It is not often that farm shop customers are seen pushing a trolley from shelf to shelf, filling it with the meat, fresh produce and other groceries that will feed them and their families in the week ahead.

The archetypal image of a farm shop as a place where shoppers might go to do a ‘basket shop’ to top up their weekly supermarket haul with meats, cheeses and some treats is one that rural retailers like the Swan family are changing.

Many of their own customers will do their weekly trolley shop at Ffrith Farm, a traditional 250-acre hill farm in the village of Treuddyn, near Mold in north Wales, where the Swans have farmed since the 1980s and where they established a farm shop in 2003.

Clive Swan’s parents had been farming 60 acres at Sealand, Chester, before moving across the border to set up a dairy herd at Ffrith Farm.

A decade later, after a devastating fire destroyed their milking parlour, they exited dairying to focus on beef production with Aberdeen Angus dairy-cross calves sourced from a local farm and taken through to finishing.

That has remained the core farming enterprise, for Clive, who now farms with his wife, Gail, and their son, Ed, but what has changed is how that meat is sold.

Selling direct to the public seemed a better alternative to supplying a processor so a farm shop was built.

It was an immediate success with with that small length of counter space generating more profit than a large block of land.

Ffrith Farm and local farmers and suppliers produce most of the products sold in the shop.

There are 10 Welsh Pig sows whose mostly outdoor-bred progeny also supply meat for the shop and a flock of hens producing free range eggs.

Ed’s resolve to make the family farm even more self-sufficient was also the catalyst to a highly successful horticulture diversification.

When he returned to the farm, there was a need for three people to make a living from it and that meant further diversification was required.

“We didn’t want to go down the route of economies of scale, chasing high-value land, but to make what we already had earn more,’’ he recalls.

His unintentional inclusion of a high percentage of sunflower seeds in a herbal ley mix for grazing cattle in 2021 sparked one idea for how he might achieve that.

“It was a happy mistake,’’ admits Ed, who established a pick-your-own (PYO) business. “PYO made sense because it tied in with everything else we had here.’’

Three acres were planted with sunflowers and thousands of flowers have been sold in the intervening two growing seasons.

The enterprise fills a summer dip in business in the farm shop when many of their regular customers are away on holiday.

To bolster income in late autumn, when sales can also tail off before the busy Christmas period, the farm is also perfectly placed to offer PYO pumpkins for Halloween.

When the crop is ready to be picked, customers comes in their hordes, paying from £2 - £8 for a pumpkin, with many buying several.

The income from the PYO business has added to farm profitability, and that gives Ed confidence as he looks ahead to the eventual removal of the Basic Payment Scheme (BPS).

Although the Sustainable Farming Scheme (SFS) is heavily weighted towards environmental goods, he believes farmers shouldn’t need a financial incentive to work with the environment.

Of the many measures he has in place to support wildlife and biodiversity is leaving his sunflower crop in situ over winter, as feed for birds.

“It is our environment as much as anyone’s, I don’t think we should expect to be paid to look after it. It shouldn’t be the only reason why we are making progress,’’ says Ed.

That philosophy applies to the shop too, where no plastic is used.

Sustainability is at the heart of the business and a reason why the Swans won the NFU Cymru/Wynnstay Sustainable Agriculture Award in 2023, an accolade that recognises a commitment to the economic, environmental, social and cultural wellbeing of Wales.

“Sustainability is incredibly important to us,’’ says Ed.

“As a country we produce some of the most sustainable food in the world but we need to get even better at it because of the changing climate.’’