Alex James: A pizza farm – with all the toppings

Rural Notebook

Almost all the buildings in the cluster around the yard here are overflowing. House is full of children, wooden sheds are full of lambs, and there are hundreds of tonnes of last summer's hay in the Dutch feed barns; but there are also a couple of big concrete, steel and asbestos agricultural buildings which have always been quite underused.

They've never really found a purpose. I mean, they are full of stuff: a digger, piles of logs, bricks and roof tiles, a trampoline and so on, but they don't really do anything. They are a luxury and I suppose that's the greatest thing of all. I'm just lucky to have them.

I've been thinking about clingfilming them, and using them to grow tomatoes because I've become slightly preoccupied with pizza since I got back from New York. I've been developing a mozzarella, plus we've put down 40 acres of wheat so it suddenly made sense to turn those sleeping buildings into a tomato-style Eden project. Then the whole farm would be an enormous organic pizza machine. Dough. Cheese. Tomatoes: a sort of slow-food Pizza Express.

This is the way forward for all farmers. Pig-fatteners should be thinking about hot dogs, oat-growers about porridge, and so on. Thinking about an end product rather than a commodity. Anyway, clingfilming wasn't as practical as I thought it would be, although after 10 minutes on eBay I was on to someone selling a large amount of old greenhouse panels. I called an architect and asked if it would be easy enough to build a frame for them inside the sheds' steel joists. He thought it was a great idea and a few hours later we were both on our way to Milton Keynes to have a look at them.

Well, I bought the lot and now the architect wants to turn his shed into a greenhouse as well.

Caught by the auction bug

One of the biggest reclamation yards in the UK went out of business and has just been auctioned off one piece at a time. Flush with my triumph on eBay I joined in the sale, bidding live online on a few things. Compulsive viewing, it was. I almost bought a fountain before I managed to unplug myself. Today there is an auction of items seized by police. Port and champagne tomorrow. Best not to even look.

Pond life has its own charm

The bottom of the farm near the railway line is an impassable swamp. No one has been in there for decades. Thirty years ago it was a duck pond. For days there's been a man in there with a digger trying to find it. Still no sign. Actually, a missing duck pond in the bushes is much nicer than a fountain in the hand. If you know what I mean.