Howbarrow Farm is a seven-hectare smallholding with lamb, beef, pigs and turkeys, and a horticultural enterprise growing salad crops and culinary herbs. Produce is sold through the farm shop (which stocks over 1,200 lines of organic food and was organic farm shop of the year 2002 in the Organic Food Awards), an online shop, and a box scheme and home delivery service handling 600 weekly orders within a 35 mile radius.
Howbarrow Farm is also the hub of a growing catering and trade round for local producers.

• Can you give a short history of how you got to where you are now, including why and when you 'went organic'?
  As a couple our personal eating went organic in early 1990s. Julia, my wife, had a miscarriage and we were struggling to conceive children, so we started to look at what we ate – and started to eat organic.
  
  In 1995 we purchased some land back to the farmhouse we lived in and, as we were looking for a career change, with no farming experience we went organic on the land in 1996, fully converting by 1998.
  
  Initially we were seen as the 'nuts' on the hill! We had lots of battles to establish market stalls in our local towns and to establish a box scheme. We struggled until, post foot and mouth, we joined the first farmers' market in Cumbria, and were the first organic farmers to attend the local County Agricultural show. Now the same sceptical farmers see us as pioneers of direct selling. Oh, and we have two lovely children.

• Organic principles – why do they matter?
  What is life without principles?

• What does the Soil Association mean to you?
  They are supportive, helpful and great at promoting the organic message and individual producers – the best value for money marketing you can get.

• How do you plan to progress in the future? What is your vision?
  More of the same, we'll develop the hub and wholesale side of the business and continue to promote all things organic.

• What is the most important lesson life has taught you?
  There are always lots of opportunities, you just need to spot them, take them and enjoy them.

• What is the key to your success?
  Being persistent: not giving up.

• What do you love most about what you do?
  The variety of work, and the fact it has an impact and an outcome. We plant it, breed it and eat it – a simple process yet so important.

• What keeps you awake at night?
  Nothing.

• What single thing would most improve your life?
  I don't really see life in this way. More capital to invest?

• How can the organic market be improved?
  'Education, Education, Education', and legislation to get rid of crap, health threatening food.

• What's the main benefit of being organic for you?
  I'm a healthy, stress-free farmer, living in a lovely place, growing and eating chemical-free food.

• What other organic ventures do you admire and why?
  All – they have all taken a risk and put two fingers up to conventional food production, and are doing something about it in their own way.

• Supermarkets – good or bad?
  Don't get me started... They have collectively created a world food economy that is the 21st century equivalent of the slave trade, enabling the wholesale exploitation of the land, indigenous populations, livestock and natural resources to be acceptable in the name of choice and cheapness.

• What is the biggest threat to what you do?
  Old age... And overuse of words like local and fresh.

• What's the best thing about organic farms?
  They've got happy land and livestock.

• What's the best thing about organic food?
  It's not a scary chemical concoction! It's respectful to all involved.

• What is your favourite meal?
  Where everything on the plate has been produced by us, or people we know.

• If I was Prime Minister I would...
  Get a grip on environmental issues, cut the short-term, political party decision-making crap. Be bold: legislate so that every new-built house has a solar panel and a grey water system.

• The world would be a better place if...
  We were all more respectful to each other.

• I'd like to be remembered for...
  Being a great Dad.

• What would be your 'Desert Island' luxury?
  A pig, a polytunnel, a Heritage seed collection and some nice Cumbrian rain!

• Is the customer always right?
  No – they've been too indoctrinated.