There is a story that farmers tell all over the world – it goes something like this:

‘a farmer had a family so he bought a cow to provide milk but it gave more than they could drink so they made butter and cheese to sell at the farm-gate but this left them with lots of buttermilk and whey so they bought some pigs to drink the buttermilk and whey but the pigs produced lots of muck so they brought a pooh-digester to produce gas for green energy but they got too hot so they built  chicken sheds to heat with all the green energy but the chickens produced loads of guano so they bought a pelleter and sold the guano pellets as fertilizer and used them on the farm to boost production of root crops but the supermarkets wouldn’t buy the misshapen ones so they bought some sheep to eat the swedes and parsnips and mangle-worzels (which they added because they liked the name) but the sheep produced meat and wool (and a lot of gas) and they were left with the sheep-skins so they opened a tannery which needed lots of water so they build a dam which made a big lake and it seemed a shame not to keep some fish so they stocked it with trout and people came to catch the trout and in hot weather they wanted ice cream so they bought an ice cream machine but they didn’t have enough milk so they had to buy another cow…’

We bought two ducks and since last October they have produced 280 eggs which is more than we can eat (we have two hens as well) so we’ve opened a farm-gate shop.

Here it is.

Like all businesses it has to be promoted.

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Rustic slate signs — farmers in Wales use anything that is available.

Our friends down the lane did the same with their hen’s eggs and business is so good and demand so great that they have already had to buy more chickens.

We sold our first six eggs yesterday and within an hour we had a telephone call (our egg-boxes carry all the require traceability information) from the purchaser wishing to bestow unsolicited praise upon our product!

We fear this may be the start of Puddle-duck Investments — a global agri-industry (see above – farmer’s tale).