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On a muddy hill above a Wiltshire farmhouse, sows are giving birth. Hordes of newborn piglets scamper between the hutches, chased by their exhausted-looking mothers.

The mothers are British saddlebacks, a once common breed that has fallen out of fashion. “We breed them with a large white,” says farmer Helen Browning. “That way the piglets have all the wonderful taste of saddlebacks, but less fat.”

Ms Browning, 49, herself is something of a rare breed. In the increasingly mechanised world of modern farming, she has been devoutly organic for more than 25 years. She is as comfortable lobbying politicians in Westminster, or delivering lectures on soil efficiency, as she is mucking out a pig sty.

Ms Browning, who runs this 1,300-acre farm outside the Wiltshire village of Bishopstone, is at the forefront of the furious debate over farming methods that will define British food and agriculture for decades to come. In March she will begin a daily commute to Bristol where she will take up the directorship of the Soil Association.

On one side of the argument are those who see the future in terms of US-style factory farms, enormous mechanised food production centres where tens of thousands of animals live under the same roof. The sales pitch is pretty basic: cheap food. For the organic lobby and farming traditionalists, such plans provoke horror.