The way Timothy Wilson tells it, the whole thing is an accident. He never intended to become a rare-breed pig farmer. He didn't see himself as the kind of man who would raise 80 head of longhorn cattle or end up grazing 1,200 Swaledale and black face sheep on the high Yorkshire moors. He certainly didn't plan to have a butcher's shop, let alone two. And yet through happenstance or, to be more exact, serendipity - the glorious art of happy accidents - his company, the Ginger Pig, has become one of the most respected meat producers in Britain.

From their three-day-a-week stand at London's Borough Market, and their shop just off Marylebone High Street, they sell superbly hung beef, lamb, mutton and great cuts of fine pork. They make pork pies and hamburgers, cure and smoke their own bacon and produce a huge range of their own punchy sausages, among them chorizo and merguez, Toulouse and herb, roasted apple and black puddings. One thing is certain. It is no accident that 46-year-old Wilson has ended up supplying the River Cafe with all their meat. Nor that the Ginger Pig is now the winner of our coveted producer of the year award.

'It was a hobby that got out of control,' he tells me, when we meet at his farm in North Yorkshire, and he sounds almost apologetic about it. Hobby it may once have been but it is clearly much more than that now. In a little over a decade the Ginger Pig has grown into a business with a turnover of £1.5 million a year and rising. It employs over 20 people, including farmers, butchers and skilled charcutiers, and as he leads me around from field to field, showing off the cattle with their beautiful curving horns, and the Tamworth pigs with their gorgeous reddy-brown coats that give the company its name, it becomes clear that this is a man on a mission. 'This is an exercise in sustainable farming,' says Wilson, a ruddy-faced chap who looks likes he was born to have mud caked on his boots. He drives me past sodden fields full of lovely fat sows. 'Everything is organic, not because it's a marketing point but because I want the animals to lead the best lives they possibly can. That is what matters to me.'

So how did it happen? He's not really sure. His grandfather was a farmer and butcher and, as a kid, Timothy had worked on a pig farm. But when he finished school in South Yorkshire he didn't want anything more to do with it. Instead he drifted into buying and selling antiques. That led to dealing in old oak furniture and eventually he found himself buying up entire old houses, restoring them and selling them on. One of them, in Nottinghamshire, was a derelict farmhouse with a few acres. There were ducks in the duck pond and pigs in the pigsty and he loved the look of it. But as soon as he bought it the vendor took the animals away.

'It looked ludicrous,' he says. 'It looked empty. So I bought three saddleback pigs, and I fed them and that was that.' Soon they got so big he was advised by a local butcher to send them for slaughter and, being unsentimental, he did as he was told. He gave most of the meat away to friends and decided to get some more pigs, this time Tamworths. Why? 'I like big things,' he says. 'And the Tamworth is the biggest.' (He gives the same reason for getting longhorns: 'If you're going to keep animals you might as well have ones that are nice to look at.') Eventually he ended up with four pregnant Tamworths which, as pregnant pigs will, soon became 32 Tamworths. 'I had to do something with them.' So he had them slaughtered too and sold them on to local organic butchers.

But he still had more meat than he knew what to do with. He got a butcher to teach him sausage making, picked up some recipe books by Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson, and started making his own meat products. 'My freezer was filling up with all these sausages so I converted a small barn at the back of the farm buildings into a butcher's shop.' By his own admission it wasn't a bad time for a change in direction. This was the early 90s and the property recession was in full swing. Wilson needed a new living and, as word of his sausages spread, those pigs started to supply it.

In the Autumn of 1998 he was asked if he wanted to run a stand at one of Henrietta Green's first Food Lover's Fairs at Borough Market (the precursor to the legendary weekend food market that is there today). Wilson said he couldn't be bothered but, by then, he had a business partner, Anne Wilson (the shared surname is a coincidence; she is neither his wife nor relation) and she said she would do it. She drove down to London with a friend from the village and what they thought was suf- ficient sausages for three days. 'At 2pm on the Friday they phoned me up to say they had sold out,' Wilson says. 'I had to work through the night to make another batch. The next day the same thing happened. They sold out.' So he made more.

When, a short while later, Borough Market become a regular affair the Ginger Pig was set up with a stand. It has been there ever since. Later he was joined in the business by chef Paul Hughes, who had worked at Fergus Henderson's St John restaurant, and who is passionate about traditionally made charcuterie and sausages. He has helped to put the Ginger Pig on the map and, just over a year ago, they were finally ready to set up their own butcher's shop.

These days Timothy Wilson splits his time between the farm and London, commuting between the two in his turbo-charged Porsche (top speed 218mph). 'I don't spend my money on anything else,' he says of the car. He's thinking about opening another shop, and perhaps a restaurant where you could choose your slab of raw meat for cooking.

But he's not going into wholesale. 'It's too much hassle and we'd have to charge too much for it,' he says. 'Anyway we're very happy with the trade we've got making and selling our products ourselves.' To his growing army of fans, among whose number I count myself, the news that Timothy Wilson is determined not to let the Ginger Pig go mass-market will be hugely reassuring. Accident or no, it's a true original and we all want it to stay that way.

· The Ginger Pig, Borough Market, London SE1 and 8-10 Moxon Street, London W1 (020 7935 7788)

Highly commended by the judges

1. Matthew Stevens & Son Fish, St Ives, Cornwall (01736 795135) mstevensandson.co.uk
Fresh fish delivered to your door overnight. 2. Plantation Cottage Herbs Jellies, Worcestershire (01386 861 507) www.plantation-cottage.com
All the herbs used in Lynda Whitcombe's jellies and preserves (sold in Waitrose) come from her cottage garden. 3. Waltham Place Farm, Berkshire (01628 825517) www.walthamplace.com
An organic farm producing vegetables according to the biodynamic rhythms set by the lunar cycle.
4. S.J. Frederick and Sons, Essex (01279 792460) www.labelanglais.co.uk
The mature, free-range chickens from this traditional family farm are the must-eat for foodies.