My love for farm shops

I love them … like I can seriously get wayyyyy too excited about going a to farm shop! The smell just takes me back to my childhood when my parents ran their own farm shop - just nothing beats it.

But what are the true benefits of farm shops?

Firstly, all farmers work incredibly hard to produce food to the best quality that they can, throughout the year come rain or shine. They have no days off and these days can turn into long days and short nights for months on end. So surely they should get the best price for what they produce?

Fresh and local

It turns out this isn’t the case. With costs for everyone sky-rocketing farmers are still feeling the pinch with receiving the smallest chunk barely making a profit.

So by shopping directly from the farmers or as close as we can get to it means we are cutting out the middle man and the farmers are receiving a much fairer price for their efforts. If it wasn’t for them - what would we eat?

Farm shops = less air miles.

We produce plenty of food to feed the whole of the UK and by purchasing from our local farm shops means that we are contributing to decreasing the amount of air miles. Not only that but most farm shops tend to use less plastic as fruit and veg can be picked and placed in boxes or paper bags.By doing small steps such as shopping at your local farm shop just helps our environment. Did you know that we produce around 9.5million tonnes of food waste each year, yet 8.4million people in the UK are in food poverty?

Milkbot

My first time purchasing milk from a milkbot and knowing that this is helping my local dairy farmer.

Freshness is just something I feel that you can buy - with food needing to travel less and then time between field to shop is a lot shorter meaning that your produce is going to be fresher which in turn will help its longevity. Lets be honest - fresher just tastes better!

So these are just a few reasons as to why I love shopping at farm shops. I will admit that I had fallen off the wagon and not been supporting as much as I should. I would just order my click and collect to grab on the way home from work and be done with it - just because it was easy. Since checking out some of my local farm shops these last couple of weekends I am definitely going to put the effort back in to support local because after tasting what we bought - you just can’t go back!

Grabbing some fresh produce

These are just some of the local shops I have been to recently but please do share others near you and lets support our farmers and local shops!

@beadlamgrangefarmshop

@theballoontree

@cedarbarnfarmshop

Castle Howard Farm Shop

Keep an eye out as I add to this list!