By Andrew Fagg, Media officer, The Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority:

I GREW up drinking raw milk daily and I’m sure that’s why I'm well over six-feet tall and heavy-boned.

Grandad used to turn up at the back door, fresh from milking, with large red plastic bottles in each hand. My parents worked at the chippy in Hawes, and used tomato ketchup bottles made for sturdy vessels.

Nowadays I find raw milk harder to come by, which is why reading the pages of this newspaper a few weeks ago got me excited.

There was a piece about Low Sizergh Farm, south of Kendal. Raw milk was on sale from a vending machine.

Despite it being an hour’s drive away, I went there with the family on the first Saturday morning I had available. The experience did not disappoint.

You could see into the milking parlour from the farm shop café. Wow. You could go to stand next to the cows as they ruminated in their airy shed. Wow. Then you could dispense and glug delicious 'un-bashed-about' milk from a glass bottle before going for a walk around the farm. Wow.

The chain between food producer and consumer could not have been shorter – and that is surely the key to a sustainable food system.

The Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority is keen to help link people to farming. This year, for the first time, the authority’s small but well-respected farm conservation team is working with farmers to develop a farm and estate open day programme for the summer and backend.

The thinking is that the more people who experience and understand the role that farming plays in the national park, the better.

Some modern farming practices, such as an almost wholesale switch from hay to silage and a reliance on bought-in feedstuffs rather than grass, have had negative effects on the environment and wildlife here in the Dales as elsewhere.

But in these times when anti-farming and anti-meat messages abound, it is important to declare loud and clear that having grazing livestock in the Dales is absolutely essential for the landscape, for nature, for the fertility of the soil and for food on our plates.