Chris Rundle meets Graham Walker, who took over his family's market garden 25 years ago and has taken the business from strength to strength

BARELY a week passes, it seems, without a new farm shop opening up for business somewhere. Such is the nation's growing appetite for fresh, local, traceable and delicious produce that demand appears to be constantly outstripping supply.

And the more people rediscover the pleasures of buying straight from the producer – of taking home carrots with a bit of dirt on them, or selecting apples which have come straight from the tree, rather than being held in cold store for months – the more they realise what a raw deal they've been getting from some sections of the supermarket sector.

So it must be with a degree of quiet satisfaction that Graham Walker surveys the retail phenomenon that is now transforming the way thousands of families shop for fruit and veg – because he was one of the pioneers of the farm-shop movement.

It was 25 years ago that he first started direct-selling from his market garden in Muchelney, near Langport, a lush, richly soiled corner of the Somerset Levels, miles inland from the sea but never totally divorced from its influence: one part of it becomes waterlogged when high tides out in the Bristol Channel lock up the waters in the nearby River Parrett.

Graham's grandfather, Bill Brister, had run the holding before – he was one of the last in the area to milk cows out in the field – and to start where he had left off seemed the logical choice.

"I'd just left college, and market gardening was about the only thing you can go into without huge amounts of working capital, which I didn't have," said Graham.

"So I started cultivating the land that autumn, and I was selling the first produce off it the following spring."

It required a lot of devotion and patience to build up a business founded on just 47 acres, and growth in the early years was slow. But Graham Walker's reputation for being able to produce the finest quality fruit and vegetables – from deeply flavoured strawberries to fan- tastic potatoes – soon saw trade expanding.

Even today, those 47 acres represent the core of the enterprise, although Graham has since added another 10-12 acres of land which had fortuitously fallen vacant locally – thanks to new arrivals in the area who bought houses with a field or two attached and had neither the time nor the expertise to farm them.

And it's not just fruit and vegetables that callers find on sale in the small, brightly lit shop attached to School Farm. For Graham and his wife Helen still run one of those increasingly rare beasts – a mixed farm.

There's beef from red ruby Devon cattle, the classic West Country breed, developed to survive the harsh Exmoor climate, with the ability to yield meat of superb eating quality from the most modest of feeding regimes.

There is lamb from the Wiltshire horn sheep – chosen because they don't produce wool and so don't need to be sheared. After all, clipping the wool from a sheep, packing it and taking it to market at a time when world prices are plummeting now becomes a drain on farm finances rather than providing an annual perk.

In fact, the returns from the livestock are so encouraging the Walkers are likely to devote more space to rearing animals, at the expense of the vegetable production. That's yet another shrewd decision to follow the many that have been made to enable the family to live off such a modest acreage.

This year, cream teas have been added to the attraction of the shop: next year, the plan is to start offering ploughman's lunches – possibly washed down with local cider.

But, says Graham, everything is a matter of fine tuning.

"When I started out as an apprentice to a market gardener he was getting £2 for a net of parsnips, and four nets basically paid my wages," he said. "A net of parsnips will wholesale for only £4 to £5 now – but labour costs you rather more than £20 a week.

"That's how the economics of the game have changed. We're lucky, really – we've got a good site on a road which is not so busy that people can't stop, and because we have cut out the middleman we are seeing far better returns from what we grow and raise and sell.

"But you have to be careful all the same. When I started out, you could be a little more happy-go-lucky about what you grew and how you grew it because if the stuff wasn't all perfect and didn't all sell there was generally a wholesaler who would take it.

"But these days, with supermarkets dominating the food sector, there's barely a wholesaler left. You've got to grow for your market, and that means growing what you know people want and paying attention to the quality so they are happy to buy it." Trading is not the only area where there has been enormous change. The same has happened to the wildlife on the Walkers' farm. It's in an Environmentally Sensitive Area, a classification which means farmers are grant-aided in return for farming in ways which benefit wildlife.

The Somerset Levels were one of the first parts of the country to be given ESA status, recognising their international importance as one of Europe's last remaining wetlands. ESA, however, is soon to disappear to be replaced by a strand of the new Environmental Stewardship programme – which may or may not offer the same inducements and rewards.

For School Farm, ESA has been an unmitigated success. Part of the farm is classed as Tier 3 land – which means it is allowed to shallow-flood from December to April to attract wading birds.

"The ESA has undoubtedly brought the wild flowers back, but it's the bird life that has seen the most noticeable improvement," said Graham.

"We get loads of waders now in the winter and you get all sorts of unusual species, such as redshanks and green sandpipers turning up.

"I don't suppose the ESA scheme has done everything they hoped it would, but it has certainly swung the balance in favour of wildlife: we just hope that progress can be maintained."