Farmer Phil: ‘The story goes that a tree in our field was planted by Cromwell’s grandchildren 350, 400 years ago’

I always knew I would become a farmer. I grew up in Co Longford and farming is all I’ve ever known.When I was a child I briefly considered being a palaeontologist. But I realised that the digging season in Hell’s Creek is during the summer, and I’d rather be at silage on the farm than digging dinosaur bones all day. I traded the idea of fossils and brushes for the family business of beef and tillage. Being a farmer and growing up on a farm is probably something I take for granted, because it’s all I know: getting to work with animals and livestock and being outdoors all the time. There’s nothing better.My family has been running the Stewart farm since 1938, when my grandfather Harry Stewart came to Longford at 19 with two horses, a cart, a plough and a bag of oat seed. READ MOREToday, the farm is around 500 acres. We produce beef and cereals. Through our farm shop we sell our own beef and pork, and when we have it, garlic, marrows and sweetcorn.There are four of us working full-time now – my father, my wife, another worker and me. We have part-time staff for the shop and for harvest.Back in 2015 I was talking to a friend. He joked that I wouldn’t start a YouTube channel and I said, “Thank you, I will”. And I started it. After a long day I filmed myself cutting some silage on Farming Simulator, and put it up on YouTube. Now I have almost 50,000 followers on Instagram and almost 100,000 on YouTube where I post about the realities of everyday life on the farm. My target audience would be fellow farmers, but I know that people from every walk of life watch my videos.Working on a family farm is all about working together. My main partner on the farm is my wife, Liv Stewart. In 2017 my father, my uncle and I were at the Newark Vintage Show in the UK, I was on my phone scrolling through Tinder at the airport waiting for my flight when I came across Liv’s profile. Farmer Phil Stewart on his family farm in Co Longford Liv, who grew up outside Burton-on-Trent in the UK, moved over to Ireland in 2019 after getting her first-class honours in agricultural engineering at Harpe Adams. She came to the farm full time in 2021 and we went from there and we went strong. We’re married now.It was Liv’s idea to write a book. We had all these stories, but how do you put them in order? Liv said to me, “Why don’t we tell the story of each field around the farm, why it got its name, the characteristics and any stories that are associated with the fields? That’s how we should tell it.” And that is how the book came to be. I want the book to remind those who grew up on or visited farms about their own favourite memories in the fields that are the heart and soul of the Irish farm. My favourite field and the story behind it, if it’s true, is the Stewart family Top Field. There is this tree in the field, or so the story goes, that was planted by Cromwell’s grandchildren back 350, 400 years ago. And my grandfather went up to the field one day in in 1940. He marked his initials into the back of the tree “HS 1P40″ because he forgot which way the nine was supposed to go. And it’s still there to this day. I think that’s a great story. Underneath my grandfather’s initials and his backwards nine are the initials of my uncle Ian who died of cancer in 2023. Seeing his name on the tree, it’s just one of those sentimental things – any time I’m up working the land there, I always look up to see the marks in the big beech trees. On the first page of the book, we wrote: “For Uncle Ian and all the farmers outstanding in their field.”Uncle Ian owned the farm but when he died, he left the farm to me. He and my father had farmed together since my father left school at the age of 14.When I would come home from school it would just be the three of us – my father, Ian, and me – farming. My uncle taught me all I know. We spent a lot of time together and he was such a huge part of the farm. This time of year around the harvest reminds me of him the most. Many of the stories in the book take place before I was born. We sat down with my father and went through some of the stories from before my time. We just loved it. It was wild to be writing a book about our own family’s history that would end up on bookshelves. An Irish Family Farm in Twelve Fields by Farmer Phil and Liv Stewart is published by Gill on September 3rd[ Women farmers for climate: ‘We are passionate about soil health, animal care, biodiversity’Opens in new window ]