Kate Humble: We don't value food because it's not expensive enough
"I'm over here!" shouts Kate Humble, and she of Springwatch and Lambing Live gambols towards me, closing the gate on a field of anxious goats and their Disney-cute babies....

...She leads me to a kitchen, which doubles as the HQ for Humble by Nature courses on animal husbandry and rural skills, from foraging to building an outdoor pizza oven. Her assistant Rebecca wonders if I'd be OK with some old coffee heated up in the microwave. I'm wondering how to explain that although I'm against food waste, there are limits. "No! That sounds disgusting," says Humble, even though she's a green tea drinker. "Make some new!" It's an earthy introduction....

The four acres she has up the road where she lives with her husband, TV director Ludo Graham, wouldn't accommodate these sheepy dreams, so they began asking around and found the working farm that we're now on. There were once 16,000 such council farms around Britain, small parcels of land rented out to farming families or individuals who didn't have their own land, but councils have spent the last decade selling them off for development. Humble estimates there are just 4,000 left.

The opportunity to "save" a farm fed into another strong belief. "Do we want everything to be imported, to deny our farming heritage, to get rid of every opportunity for young farmers?" she asks. "It's nigh on impossible to get into farming now, if you even wanted to." She once tried to buy a farm in the Karoo, South Africa, for £70,000 but was dissuaded by Ludo, who pointed out they knew nothing about farming. This time, however, she battled until she "won" it from the council and then almost fell into despair because she thought she'd never find a tenant farmer. Then she lucked out with local farmers Tim and Sarah Stephens, who breed Welsh mountain sheep and Hereford cattle and are now happily settled.

But it's the price of food, the farmer's end product, that really irks her. "Everyone's going to hate me and call me a middle-class bitch but I'm past caring because I'm so incensed. Food waste is endemic but we don't value food because it's not expensive enough. Four pints of milk for a quid, are you kidding me? ...