When he has a food beef he has never been shy about saying so. From 1979 to 2006 he grew carrots (as part of this very rotation) but he rather famously gave an interview to our own Felicity Lawrence, exposing how supermarket logistics had resulted in a farcical system of trucking eco carrots, his own and those from Highgrove (‘royal roots’), 230 miles to be washed and prepared before being returned to the locale to be sold, racking up the carbon footprint. The last straw came when he was delisted by the supermarket over quality control issues. The hippie on the hill commune disintegrated – as many West Wales hippie communes did when urbane metropolitan types tired of milking cows and hand-carving Welsh dressers.