Katie Herring is sales and marketing manager for local food and farming co-operative Cultivate

THINK about the last meal you ate: do you know where the ingredients on your plate came from?

And how much of the money you paid for that food went to the person who helped produce it? Why should you care?

At Cultivate our priority is to source locally and I’m proud to say that when you buy local produce from us at least 50 per cent of the price you pay goes to the person who worked so hard to produce it.

That’s people like Pete at Westmill Organics, George at Sandy Lane Farm and the co-farmers and support workers at FarmAbility in Wytham.

And you can bet that’s a whole lot more than the supermarkets pay their farmers.

Buying food from local farmers helps preserve our local landscape and environment. It’s the beautiful green spaces and wildlife that help make our county a great place to live. Our local farmers, working to organic standards, help sustain these spaces and preserve them for many years to come. By spending your money on their produce you’re directly helping preserve the landscape around us.

Our smaller local farms are also fantastic at growing a diverse selection of plant cultivars which helps boost bio-diversity. Mono-culture (raising vast quantities of only one cultivar) spells devastation when disease strikes. It’s also much less interesting – imagine only having one type of apple!

I admit local produce may not always be as cheap as the supermarket deals but you can’t truly compare the two as the end products are entirely different.

A non-local conventionally-produced carrot is grown in soil loaded with chemicals and for its endurance and uniformity, rather than its flavour.

A local organic carrot will have been grown in soil teeming with life, it’s likely to be one of a variety of cultivars available, it will have been picked within a day or so and as a result its flavour will be infinitely better.

In exchange for supermarkets cheap deals and convenience you’ll sacrifice flavour, freshness and fair pay for producers.

If you want to be sure you’re getting value on all levels, local produce is the only way to go.