Local food often has more pulling power than organic when it comes to selling meat, according to Andrew Keysell, who created Rochford Country Meats with his wife Cheryl.

We started our business in June 2003 on the back of my parents' small farming business in Shropshire. They were doing a few farmers' markets with beef and lamb, but we wanted to step back and do things the old-fashioned way.

We decided to concentrate on bacon and sausages, and invested in native-bred British Saddlebacks and Large White pigs. Their meat has a superior taste and we rear them outdoors to give them a nicer life. We only use shoulder meat in the sausages, which is lean, and herbs and spices grown on the farm, which gives products an extra 'local' selling point.

We won a Heart of England Fine Foods' best speciality award for our traditional sausages. They were produced under the Rochford Country Meats brand and people started looking out for the label because they wanted the direct link to the producer.

Selling at five or six farmers' markets every month and in our own farm shop provides valuable customer feedback and the message is that local is more important now than organic. People are prepared to pay more for local meat, which is a trend I can't see ending.

We decided not to go organic because we have too much form-filling already and, while organic is no longer just for snobs, I think it is still a niche market - albeit a growing one. Organic prices are often still too high.

We try to keep prices somewhere between Finest and Taste the Difference, which is about 20% cheaper than the organic equivalent. People still ask if ours is organic, but when we say no they buy it anyway.

Our ambition is to break into catering and attract more retail interest as, on the pork side in particular, we have the potential to produce a lot more. The idea is to have more pigs to produce more sausages and get extra outlets for them. We can make many different varieties of sausage but since we won the award we have concentrated on the traditional pork sausage as it sells ten times faster than the other flavours.

We are also toying with the idea of getting some Jacob sheep - for their aesthetic value as much as their quality. We have about 200 finishing pigs and 20 sows, 60-80 cattle, 200 ewes and their lambs on the farm, which covers 90 acres. Cattle-wise, we move about 60 a year, pigs 250 to 300, and lambs 250 to 300. We try to grow most of the feed on the farm, though we lapsed last year. This harvest we should have plenty of corn, though, and we can always top up from local farmers.