" This is good for the environment, it will protect the cows and it' s good for us, " he says. " It shows we can keep this old wooded landscape and adapt it to modern agriculture."

Halleux' s 247-acre operation in northern France is how many Europeans think farming should be.

Fat Holstein cows munch on the last of the winter hay before being turned out to pasture by Halleux and his brother, whose wife crafts cheeses from the milk. Halleux knows " Angel, " " Rogue" and his other 90 cows by name.

This rural idyll seems to represent a fast-disappearing world as European agriculture is wracked by mad-cow disease, dioxin-infected chickens, sewage-fed cattle and the funeral pyres and mass graves of livestock slaughtered to stop the spread of foot-and-mouth disease.

Many Europeans who blame such problems on the intensive mass production of food believe farms like Halleux' s could represent agriculture' s future as much as its past.

" The writing is on the wall for all to see: Mankind must work with nature and not against it, " said Franz Fischler, the European Union' s agriculture commissioner. " We must get back into step with the natural cycles which we have come to neglect."

Leading calls for a rural revolution is Germany' s agriculture minister, Renate Kuenast, a Green Party politician who wants to divert much of the $35 billion that farmers receive in subsidies away from mass production and into promoting organic farms, which shun artificial feeds and chemical pesticides.

Kuenast wants one in five German farms to be organic within 10 years, a tenfold increase.

" The old agricultural policy is at an end, " she said. " We must lower production and increase quality."

While the Halleux farm isn' t organic -- the family decided the tag wasn' t worth the bureaucratic hurdles needed to get it -- the family has been thinking about quality for 20 years, since they moved from straight milk production into making smelly-but-delicious Maroilles cheese.

" In the 1980s there was overproduction of wheat, milk. There was no satisfaction in that. We started the cheese production to create added value, " Halleux said.

Today, 20 percent of milk from the farm goes into the cheese, but it brings in half the income.

" Consumer patterns have evolved over the past five years or so with these famous crises, " Halleux said. " They want to know what they are eating, where it comes from. They want to be closer to the production."

Under pressure from voters, EU governments are coming to agree.

" The opportunity to change direction is the silver lining in the European farming crisis, " British Prime Minister Tony Blair said.

Blair said the EU must show the political will to overhaul its Common Agricultural Policy, under which the more farmers produce, the more they receive.

Farmers who earn most from the CAP disagree.

" If they want to kill agriculture, that' s the way to do it, " says Jean Demazure, who tends 543 acres between Paris and the Belgian border. " We' re always going to need mass production."

Although just 17 miles south of the rolling green dairy land around Haution, Demazure' s part of the Picardy region is made up of vast fields of cereals and sugar beets with the skyline broken only by towering grain silos.

This is big-time farming country, home to many of the 20 percent of large-scale farmers who produce 80 percent of Europe' s food -- and claim around 80 percent of the subsidies.

Demazure' s beet is transformed into sugar in factories, his potatoes end up as fast food fries and he gets around $30, 000 a year in direct EU handouts for his wheat alone.

He has little time for back-to-nature talk.

" We cannot return the age of the horse, cannot make farming a museum piece."

France is the EU' s biggest farming nation. Its farmers gain most from the EU subsidies and their readiness to take to the streets makes them a lobby French politicians ignore at their peril.

President Jacques Chirac has ruled out any overhaul of the subsidy system for the next five years.

Such French determination may force German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder to choose between his Green Party allies and the partnership with France that lies at the heart of the EU.

" The so-called special relationship between France and Germany ... is the counter factor to possible change of the agriculture policy, " said Stephan Dabbert, an agriculture specialist at Hohenheim University in Stuttgart, Germany.

Yet pressure for change is also coming from EU trading partners complaining about commerce-distorting subsidies and from the imminent entry into the EU of Poland and the other eastern European nations with their millions of poor farmers.

On the Net:

• http://europa.eu.int/comm/dgs/agriculture/index--en.htm