I don’t listen to the Archers religiously, but with four of my five radios (bedroom, dining room, wind-up radio for bath times and the one in the truck) permanently set to Radio 4 (so much so that the wind-up now can’t pick up anything else) I do get to hear quite a few episodes. In case you are wondering - the fifth one in the tractor swings wildly between Pirate Radio and Classic FM depending on whether it was Mitchell or me who last fed the cows!

Sad to say, that from time to time as the story of the good folk of Ambridge unfolds over the airways, I sometimes find life imitating art – or visa versa – and I hear exact conversations between the characters that we ourselves have at home.

Just before Christmas there was a story line about Ruth and David Archer replanting a hedge that his father had removed during the good old subsidy driven days of the seventies. As it happened, I had also just ordered 250 metres of native hedge to plant as a new field boundary.

Unlike the Archers, we were not reinstating a hedge, if fact our moorland holding doesn’t have any hedgerows at all – just miles of granite walls. However one particularly large field had been split by a former owner with a simple wire fence, which was now about twenty years old and showing its age. To build a new stone wall to replace the 250m of tatty sheep netting would cost well in excess of £30,000 and so I hit upon the idea of planting a new wildlife-friendly hedge.

First of all, we borrowed a tractor-mounted rotovator and ‘ploughed’ a line next to the old fence. Next, in came Chris with his huge monster-truck post thumper and put a new wire fence the other side of the rotovated strip. Then the trees arrived.

With over 1200 assorted thorns and beech this was going to be no mean job for Cathy and I (despite the fact it only seemed to take the Archer family one leisurely afternoon), and so it was with considerable relief that I learnt that the local college was looking for planting jobs for the students on their NVQ land management course.

This was a true win-win situation, with the college delighted to have such a large planting job to train the youngsters on and with me having to do nothing more strenuous than stroll up and down twice a week and survey the progress.

So now the hedge has been neatly planted (with about 5 tonne of shredded garden wasted as a mulch to keep the grass down for a bit), leaving me to return to restoring old tractors and running the village cricket team while Cathy runs off for a fling with the herdsman - damn those Archers!

Like many, I have been glued to the TV this week watching Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s bold attempt to convert the good people of Axminster away from buying cheap, intensively-reared chickens at their local supermarkets. In addition, my email inbox has been bombarded by emails from both the Soil Association and the NFU (National Farmers Union) roundly condemning him for either ‘going too far’ or ‘not going far enough’.

I have a lot of respect for Hugh and have followed his career with interest ever since the first series of River Cottage. This had a subtle but profound influence on me, and I look back now and realise that I have since been gradually turning my farm into a very large smallholding. This has suited Cathy (who I suspect would be just as happy with 20 acres instead of 200) and has been a real boon for our small campsite – the campers just love to see the chickens, ducks  and turkeys roaming around the tents, and lap up the burgers and sausages from our own sheep.

Several times now, when hosting events for other local farmers, I have heard one sneer ‘this place is just like bleeding River Cottage’; which I take as a huge compliment rather than the insult it is so obviously intended to be.

Quite often in life, I pride myself to be between six months or a year ahead of my time (or ahead of popular opinion anyway), and so I can smugly declare that it was over 12 months ago that I said to Cathy that, as we already have a plentiful supply of top notch beef & lamb, surely we can afford to spend a bit more on our chicken. So we stopped buying two for a fiver at Tesco and started buying from another local organic producer at Stephen Gelly Farm. Now we are a large family, and so for a large bird we pay anything between ten and fifteen pounds. But, as Hugh pointed out in his programme, we harvest at least 3 meals from each carcass, and once you have tasted real chicken it is impossible to go back.

Persuading people to pay more, when food and fuel prices are already on the way up, is a tough one, and hats off to Hugh for even attempting it. However this sort of exercise also needs to be repeated across pork, beef & lamb, all of which we struggle to produce profitably in this country but will suffer from their own welfare and environmental issues if sourced cheaply from abroad. The messages are subtler and much less easy to convey to the public – but this is the challenge we as farmers need to rise to.

I have grown to like making New Year resolutions and like to think that over the years I have changed our lives on the farm in small but significant ways through trying to keep to them. First up for 2008 is to make a concentrated effort to walk more. This may seem a strange one for a farmer, but believe you me, you can quite easily do a full days work without stretching your legs any more that climbing in or out of the cab of your pick-up/tractor.

Now that the cows are in the barn for the winter, all their feeding is done with large round bales, and the sheep are fed oats which are dispensed onto the ground in neat little piles by a trailer we pull behind the quad bike – so not much room for exercise in the day to day routine. My saviour is our young dog Maggie, who if left to her own devices will harass the poultry all day long. The only solution is to chain her up while not in use and so she requires a couple of good long runs each day. This will do us both the world of good a as an unexpected bonus has provided me with uninterrupted thinking time away from the kids/phone/office – a real bonus.

Without doubt though, the star resolution this year has been to limit the time the kids spend watching TV. I suspect that this is a bit of an issue in any house and is nearly impossible to handle without a major row. When I was a kid at secondary school I was the only one in the class without a TV - and so considered a bit of a freak; nowadays our own offspring think its too bad that we don’t let them have a TV in their bedrooms!

There must be a third way I thought, and so I scoured the Internet and purchased a wonderful little gadget called TVTimer. This simple little box takes your TV’s plug and locks it in to a small timer, and you can then set the hours of each day when the TV will come on. This is a bit fiddly, but well worth persevering with. Our TV will now only come on for an hour in the morning (for the sake of the youngest) and then remains dead until 6.30 in the evening (in time for the teens to watch Hollyoaks) and then cuts off at 10.30 – thus making sure we all get a decent nights sleep.

If you are desperate to watch something out of these times then you can of course video any program (the timer only effects the TV) and watch it later. This all takes a bit of getting used to, but as I keep saying to the kids, with a stroke I have given them all something that money can’t buy – several hours a week of their lives back!

Actually they have accepted it surprisingly well (because, I think it is much harder to get angry with an inanimate object that is preventing you from watching the box than it is to harangue a tired parent), and for me the proof of the pudding was when on day three (of the rest of our lives) I walked into our sitting room (formally the TV room) on a wet afternoon and there was my eldest, sitting on the sofa, quietly reading a book – it almost brought a tear to my eye.

www.tvtimer.co.uk