It is half past eight on a golden morning in the Golden Valley, a fertile little fold of God's own country in Herefordshire. We are in a Land Rover, bumping through rutted gateways and up the side of a field to a wood to feed pigs. Our arrival is greeted with a frenzy of grunts and shrieks and 13 little rusty gold squealers with black splodges on their backs rush about in excitement, hoovering up pignuts and slurping at bucketfuls of whey from the local dairy. In winter the pigs will go on to arable land, their snouts aerating the soil, their dung fertilising it for next year's barley crop which in turn will feed them, making the farm self-sufficient in food for ten months of the year.

Down below, red and white Herefords graze the water meadows, most with a calf beside them. There are a couple of Gloucesters too: black, bony, ancient-looking and almost extinct as a breed, they were used to produce milk for Double Gloucester cheese and lovely marbled meat with rich yellow fat. All the calves will stay with their mothers for nine months and then the boys will graze on as steers to 30 months, when they will go for slaughter to the small local abattoir, 50 minutes away. The pigs go there too, at six months, as do the comical woolly Ryland and Shropshire lambs.

Most of the meat is sold through the farm shop, some of the lamb through butchers, where it commands a "traditional breed" premium.

Here, in springtime on Turnastone Farm, the meadows and hill paddocks are awash with wild flowers; the hay they produce is rich, sweet and fragrant.

No pesticides or artificial fertilisers are used. Pasture is rested, margins are left fallow for wildlife. The old brick and timber farm buildings are gradually being restored. This is how we want our farms to be: small-scale, "natural", kind to animals and wildlife; how, in our imagination, they used to be before globalisation and factory farming, the Common Agricultural Policy and Eastern European imports and all the other bogeymen we blame for things not being as they were in some mythical golden era. The truth is, it never was easy being a small farmer and common wisdom says that for some time now it has been close to impossible; that since Britain cannot produce food as cheaply as much of the rest of the world, only intensive industrial-scale farms will survive while the rest of the countryside is turned into a recreational theme park. Radical changes in EU subsidy payments encourage landowners to look after the countryside while not actually producing anything. There are grants to develop clay pigeon shoots, dirt-bike trails, caravan parks, petting farmsI Diversification is the watchword; farming is so yesterday.

These days it is not enough to be a farmer in that simple, link-in-the-food-chain sort of way; now you have to think about niche products, marketing, branding and packaging; you have to take your product to the market - to delis and pubs, to farmers' markets and farm shops; and you have to sell yourself, have a brand image and a story. But, if you can do that, think smart, reinvent yourself, then there is hope. We found three such new-style farmers, each of them practising the mantras of "hoof to hook", "paddock to plate", using the internet as a shop window, controlling the path of their product all the way from the source to the consumer.

These are their stories.

Robert and Chrissie Fraser

Turnastone Farm, Herefordshire

Acreage: 250 acres of pasture, meadow, wood pasture and arable

Product: beef, lamb and pork. 43 suckler cows, 8 sows, 100 sheep

Sold through: own farm shop and mail order

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