When James Martin singles out your bacon sandwich for special praise on his show, you know you’re doing something right.

For Tracey and Stephen Ridgway at Close Leece Farm, it all starts with their rare breed Tamworth pigs.

Now, as they set their sights on expanding into the UK market, they are looking for farming partners to help them increase their pig numbers.

’It should have been the year when we really built on our reputation,’ says Tracey.

As winners of no fewer than 12 UK Great Taste Awards for their bacon, charcuterie and eggs and more recently featuring on James Martin’s Highlands to Islands series, Tracey and Stephen had planned to spend the summer promoting their products at agricultural shows and food festivals in the UK.

As with many plans, this one went out of the window due to coronavirus but they are now starting to look again at the possibilities and the James Martin sequence has already helped.

Although it was filmed last year during TT Practice week, it only aired at the end of April and again last month.

Tracey says: ’He came to the café and he described our bacon sandwiches as the best bacon he’d had since his grandma used to make bacon, and they were farmers so it was a huge compliment.

’We had quite a lot of UK orders off the back of that on both showings: we sent our charcuterie everywhere from the Isles of Scilly up to John O’Groats. It was amazing the reach of the programme.

’So that boosted us a bit and we’re now poised again to try and go back into the UK market, though of course everyone’s very nervous in the UK because it could all lockdown again.

’But we’re still pushing because obviously that’s the next step for the business. It’s a big step but we’ll make it work.’

Tracey has had a manically busy lockdown, transforming their café and farm shop into a convenience store, starting island-wide deliveries, upgrading their online ordering system and delivering 772 ready meals to frontline workers in Noble’s Hospital, the ambulance service and care homes.

Tracey says: ’We’re slightly different from the other cafés in that we couldn’t just mothball it because we’ve got the animals to feed so there was no option but to carry on because that brought the income in for the feed. And it has meant that we have been able to keep most of our staff.’

They have decided to keep on with the frozen ready meals, made in the café’s kitchens, and they are available to buy from Close Leece Farm shop. Tracey reports that the favourite meal for the frontline workers was ’definitely the Manx Loaghtan shepherd’s pie’.

But now it’s time to look to the future: Tracey and Stephen have 300 Tamworth pigs, 1,300 free-range hens and a small flock of Golden Guernsey goats (above), which means that their own acreage is beginning to get rather full.

So they are now examining other options. Tracey says: ’We’re actively looking for farming partners, people who will raise pigs on their land for us. They’ll raise them and we’ll guarantee to buy them back.’

The Tamworth is on the Rare Breeds Survival Trust’s watchlist. It’s a hardy pig, known for its great tasting meat and bacon, but its numbers declined following the Second World War when farmers moved to using faster-growing, more profitable breeds.

Tracey says: ’Mine are all on just a couple of strands of electric fence so it’s not a great outlay, and they are docile and they are great land clearers.

’If you’ve got sheep or goats they will just nibble at the tops but pigs will actually dig up all your weeds and shrubs and gorse and everything.

’They need iron and they actually get that from the soil so they’ll nose out the roots as well and there’ll be nothing left, just beautifully rotavated, aerated soil.

’If you’ve got sloping land you don’t want to plough but want to reseed, they’ll do the job: they are the world’s best rotavator!

’If anybody would like to be part of the scheme, come and talk to us.’