In December 2005 Ecocabin's Kate Grubb was named 'Entrepreneur of the Year' by the Countryman. The full article appears below:

It’s not big it’s clever

Katherine Gow finds a shared belief and principle among our entrepreneurs — and it’s an approach that suits the countryside

SMALL BUSINESSES will be the heart and soul of any future economic revival of the British countryside, and such enterprises are driven by good ideas and a determination to succeed against all odds. One such business is run by farmer’s wife Kate Grubb in the beautiful borderlands of Shropshire and Herefordshire. A few months after the birth of her baby daughter, Kate Grubb made some extra cash by cleaning holiday cottages near her home. What she discovered angered her and outraged her environmental principles. “People brought with them large amounts of supermarket food, spent very little locally and then left huge bags of waste behind them. It just didn’t seem fair.”

So with the help of a rural business grant from DEFRA, Kate created a beautiful, two-bedroom timber holiday cabin at the foot of the Black Hill. All materials used are local and environmentally friendly, much of it recycled. And the visitors are encouraged to use Kate’s own shopping service, where they can order groceries online from local suppliers and have them delivered. Everybody benefits from Kate’s refusal to accept the old way of doing things.

This do-it-yourself approach to business is also evident in the work of Jimmy Bell, known as the Lamb Man. He realised traditional farming had to change. He decided to sell his prize-winning lamb directly to the public and undertook an intensive butchery course. “I am now a butcher who farms. I realised the farming industry had to change and we had to diversify to make the farm viable.” All the meat is now processed on his farm and sold on the internet and at farmers’ markets.

Committed to countryside

Jimmy is also a committed countryman who has opened up access roads on the farm for riders and walkers and created woodland reserves, ponds and hedges to encourage wildlife. “I was checking the ewes in one field with my young son John when he called me over to watch a red squirrel in one of our plantations. That really made my day.”

A similar story holds true for sheep farmer Derek Scrimgeour in the Lake District. Foot and mouth disease nearly wiped them out, so he built on his international reputation for breeding sheep dogs. A large part of the farm’s business is now rearing and training sheep dogs — and running residential courses for their owners as well.

Luscombe, the family business that has been making cider in the West Country for twenty-five years, also faced big strategic questions about how to survive in an increasingly harsh world. The answer for Gabriel and Susie David was to convert to organic production and build up a soft drinks and fruit juices business to complement the cider. “We are finding more people are turning to organic products made is with real fresh fruit and minimal sugar content, so we feel confident we are going with the flow.”

John Severn sources the fruit from local farms and orchards. “Our fruit is very traditional. We use old Devon varieties organically grown in long established orchards, not in monocultural conditions. We do not use any finings and isinglass which means our cider is vegetarian, even vegan. We don’t use sulphur dioxide to kill off yeast, so each vat ends up with its own population of yeast culture and a distinct flavour. We achieve a consistent end product by blending cider from different vats.”

England’s wine growers are also sharing their moment in the sun, with the quality of the wine vastly improved and sales rising by around twenty-five per cent year on year. Dr Howard Tripp at the Avalon Vineyard in Somerset is one of Rick Stein’s ‘superheroes’ and makes around seven thousand bottles of white wine a year from organic grapes. The grapes are crushed in a traditional Somerset cider press and Dr Tripp makes the wine himself. Nearly a third of his annual output is sold in just one week at the Glastonbury Festival just over the hill.

This seems to be a theme with our country entrepreneurs: using traditional and often organic methods to satisfy a growing demand for good food and drink. It is not the big factory approach and it suits the countryside very well.

Our Entrepreneur of the Year for 2005 is Kate Grubb from the Black Hill. She didn't lecture people about the environmental costs of increasing waste; she did something about it — and in the process created continuing work for all sorts of small businesses and suppliers living nearby.