There is a piece of legislation, just a far reaching as the proposed Climate Change Bill, which is already on the European statute books and is beginning to make its presence felt here on the farm. Namely the Water Framework Directive. It was passed in 2003 and states that by 2010 each member state will protect and/or restore the quality of all ground and surface water. Yawn, yawn, I hear you say – but actually this is quite a tall order and nearly 80% of UK water resources don’t yet come up to scratch.

Having just hosted a couple of farmer training workshops about this issue - under the snappy banner of Catchment Sensitive Farming - I feel emboldened to bore you further. Now there are basically two types of water pollution, point pollution (where somebody tips a barrel of chemicals into a stream) or diffuse pollution (the kind of background pollution which has many small or tiny contributors).

Agriculture gets most of the blame for the diffuse problem and so we are being asked to voluntarily clean up our act or be faced with some pretty severe regulations. Solutions can be a simple as fixing guttering, moving a gateway or changing the timing of our manure spreading.

Having sorted all of our water issues long ago with the Westcountry Rivers Trust (for whom we are now a demonstration farm), I thought – arrogantly - that I would have nothing to learn from the workshops and simply needed to serve Cathy’s delicious homemade lunch and pick up the cheque.

Well, while it is true that as a responsible organic farmer I do not spread bags of Nitrogen and Phosphates directly onto the fields, it transpires that 12% of phosphorus that ends up in drinking water comes from detergents, i.e. soap, shampoo & washing powder, and here we are in the summer with over 100 campers a day, using our solar showers and flushing criminal amounts of phosphates into the soil via our soak-away.

As we learnt on the day, the cheapest and most effective way of dealing with any pollution is to stop it at the source. And so from this summer onwards we will be providing free eco-friendly (phosphate-free) shower gel and trying to persuade the campers to use it instead of their nasty wash-and-go. In a long line of environmental measures that will cost me rather than save me money (see entry below), I can only hope that it will at least be tax deductible.