yngve Frej [‘Who Loves Yngve Frej?’], Stig Claesson had the man “who’d done his bit” hang a sign saying “Relic” on the post box of his cottage. The industrialisation and structural rationalisation of rural communities could be seen, indeed probably by most people, as an unrestrainable force of nature.

In actuality, the depopulation of rural communities resulted from an act of will, an expression of a cultural and political project that was not unique to Sweden but which for a number of reasons (Sweden’s long peace, the centralised state, close contact with the US – the country of the future) had a greater impact here than in the rest of Europe: the ambition to make industrial rationality the guiding principle for all of society. Two years after the end of the war, in June 1947, the Swedish Parliament set the course for the country’s modern agriculture.

Three goals were adopted : 1) The state would ensure, with the help of price regulation, that farmers attained an income level on par with the salaries of industrial labourers. 2) Sweden would be more or less self-sufficient in food production. 3) Agriculture would be made more efficient. Larger but fewer farms. More and better machinery. From the start, agricultural policy was already infused with the cult of the large-scale corporate that was so typical of post-war Sweden (the state helping the big guys eat up the little guys). Two of the most important tools in this modernisation effort were the county agricultural boards, which pushed through structural rationalisations by hook or by crook, and pricing policy, which locked farmers into a closed, tightly regulated system.

The prices of agricultural products were decided in Parliament after negotiations between the State Agricultural Board and a delegation of negotiators from the Federation of Swedish Farmers (consumer representatives were also eventually allowed into the negotiations). If there is any industry that succumbed to the planned economy in Sweden, it is agriculture. So it is disturbing when some farmers dismiss demands for more environmentally-friendly methods or better animal husbandry with arguments about market machismo. Like when a pig farmer a few years ago argued for less pampering in animal husbandry and touted Danish industrial pigs as an alternative that was better adapted to the market: “In Sweden, we’ve produced Cadillacs. And obviously we’ll sell Cadillacs if people want Cadillacs, but they don’t. They don’t want to pay for more than a Skoda,” he grunted. Once again, that machinery metaphor. This imagery reflects a mindset, a way of thinking, it is worth repeating, that has not grown out of a raw and ruthless market but under the auspices of regulations and subsidies.

The farmers have now changed masters. The Swedish state has been replaced by the European Union. Competition, naturally, is fiercer (roughly half of all meat consumed in Sweden today is imported), but agriculture is still far from being an industry like any other. It devours 40 per cent of the EU budget (and it is unclear when and how this strange subsidised economy will be phased out): taxpayers are thus entitled to make exacting demands on operations run by farmers, for the same reason that taxpayers are entitled to make demands on other publicly funded activities.

One can imagine, for instance, that many taxpayers think it reasonable that dairy farmers should provide not just milk but a living landscape with grazing cows. Agriculture’s fixation on the industrial production of goods – the largest quantity possible at the lowest price possible – has long been outmoded, a fossilised fallacy from the past.

Agriculture in the Swedish Welfare State 1945–2000, the final installation in the publishers Natur & Kultur’s five-volume series on the history of agriculture in Sweden, includes an interesting and very revealing diagram of the breakdown of employment by agricultural, industrial and service sector during the period 1870-1990. One can clearly see how the different social categories superseded one another. At some time in the 1930s, the green agricultural graph and the red industrial graph intersect, after which agriculture’s share of the workforce continues to decline rapidly, stabilising in the 1990s at just a few per cent.

But the hegemony of the industrial sector prevails for only a few decades. In the mid-1960s, the industrial curve and the service curve intersect. The service sector then rises sharply, while the industrial sector falls. In the 1990s, the service sector’s share of employment is as large as agriculture’s is in the 1870s, close to 70 per cent. The mental models that farmers were persuaded to adjust to after the war are hopelessly dated. Industrialism was not the future. Industrialism was a deviation.

I am eating a slow lunch with Rolf Axel Nordström; he is treating me. The crayfish come from Lake Vättern, but the orange-flavoured sausage and sugar-salted ham were bounding about on nimble legs just a short while ago in pastureland a few hundred meters from the table. Nordström is a farmer. Pigs are his passion – they always have been. He would never talk about them in terms of machinery. His farm is not a factory. That is precisely why it can be seen as a model for Swedish agriculture in the future. By generalising from Nordström’s way of raising pigs, one can actually imagine catching a glimpse of something even bigger – a synthesis between a globalised consumer society and a local society aware of tradition.

Ängavallen is located in Söderslätt, along the country road between Malmö and Trelleborg. There are herds of multicoloured, spotted pigs – slender, long-legged and energetic. They make one think of happy dogs eager to retrieve rather than conveyor belt-fed pigs for slaughter. Nordström’s pigs live in herds outdoors year-round and eat only vegetable feed. They are a mix of conventional domesticated pigs, wild boar and, above all, Linderöd pigs, a hardy old country breed. In another field, small red-brown cows graze with their calves. They are rödkulla cows, another old country breed threatened with extinction. The farm also raises sheep and produces grain as well as fruit and vegetables. In many ways, it is like Bullerbyn, that idyllic farm from one’s childhood with grunting pigs and fuzzy lambs. But at the same time, it is a successful post-industrial service and experience company. Rolf Axel Nordström was born into a family of entrepreneurs, at the time 50 per cent owners of the paint producer Nordsjö Färg.

The future was set. He was the only son and was supposed to learn the ropes at the company. But Nordström was more interested in animals than paint and studied to be a farm manager. This happened not without conflicts with both his father and his own views of what a farmer did and did not do. Nordström was shocked when he realised as a brand-new pig farmer how he was expected to raise his animals – feeding them with meal made from dead animals, turning them into cannibals. So he began his fight against conventions and the agricultural-industrial complex. He became the odd man out, a dissident.

As we eat, Nordström talks about a childhood experience that left a heavy mark on him. When he was little, he went to a kindergarten close to the old Hussar stables, which were located where the Kronprisen high-rise in Malmö is today. At that time, there were still horses in the stables and one day, Nordström saw how a mare was led out into the courtyard. “Then it was on with the slaughtering mask. One man cut the horse’s throat. Its hoofs clattered against the cobblestones. I had nightmares for a month without telling anybody.” He has strived to develop a slaughter method that is as humane as possible. No transporting. The pigs are slaughtered at home on the farm. No stress. No pigs are pushed to the slaughter. At Ängavallen, they open a gate and wait for the pig’s own curiosity to lead it into a passageway that runs to a feeding place where the animal is anaesthetised and then slaughtered.

The method is completely contrary to the conventional assembly-line logic of industry. But slowness here has a value in and of itself. Pigs should not have to die in panic. They should not have to smell blood or see one of their own killed. An accelerated rate of production has otherwise been the rule in post-war European agricultural production. Nordström gives a few examples: sixty years ago, the average milk cow produced about 3,000 litres a year; today it is between 10,000 and 12,000 litres. In the past, a chicken was between four and six months old when it was slaughtered, today 32 days. At the same time, the life of cows has been reduced dramatically. Poultry and pigs have been forced to live in factory conditions that have very little in common with Old MacDonald’s farm.

Almost ten years ago, it was not swine flu but rather mad cow disease that struck terror in Europe. There are good grounds for linking this epidemic, so strongly suppressed today, to agriculture’s pursuit of productivity. In continental Europe, cows are contaminated with feed from animal remains, which is most likely one of the factors behind the outbreak. From a European perspective, we are thus talking here about an industry that, in order to produce ever more milk per cow, has made cows ill, and most likely people as well. At the same time, milk is a good that is produced in such quantities that quotas are set. And the soil has been contaminated. Intensive chemical agriculture, which has provided beautiful productivity curves, has contributed significantly to the devastation of the environment. The eutrophication of the Baltic Sea is just one example. Industrial agriculture has a cost. But does it have any flavour?

Food that can grow slowly has more and better flavour, Nordström argues. There was a time once when fast was an almost irresistible word – even where food was concerned. Cake mixes, tinned ham, tinned ravioli – when Sweden was at its most modern, only old-fashioned people insisted on making their own food. Everyone else let industry do the job. After all, it was so practical. People saved a lot of time. Nordström compares post-war industrial agriculture with Sweden’s Million Home programme.

The parallel is striking. All those gigantic residential silos punched out of the ground in the 1960s and 1970s, all those sterile fields of asphalt, all those chain store boxes springing up in clear-cut town centres … it was not simply a response to real needs but also an expression of a mindset, a culture. Isn’t it time for agriculture to face the consequence of this culture no longer being hegemonic? The point of a concept like Ängavallen is that agriculture here has taken a qualitative leap. They are not selling just a physical product. Customers are also buying an experience, a feeling of having made a morally sound choice, intangible values. People pay to stake a claim in a rural culture that feels genuine. That is worth a great deal.

Ängavallen is part of the experience industry in another, more palpable way. Nordström and his family not only feed animals on the farm; they also run an ambitious restaurant which was named “2008 Eco-restaurant of the Year” by Sweden’s leading restaurant guide, the White Guide. That is just one of the many honours bestowed on him in recent years. There has been a proliferation of prizes and diplomas. But up until the late 1990s/early 2000s, things were not easy. Nordström bought the farm in the 1970s and was long seen by his colleagues as that difficult oddball from the city. His ideas were not compatible with the drive by the powerful agricultural cooperative to establish a standardised, centralised production system.

The economic base of the farm had long been porous and weak. But since the turn of the millennium, things have gone much better for the farmer at Ängavallen, not just in terms of public opinion but also financially. The environmental debate and the outcry over animal transports and pig factories have worked in his favour.

After lunch, we take a walk – past the herb garden outside the restaurant, past the hotel in the old farm building that has been operating for several years, down through the park where Ängavallen grows fruit and vegetables protected by beech hedges that create a beneficial microclimate, down to the farm shop, where people can buy picnic baskets as well as meat, deli items, bread and mustard. We finally stop down by the curious pigs, who will soon be moved from their enclosure to the harvested fields to rummage around the roots of weeds. Now did I get everything in? Restaurant. Café. Hotel. Picnic grounds. Animal enclosures. Their own bakery. An indoor gallery. Concerts and evenings with authors. A shop that will be refurbished and expanded. A dairy. Today Ängavallen employs 18 people – four in the family, 14 staff members. If the farm had been operated as a conventional pig factory, Rolf Axel Nordström would have had three employees, he thinks.

That is another aspect of ecological and experience-based agriculture. It creates jobs. Interesting and exciting jobs. (At Ängavallen, along with the chef and sous-chefs, there are a baker, a sommelier, a cured meats specialist and so on). Large parts of the countryside, one realises, could be repopulated with hard-working, well-educated professionals who in turn create the foundation for service and culture – people who are not content with a petrol station, a pizzeria and a school that will soon close down. But not every farm can be Ängavallen, right? Not every farm can be turned into a thriving restaurant operation (80 per cent of Ängavallen’s meat is now served in its restaurant; the rest is sold in the farm shop).

Perhaps not. But people can turn their backs on their failed factory mentality in many different ways. Many farmers are already undergoing this mental adjustment … they understand, for instance, that it is not primarily what might be a lower price that makes summer visitors from Stockholm want to pick their own strawberries. It is the experience that Stockholmers are looking for, the memory of an afternoon in a sun-warmed field scented with strawberries, with a view of the glittering sea. People can charge a good price for that. People can also charge a good price to ease a guilty conscience. They should also get paid well, by all means with tax revenue, to safeguard cultural heritage and provide such idylls: rolling fields of grain, pastureland where cows lick their calves clean, hay that is not packaged in white plastic.

In its report on pigs, Filter magazine did a price comparison and calculated that an ecological pork filet from Ängavallen was twice as expensive as a filet from a high-tech Swedish pig factory and four times as expensive as the brutally produced Danish filet. Are Swedish consumers really ready to pay for modern old-fashioned agriculture, farming that spends money on slower, more humane, more diverse production? We should be. Food costs as a percentage of Swedish household expenses have fallen dramatically over the last thirty years.

Nowadays, it is not food, but housing, leisure and transport that are the big costs. There is room here for new priorities. And as the meat producer Rolf Axel Nordström quietly maintains, we can certainly reduce meat consumption. Cut back on quantity, put money into quality. “We eat too much meat. A third would be enough. We would feel better and it would be good for the environment.” It would also be to the delight of Sweden’s half-forgotten food culture today, one might add. Fewer mixed grills and low-cost cutlets, more pea soup and classic herring dishes.

There is not really much to argue about. Anyone not prepared to pay for vital rural communities, happier livestock, cleaner oceans and better food can, as far as I am concerned, go boil themselves slowly in saturated fat.