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.