FARM shops have come a long way.

When they first started appearing 15 to 20 years ago, they could be nothing more than a bashed up table top on two milk churns set up at the end of a farm lane. You took your pick and put the cash in an honesty box.

So simple, but, sometimes, not very good. I can recall buying some eggs from a remote and seemingly deserted farm on the North York Moors which turned out to be the rankest, most miserable, verging-on-off examples of eggs we’d ever come across. Two were boiled and after just one dipped soldier were consigned to the bin, along with the other four.

Now, farmers have upped their game. Some have gone all Alan Sugar. They’ve taken investment advice, been on marketing and food hygiene courses, employed planning consultants and proper builders and even picked up the odd European grant. Some farm shops today look like they are branches of Waitrose or Fortnum and Mason, such are their standards of environment and presentation.

Which is all good, of course.

We don’t want to have to traverse a nasty, manuresplattered farmyard to pick up our 35 day-aged sirloin steaks, organic parsnips and cold pressed infused rapeseed oil. But one does still want to feel that the farm shop does have the tiniest connection with the land and is not just the result of blue-sky thinking by a Hooray Henry farm planning consultant with an agricultural college qualification in farm diversification. So when we got out of the car on Saturday at Spring House Farm to be greeted by a smell which could only be generated by an animal by-product, I breathed in deeply and said “lovely” while Sylvia said: “Quick, let’s get inside, I’m about to be sick.” Trouble is, Sylvia is a die-hard and unrepentant Townie, bless her.

The High Street is her natural environment. Despite being married to the editor of “the farmers’ bible”, she still doesn’t understand why tractors have to, occasionally, take to the public highway, why new-born lambs are not tucked up in bed at night, or why the countryside sometimes smells.

But she does like farm shops and she liked the look, if not, initially, the smell, of Spring House Farm Shop on the main road between Northallerton and Bedale, just east of Leeming Bar.

Created in an old farm building, it has a clean, manure-free, car park and an attractive display of vegetables stacked outside, along with a couple of tables with bench seating. Inside, the shop is tidy and well stocked with a wide range of locallyproduced goodies, and the cafe next to it is done out farmhouse kitchen style with lots of pine furniture.

We were there for breakfast but the cafe menu also caters for lunches and snacks. There are salads, baked potatoes, quiches and pastries. All the bread is produced fresh daily, along with cakes, scones and other baked goodies.

The bread is very good.

Sylvia and our guest diner chose butties, one egg, the other sausage, and to a degree the star of the show was the white bread bun – soft but not pappy. The same was true of the bread served with my full English – four thick doorstep slices so fresh it was difficult to spread butter on it, even when toasted.

They call the full English here the Spring House Farm Special because it sums up their commitment to local produce. The firm and meaty pork sausage – also used in Sylvia’s butty – was made by Masham Sausages.

The dry cured bacon is from Taste Tradition at Cold Kirby, near Thirsk, the black pudding is Doreen’s famed variety profiled in our The Producers feature last week.

Their free-range eggs come from Ian Taylor’s farm at Burton Leornard. The only thing on the plate that wasn’t locally sourced was the little pot of baked beans.

It was a first-rate breakfast, all perfectly cooked, and served with a strong pot of tea for me, a large glass of fresh orange juice for our guest diner and a cappuccino for Sylvia. Our young waitress was charming and efficient.

It all came to £18, a sum completely dwarfed by the amount spent in the farm shop afterwards. The freezer is now full to bursting.

Ratings (out of ten): Food quality 8 Service 8 Surroundings 7 Value 8