Unlike supermarket shopping, visiting a farm shop can be educational for all the family.

Cate Devine

The Herald 4 Jul 2011

Unlike supermarket shopping, visiting a farm shop can be educational for all the family.

There’s a buffalo on one side of the gate, and a stall selling fruit and vegetables on the other. Visitors stroll around, or sip lattes in the cafe after browsing the shop and buying cream and yogurt from Loch Arthur farm in Dumfries. Also on sale are salad leaves and edible flowers from Saladworx in Dornoch; beef, pork, lamb and buffalo meat from Puddledub in Auchtertool; Orkney herring; Summer Isles smoked fish; gin from Caithness and Islay; and ice-cream by Stewart’s dairy in Perthshire.

Visitors look over the fruit farm’s thriving raspberry, strawberry, blackcurrant, gooseberry and bramble bushes to the Pentland Hills and beyond to the Firth of Forth.

Welcome to the farm shop, the fastest-growing retail phenomenon in Scotland –and a world away from the strip-lit environment of the supermarket.

Craigie’s farm shop and deli near South Queensferry is a typical example of how farmers are finding new ways to earn a living from the land. A substantial percentage of the fruit and vegetables John and Kirsteen Sinclair grow is sold in the shop, with the rest sourced from local producers. “We decided to stop supplying the supermarkets to concentrate on our own business, and now we supply local shops ourselves,” says John. Like many small suppliers, they found supermarkets were always looking to increase volumes, which they’d sell in three-for-two deals, with little of the profits coming back to the producer.

The Sinclairs are part of a growing network of farmers who have chosen – or been forced – to diversify in order to survive. Kirsteen’s father was a pig farmer in Kirkliston until four years ago, when he gave it up after 40 years because it was no longer economically viable. John’s family, who have been farming in the area for 200 years, have been tenant farmers at West Craigie since 1966. It was originally a dairy farm but, as the industry became less profitable, John’s father gave up the dairy. John and Kirsteen took over the tenancy in the mid-1980s, and started growing fruit and potatoes, and making jam. They began to sell these in a disused byre in 1988. Their decision to add a cafe four years ago, then a butchery and more local produce in 2010, has been a smart one: their turnover of £200,000 in 2007 has leapt to £1.2m, and they have 300,000 visitors a year.

John says customers are from South Queensferry, Kirkliston, Fife and Edinburgh. “We’re seeing a lot of interest, especially from people who want to know where their food comes from and how it is produced. Adding the cafe makes it a destination rather than a shopping trip. People have grasped that the meat they eat in the cafe is produced locally and can be bought on site – so they’re getting to taste the food before they buy it.”

There’s added interest for young children, who can visit the couple’s pet pot-belly cross Kun Kun pigs, and for school pupils who come on trips to learn about managing the land. Pick-your-own-fruit days started last month, in time for the summer holidays.

Like many farm shop owners, the Sinclairs are members of Farma (the National Farmers’ Retail & Markets Association) whose patron is Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and which represents growers, producers and farmers’ market organisers. Farma’s annual conference this year is in Edinburgh.

“It will be interesting to discuss the massive change in farm retail in Scotland in the last 10 years with so many more of us diversifying,” says John. “Ten years ago England was 30 years ahead of Scotland, but now we’re on a par. Farm retail has reached a plateau in England, while in Scotland it’s still growing. You can’t have a local farm shop in London, for example, because everything has to be bought in from far and wide. By contrast, all Scottish food is considered local. It’s a market that is still growing.”