From little Acorns...

IT was the biggest gamble of Gordon Tweddle's life, one which could either make or break a long-established family business. And, in the end, it all hinged on a couple of baked potatoes.

Serious doubts about the government's view on the future direction and prosperity of the farming industry were already at the forefront of his mind.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the official advice to the industry was simple: intensification, which meant a heavy reliance on drugs and chemicals, was the way forward. As a result, Gordon ended up running 300 cows on a 300-acre holding at Garthorne Farm, Archdeacon Newton, near Darlington.

But he was becoming increasingly convinced that the way to safeguard the future of his business was to forge closer links with the local community and get back to organic basics.

"We were looking at what was happening abroad in milk production and a key example was California," he says. "It's the ideal climate for producing maize and lucerne, the ideal feed for dairy cows.

"They had massive advantages in that desert area, but even there they were being told that 5,000 cows in one herd wasn't big enough, they had to go up to 10,000. This was putting big question marks in our minds, because we were already as intensive as we could get."

The final straw came at an evening out having dinner with friends, who recoiled in horror as Gordon and his wife, Linda, ate the skins of their baked potatoes.

"I was pulling their legs about them leaving food on their plates, but they looked at us like we'd just come off the Ark," he recalls.

Their farmer friends were horrified. Did they have any idea just what pesticides and other chemicals had gone into those potatoes, before they arrived on the plate?, they asked the couple.

'That was the final thing for us," says Gordon. "We decided to switch to organic, cut out all the drugs, and produce a product with that extra flavour and taste that we would sell direct."

In the late 1990s, detailed studies found that there was a huge demand in the North-East for locally-produced organic goods. The conversion of the farm to fully organic status, meaning the cows do not receive growth hormones and are fed on pesticide and GM free food, took two-and-a-half years; the processing unit, which was finished in May 2000, now handles about 7,000 pints of milk a day from the farm's own dairy cows.

The unit produces Acorn's whole, skimmed and semi-skimmed milk and cream for doorstep deliveries and shops. In response to customer demand, the Tweddles also supply a range of other organic products they have sourced, such as bread, eggs, yoghurt, cheese and butter.

"Now we have 170 cows on 300 acres, with three men looking after them," says Gordon. "There are fewer animals in the space in the buildings. It's reduced the intensity and the animals don't get ill, and they have more fibrous food.

"At first, the increase in sales was just nice and steady, but then we began seeing scientific evidence that organic milk was better for you and we started getting more interest from the public.

"But there was still a feeling that organic milk was expensive and just tasted a bit funny. We couldn't tell people to switch to it, they had to make that decision themselves."

Word of what was happening at Acorn Dairy soon spread. Now, the concept of milk coming from the cow to the customer in just a couple of hours is proving a big hit.

"What we started to see was quite a few people coming to us who had babies and wanted the best for their children," Gordon says. "Another common customer was the grandparent who was getting the grandkids over for the weekend and wanted the best for them."

The Tweddle family reintroduced doorstep deliveries, which are now carried out across Darlington and Teesdale. Acorn's milk and cream is also supplied to supermarket chains and shops stretching from Newcastle down to Tadcaster, and across to Penrith.

Morrison's became the first supermarket to stock Acorn milk. But gaining the support of the big-name retailers has often been fraught with difficulty.

"We deliver direct to local supermarkets, but if that happened everywhere it would increase their administration immensely," says Mr Tweddle.

"Other stores have come on board, but again they all want their central computer to do the ordering. If supermarkets are going to alter that, they will have to give their regional managers more responsibility to source locally and do the administration themselves."

The Acorn success story saw another chapter written at the turn of the year when Darlington Memorial Hospital became the first in the country to dump ordinary milk in favour of organic.

"We'd been trying away at various public places and the hospital door swung open," Gordon says. "Ron McKenzie, their head of catering, was prepared to think about it, instead of being tied to the rules and regulations.

"He'd heard about us before from other sources and realised the quality was good. They did their own assessments, had some samples taken, then we went through a two-month trial period before we finally struck a deal."

Acorn now provides 5,000 pints a week to the hospital - equal to 22 cows' worth of milk - after patients extolled its virtues during the trial period.

Recent research from Aberdeen University backed up the patients' comments about the health benefits. It showed that organic milk contained up to 71 per cent more Omega 3 than non-organic milk. Omega 3, a nutrient which protects against disease, plays a key role in maintaining a healthy heart, supple and flexible joints, and promoting healthy growth and strong bones and teeth.

So what next for the thriving firm that is now at the very heart of the organic revolution in the North-East? Gordon's ambitions are modest.

"We have a production capacity and we're not looking to go much bigger than that," he says. "We want to be seen as the quality source of organic milk and cream in the North-East.

"It's a nice and satisfying feeling to know that all the problems we could have had if we were still producing milk on the wholesale market are behind us now."