BEEFING UP HIS STOCK; Farmer Jimmy Doherty has become a bit of a pin-up since he found fame on his farm thanks to help from pal Jamie Oliver.

Byline: GRAHAM KEAL

The methods TV celebs find to unwind from the stresses of life in the studio vary from the exotic to the illegal but Jimmy Doherty must be the only one who relaxes by turning his farmyard compost.

The recurring series of Jimmy's Farm made him famous and the enterprise now employs 15 people - but there are no airs and graces from the star.

He says: "I like to get in the digger and turn the compost heap when I come back - I am very hands-on because the most important thing in running the business is being able to do every job."

Jimmy will still tackle everything from cleaning the loos at the visitor attraction to mucking out Guinea Pig Village.

And it must be a labour of love, since his flourishing TV career is no longer tied to the Jimmy's Farm format. His happygo-lucky style and boyish bounce have a universal appeal. And female fans think he's think he's well-fit. Jimmy's Food Factory, his latest primetime offering, is a six-part series in which his old brick barn houses an unlikely assembly line as he creates low-tech, home-made versions of what the food industry does in giant factories.

"It's kind of Delia Smith meets Heath Robinson," says Jimmy, though there is a serious purpose behind the farmyard frolics, Viewers will witness such bizarre sights as Jimmy loading his home-reared freerange pork into a cement mixer to re-create square, processed, sandwich ham, or spraying filter coffee into a heated canister to make his own coffee powder.

Jimmy says: "My two big passions in life are science, mainly natural science, and food production - farming.

"We try to have fun and get people to understand how food is manufactured because informed choices can only be made if people have the information."

Without being at all preachy about it, Jimmy shows exactly how raw ingredients may be mucked about before they reach shop shelves, kitchens and dining tables.

It's up to us to figure out whether we think this is a good or bad thing.

In episode one, Jimmy deconstructs breakfast and has a go at making his own cornflakes. He says: "You could walk round a factory but I hate to see programmes where they just film the back of someone walking around talking.

"This is the best way of understanding how they provide a cereal that everyone loves - out of a waste product."

He starts off with a fresh corn on the cob and through a process of drying, bashing, cooking and pummelling, delivers his own version of the factory food process.

Firstly, he gets rid of all the bran (and we all know what that's for), then he pokes out the inner 'germ' containing nutrients and proteins, leaving behind the starch that makes the eventual cereal.

Then he puts back some of the removed goodness by spraying on a lurid green chemical cocktail of nutrients and iron.

Jimmy says: "The thing that surprised my wife most was the iron filings. Why do we need this in? Is our food deficient in some way? There are a lot of big questions that will spiral from this."

Fans who are distracted by the reference to Jimmy's wife may need to catch up with the fact that he and Michaela married in August, in a Suffolk church just up the road from the farm, with Jimmy's old school pal Jamie Oliver in attendance.

Jimmy says: "We had a lovely day and a little pink tractor that I bought Michaela on Valentine's Day for her herb and veg garden towed us back in a trailer.

"We then had a party at the farm and honeymooned in Ireland. It only rained twice - but the first time it rained for three days and the second time for six days."

Back at his farmyard food factory, Jimmy admits there were lots of hairy moments, not least when he attempted to manufacture morning coffee by making real filter coffee, then feeding it - via a high-pressure spray into a metal canister heated by two hot air guns jammed in the lid.

He says: "That got so hot it was almost like I'd built a rocket ship.

"It had to reach at least 100 degrees centigrade to evaporate the coffee. We thought it might explode."

The resulting coffee powder does at least prove more palatable than the homemade cornflakes.

Another experiment in the 'don't try this at home' category came when Jimmy tried to make his own cola.

He says: "I showed how much fizz there is in a bottle of cola. It's really interesting to do.You get one of those chewy mints - I forget what they're called now - put it in the cola and it releases all the carbon dioxide. Whoosh! It shoots the gas out in a great big jet.

"I thought this was going to cause a nightmare for parents but then we wondered how we could get the fizz back in. So we built a big carbonator.

"It didn't really work but I decided to demonstrate what carbon dioxide does and we used some dry ice, put it in the bottle with some more water and did the lid up. This was just to show the dangers of me creating this carbonator - and the thing goes off like a hand grenade!

It was unbelievable. Obviously we took cover and were wearing goggles and doing all the health and safety stuff."

The Boys' Own enthusiasm is part of Jimmy's appeal, though underneath he is a serious, shrewd and determined farmer and businessman who has had to face many difficulties in the current economic climate, just like everyone else.

Last year's soaring feed prices meant he had to slaughter more than half of his rare breed sows.

On the plus side, his sausages - combining free-range rare breed pork with blue Stilton and freshly-crushed garlic - were listed as among the 10 best in the world.

He says: "Ah, the Ipswich Super Blue. That's what we really hang our hat on, the quality of the sausages. We have won various awards for them."

And how hard is the recession biting? He says: "We've got through it.

"The first thing we did was open another outlet in the Birmingham House of Fraser store. Everyone thought that we were nuts but actually it increases sales by going to a different area.

"And we concentrated on the family day out at the farm.

"That really helped, with people who hadn't been on holiday coming to have a day out. So you've constantly got to reinvent yourself and constantly come up with ideas - which is exhausting - but it makes it a bit exciting as well."

One of the best ideas was to bring in Scottish-born pop star K T Tunstall along with Athlete and Badly Drawn Boy for Harvest Festival, a pop fest combining music with food demonstrations by James Wong and James Martin: Jimmy says: "It was brilliant. It was sold out a month ahead and we had 10,000 people over two days.

"We didn't have camping facilities so all the local B&Bs and hotels could benefit - and all the ones around us were fully booked, which was great."

Like his mate Jamie Oliver, Jimmy has an agenda that goes way beyond earning a good living for himself and his new wife.

He likes to spread the success around and the farm works with Jamie's Fifteen Foundation as well as the 'naughty soldiers' doing time at the Military Correction Training Centre in Colchester, to help young people re-connect with the natural world.

Jimmy may have caught the bug for helping out less fortunate folk from Jamie, and at an early age: He says: "When we were 11 or 12 one of our mums would drop us off at the station on a Saturday and we'd go to Cambridge for the day. We had 10 or 12 quid pocket money because we used to work, so we felt well-off and it was a big adventure for us, going shopping and buying a CD or something.

"We'd see the guy selling The Big Issue and Jamie always wanted to open a pasta bar where the staff would be homeless people. That always stuck in my mind."

The roots of Jamie's Fifteen Foundation - which helps jobless kids get a career in catering - formed way back then.

And Jimmy takes his obligations to the wider community just as seriously.

When he started the farm, no bank would touch him, so Jamie's company stepped in with the cash. If there is an acceptable face of capitalism these days, this must be it.

. Jimmy's Food Factory, BBC1, Wed,7.30pm

CAPTION(S):

Jimmy's ON THE FARM... are a bit Heath Robinson DOWN but he loves being dangerous contraptions It was unbelievable. Obviously NEVER DULL... Jimmy loves experimenting on the farm and this has captured the imagination of viewers to his shows