HERE I am in Italy writing my column at a lovely café in Mantova in Italy.

I was invited to come over and talk about farmers’ markets in the UK at a conference organised to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Mantova market.

I was a guest speaker alongside a lady from the USA who runs the Dale market in Wisconsin, the largest farmers’ market in the states. I was asked to talk about how things run in Stroud and specifically about national legislation.

The Italian government passed a bill in 2005 which defined what makes a market a farmers’ market as opposed to a general market.

The audience was rather surprised that despite markets being active in the UK since 1998 there was no national definition or protection for the brand.

I was able to highlight that because of our government’s intransigence on this there are many markets purporting to be farmers’ markets that don’t have strict rules and therefore have stalls selling that are not producer only and furthermore it has allowed unscrupulous big business to use the brand for their own ends. I was able to show how our MP David Drew went to the House of Commons and raised a question about Heinz ‘farmers market soup’ in 2006 (nothing was done) and more recently (this year!) a supermarket poster advertising “farmers’ market bananas”. They were shocked!

In the USA the rules are very clear and enforced by local authorities, so why don’t we have that? Believe me, we’ve tried!

As part of FARMA, the voluntary members group which inspects our markets to ensure we are sticking to the rules, we have been to the House of Commons on several occasions to discuss this with MPs but to no avail.

The small scale farmers in Italy are facing the same challenges as their UK counterparts; price squeezes at the hands of the retail giants that have turned food into a commodity to be traded on the open market where production costs are ignored and the pressure to factory farm in order to make a living are high; just like here.

One thing they don’t yet have here are farm shops, a sector that is booming in the UK and I was able to share with them such thriving new ventures as Jolly Nice at Frampton Mansell and the amazing Gloucester Services; both of which are supporting local low intensity farming and making quality and sustainability a priority over price.

Back in Stroud this Saturday we have the start of Sausage week and The Stowe Herd will be giving away a sausage recipe book with ten wacky recipes with every sale of a pack of sausages and there will be sausage tasters aplenty from our great livestock farmers, all of whom offer a splendid range of bangers. Rumour has it that the gourmet sausage has fallen out of being as popular as it was three or four years ago. Whether that means customers are being tempted back to the cheap offal sausages available at supermarkets or whether people are just eating less sausages we know not but sausage week is your chance to revisit this staple of the British breakfast.