FEATURE: TOP OF THE CROPS

DRIVING through the rusty farm gate, past the sign with peeling paint and up the bumpy dirt track, complete with plenty of potholes, Sunnyfields Farm seems just like any other.

But I suppose it's when you reach the farm shop and four little rustic cabins that you can detect the first hint that this is an organic farm.

The watchword here is 'natural' - there are no huge corrugated iron buildings housing masses of machinery, and you certainly won't find any large stores of fertilisers or pesticides. Like everything at Sunnyfields Organic Farm, what you see is what you get. Those few small buildings, plus some polythene tunnels, greenhouses, cold stores and, of course, plenty of fields, make up the farm.

From marrows to mushrooms, aubergines to apples, everything at Sunnyfields is naturally grown and cultivated - and there for you to see and buy straight from the field.

Top London restaurants, and a celebrity as famous as Sting, may be among Ian and Louise Nelson's customers, but like their farm, the husband and wife team are still as natural as ever.

As they sit talking to me in one of their little cabins - with well-worn chairs, a warped wooden door and walls lined with shelves full of signed cookery books from their various customers' restaurants (many with pictures of their vegetables inside!) - they seem unfazed by the dizzy heights their business has grown to over the last ten years.

Dressed in his summer workwear of "smart" shirt, baggy shorts, socks and (rather muddy) sandals, Ian told me how the Totton farm has grown from a tiny seedling and blossomed into a remarkable success story.

Surprisingly, neither Ian, 36, nor Louise, 37, come from a farming background. Ian grew up in Manchester and, "always interested in the outdoors", he chose to study horticulture at an agricultural college in Essex.

Louise's background is even less akin to organic farming. She grew up in Hertfordshire and through her interest in science, went on to do a degree in natural sciences at Cambridge, before becoming a general science and chemistry teacher at an upper school in Bedford.

Their seemingly unbeatable partnership in business and marriage was formed when they both went to Malawi in Central Africa through VSO (Voluntary Services Overseas) - Louise as a physics and chemistry teacher and Ian as a horticultural development officer.

The idea of going into organic farming didn't occur to Ian and Louise at all until they arrived back home, with hardly any money and nowhere to live. But Britain was just starting to come awake to this new method of natural food production.

Ian said: "When I came back from Africa I just thought to myself I don't want to get bogged down straight away into the same old boring food production in this country - I wanted to do something a bit more exciting and organic farming was coming more to the forefront."

A friend had already been managing Sunnyfields in Jacobs Gutter Lane as an organic farm for two years.

"I did apply for a few jobs but we weren't sure what to do," said Ian.

"We really wanted to become self-employed and run our own business. So we did decided to start marketing organic produce."

So 12 years ago the couple set up Naturally Best Foods, and, operating from a rented garage in Netley Marsh, they bought and sold organic fruit and vegetables through home deliveries.

Then in the summer of 1990 came their lucky break.

"Longdown Management, who own Sunnyfields Farm, decided that for economic reasons the farm should be closed down, so we dashed in and said we would like to take it on," explained Ian.

With the help of a government business start-up scheme, a bursary and loan from the Prince's Youth Business Trust, and numerous other loans, Sunnyfields Organic Farm slowly took shape.

Ian said: "We have just expanded everything as we've gone along, so every year we add new products and new crops.

"Instead of chemical fertilisers we use animal manure, green manure made from crops that we grow, and Pro-Grow compost, which is garden waste.

"As for pesticides, we don't use any at all. If it's really wet and humid, the crops get more diseases, so we just space them out a little bit more so the wind gets round them and that reduces the problem. With the pests, you get a build-up of beneficial insects that eat some of the worst insects, so you get a balance."

He added: "There are now lots of businesses trading in organic produce, but most of them are just buying and selling, so they are just traders only. But because we grow and sell ourselves, we have that edge with freshness and more knowledge of the produce, which helps us gain people's trust."

Right from the word 'go' the couple opened a small shop on-site for a couple of days of the week, and now that shop is open every day selling 2,500 organic products. These range from fruit and vegetables, which are nearly all grown on-site, to wholefoods and dried goods, organic meats (from other farms), cheese, frozen organics, teas, and even organic cotton T-shirts, towels, boxer-shorts, cleaning products and toiletries.

Sunnyfields now employs 14 full-time and six part-time staff, and makes daily deliveries to around 700 homes and shops in Hampshire, Dorset, Wiltshire and along the M3 corridor into London.

Among those regular customers are Sting and his wife Trudie Styler, who, despite having their own organic farm at their estate near Salisbury, have had a regular delivery of Sunnyfields' food and domestic products for the past five years.

"Since then the relationship has blossomed into giving them a lot of help with their farm - including technical advice and information on recycling, and we go to parties now and then," added Ian.

The orders started coming in from top London restaurants too - starting with the River Caf, owned by famous healthy eating duo Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers, before Sir Terence Conran added his Saville Row eaterie Sartoria to the list. Next came Moro in Islington, voted Time Out Best Restaurant of the Year, and Sally Clarke's Kensington restaurant, Clarke's.

The latest celebrity chef to add his name to Sunnyfields' delivery list is the "Naked Chef" Jamie Oliver, who knew of Ian and Louise through his time working at the River Caf and has chosen to source his ingredients from the Totton farm for his new Kensington restaurant, Monty's.

"We first started delivering to the River Caf because the farm owners are friends of Rose Gray.

"We're now limiting who we go to restaurant-wise because we rarely have enough produce. We could sell them so much more but we have got to grow it."

It's clear as I talk to Ian and Louise that they're both truly passionate about the environment and what they do. They have big plans for the farm on its 10th anniversary and don't feel as if they are "by any means there yet".

"We want to grow more and more vegetables and we are, every year. The farm down the road, which is part of the same estate, is converting some land at the moment, and we are looking at producing more vegetables there, as well as producing livestock," explained Ian.

Ian feels organic food is here to stay, despite those who complain about price. For someone whose working day at the farm starts at about 4.30am and finishes anytime between 8-11pm, seven days a week, he's a strong believer that higher prices for organic food are justified.

"As organic farming becomes more mainstream, economies of scale and improved production methods will automatically bring the price down. But what has happened in the conventional food industry is we have had all these food scares and problems because people have been demanding cheap food, so farmers and growers have been paid less and less and they have been cutting more corners to stay in business.

"Organic food should cost more because it reflects the way the food is produced. I can have 10 staff in the field working for several hours, but if that was a chemical farm that would be one man in there for one hour - the main reason organic food is more expensive is the labour input."

With the success of Sunnyfields Farm, and the joy that both Ian and Louise get from running the business and producing organic food which has "so much more life", they are part-way to fulfilling their dreams.

But they will continue their crusade for a return to a natural way of food production.

As an environmental idealist, Ian has one more ultimate dream, which he would dearly love to become a reality.

"What I would really love is to see supermarkets put together in a totally different way. Where you would perhaps have plants, running water, wooden floors, three, four or even five restaurants within the store, a soup bar and a juice bar.

"Maybe in the evening there would be a restaurant, and there would be a place inside too for exhibitions and displays to bring education into it as well.

But Ian and Louise have already come a long way with little money of their own, a good product - or to be more precise, 2,500 of them - and a lot of business know-how. The important thing is they believe in their product and are confident that organic farming has got to be the way forward.

Converted for the new archive on 25 January 2001. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.