You're put in your place the moment you drive down the track that leads into Laverstoke Park, Jody Scheckter's organic farm near Basingstoke. Every few metres there's a small sign, each a little bit bossier than the last. 'Do not use polyunsaturated oils for cooking, sautéing or baking.' 'Eat beef, lamb, game, poultry and offal from pasture-fed animals.' 'Avoid white flour, white-flour products and white rice.' 'Use unrefined salt.'
And my favourite? 'Only cook in stainless steel, cast iron, glass or good-quality enamel. Never aluminium.' I've always liked my Le Creuset, but I never thought they'd earn me a place in heaven.
Truth be told, I feel a little uncomfortable at the prospect of a morning with Scheckter, former Formula 1 world champion and a born-again biodynamic farmer. Am I going to be lectured?
As it happens, I'm not. It occurs to me after I've left that the grumpy signs are there to announce to the outside world that the ex-racing driver- he was number one in 1979, against the likes of Niki Lauda and Gilles Villleneuve - is not an agricultural dilettante. He's saying: 'Take me seriously: I'm a proper farmer.'
In fact they don't come any more proper. Or any more organic. 'It's not a hobby. It's more special than that,' he tells me, with touching understatement, as we shake hands. Look in any direction and it's clear that Laverstoke Park is not a millionaire's plaything. Scheckter supplies the likes of Heston Blumenthal, Raymond Blanc and Abel & Cole with their meat and recently signed a deal to provide buffalo burgers to the Gourmet Burger Kitchen chain, as well as mail order from his website.
It's a most remarkable operation - and from such an unlikely organic evangelist.
Scheckter's mission is, in one sense, a very simple one: in the 57-year-old South African's words, it's 'to produce the best-tasting, healthiest food without compromise'. In practice, that means he has thrown an extraordinary amount of energy into rearing his sheep, cattle, pigs, wild boar, poultry, and buffalo, and gone back to the first principles of agriculture.
He's planted 130,000 trees and eight miles of hedgerow; he's created and planted a bespoke 'mixed salad' of 31 different grasses for his flocks to feed on; and he's aiming to be self-sustaining in fossil-fuel-free energy within two years. 'I'm an odd farmer, that's for sure,' beams the man who used to make a living driving round in circles burning carbon.
And burn he did. Scheckter 'exploded on the scene as an erratic, crash-prone wild man whose desperate deeds of derring-do put himself and his peers in great danger'. The man who 'only knew one speed - flat-out' - was held responsible for one of the biggest Formula 1 accidents of all time, causing a monumental pile-up at the 1973 British Grand Prix at Silverstone, in which eight cars were totally destroyed. Gradually, though, he learned to curb his aggression and, in 1979, driving for Ferrari, won the world championship. He retired shortly afterwards.
The only sense in which his former career matters now, though - and the one that followed it, a hugely successful business in the United States that provided firearms-training systems for the police and military - is that it provided the financial backing for his biodynamic dream. In the six years he's owned the farm, he's lost huge amounts of money. This year, he hopes to turn his first profit.
He takes me into the library. 'We have probably got more than 500 books on farming, soils and health, many of them from the beginning of the last century when the best natural farming was happening. We'd had 1,000 years of no chemicals at that point. That was before everyone went down the "easier" route with pesticides and antibiotics and so on. So I started researching: which are the best breeds, what are the best animals, what's the best way. I researched it in every direction.'
He eventually lighted on the teachings of Weston A Price - a dentist and nutritionist born in 1870 whose conclusions some might find a little eccentric (the ban on aluminium pots is accompanied by a stricture that corn oil can cause cancer and sterility) but whose broad principles are simple and reassuring. 'The way to stay healthy,' says Scheckter, 'is to eat what your grandmother told you to eat.' That means meat reared naturally and humanely in the open air.
Yet he augments this homespun wisdom with 21st-century scientific research - how many organic farms do you know that have their own on-site laboratories and full-time biochemists analysing soil samples? 'We go all over the world to find the latest scientific ways of working with nature,' he says. He calls Laverstoke 'the university of organics'.
I ask for an example. 'I was on an organic farm about five years ago, which was meant to be one of the best there is, and I went to see their chickens. They had 1,200 in the chicken house. And three of them were outside.' Scheckter brought in an animal psychologist to find out why birds with the option of life in the fresh air might shun it.
The expert's answer was obvious perhaps - but overlooked by many free-range and organic farmers. 'Chickens are like children. If your child is brought up indoors and spends all his time looking at a computer, does he go outside? No. The secret is to get the birds out early and to breed them in the same places they're going to be brought up. And plant trees for shelter. It's as simple as that.'
He's built an abattoir on site too, whose architecture is specially designed to minimise distress to the animals in the last moments of their lives. The truth, says Scheckter, is that the kinder you are to them while they're alive, the better they'll reward you on the plate. The result, he says, of the extra effort on the farm is simply the most delicious meat you'll find. Though, of course, you have to pay for quality: his chickens start at around £12, more than four times the cost of a battery-bred creature on sale at your local supermarket.
'To produce good meat, you've got to go right back to the soils, the grasses - and of course the breeds. But most critical is making sure the animals are not stressed when they are slaughtered. The meat tenses up, it changes colour, everything goes bad. This, to me, is nature's way of telling us to be humane to animals.'
There is, it seems, a curious gentleness at the centre of the fossil-free former racing driver. 'I got this lovely letter from this lady who I'd never met,' he says with a smile. 'She said: "I've got to apologise to you. I said all these horrible things about you all the years when you were racing - but now you're part of the biodynamic community and you're obviously a nice chap."'
