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Phil Stewart of Co Longford on running a family farm, building a huge online following, and writing a book about the twelve fields that shaped his life
Phil Stewart has built a large following online for his videos showing day-to-day life on his family farm in Co Longford. As a child he briefly considered a career in palaeontology, drawn to the idea of fossils and brushes, but he soon realised that the digging season in places like Hell's Creek would keep him away from the farm during silage season.
Choosing the family business over dinosaur bones, he threw himself into the work of beef and tillage, a path that has shaped nearly every part of his life. Growing up on a farm, he says, is something he probably takes for granted because it is all he has ever known, from working with animals and livestock to spending every day outdoors.
The Stewart farm has been in the family since 1938, when his grandfather Harry Stewart arrived in Longford at the age of nineteen with little more than two horses, a cart, a plough and a bag of oat seed. Today the farm covers around five hundred acres and produces beef and cereals, with a farm shop selling the family's own beef and pork, along with seasonal produce such as garlic, marrows and sweetcorn.
Phil now works the farm full-time alongside his father, his wife Liv and another employee, with part-time staff helping in the shop and during harvest. In 2015, after a friend joked that he would never start a YouTube channel, Phil decided to do exactly that, posting videos that now attract close to fifty thousand followers on Instagram and almost one hundred thousand on YouTube, where he shares the realities of everyday farm life with fellow farmers and viewers from every walk of life.
Phil's main partner on the farm is his wife Liv Stewart, who grew up outside Burton-on-Trent in the UK and moved to Ireland in 2019 after completing a first-class honours degree in agricultural engineering at Harper Adams. She joined the farm full-time in 2021, and the couple later married. Together they have written a book that tells the story of each field around the farm, including the names, characteristics and family memories associated with them.
Among the most treasured stories is that of a tree said to have been planted by Cromwell's grandchildren three hundred and fifty to four hundred years ago. In 1940 Phil's grandfather carved his initials into the tree, marking HS 1940, with a famously reversed nine that remains visible to this day. Beneath those initials now sit the initials of Phil's uncle Ian, who died of cancer in 2023 and who left the farm to Phil.
The book is dedicated to Uncle Ian and to all farmers outstanding in their field, capturing the deep connections between land, family and memory that define life on an Irish farm
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