A music system blares across the vast, Hunter-wellied crowd, which shuffles in mud between brightly coloured tents. As the next solo artist ambles centre stage there’s a palpable air of expectation. Crackley Cornelia is tipped for the top.

You could almost be at Glastonbury. Instead, I am at its agricultural equivalent, the Royal Show, and Cornelia is a cow. Forget cut-off denims; here at Stoneleigh Park, Warwickshire, cords flap above wellies, the tents hold cages full of chickens rather than tarot readers, and the music system is playing Jerusalem not Jay-Z.

As for the most hotly anticipated group, well, it’s a trio of Rouge sheep, owned by Percy Tait, 79, that he’s hoping will carry off the prize for the Best Group of Three. Having grasped all three animals firmly (and, to the untutored eye, rather suggestively) by the hindquarters, the bowler-hatted judge nods firmly and presents Tait with the red rosette. “Oh, that’s lovely,” Tait says, beaming as he leads his little flock away, past rows of bleating, snub-nosed Texels and puffed, poodle-like Hampshire Downs, their pens adorned with tempting photographs of succulent lamb chops.

While Percy Tait is happy, these are turbulent times for British agriculture. The livestock industry has been reeling for the past 20 years, thanks to a series of outbreaks that began with BSE, and continued with foot-and-mouth disease, TB and now bluetongue, which has led to restrictions on the movement and sale of cattle, sheep and goats. As a result, 1,000 fewer cows have made it to the showground this year, and there are only 400 sheep, a quarter of the normal number. Behind the pens, an enormous hangar that should have been bursting at the seams with indignant woolly denizens lies forlorn and empty.

That’s not all. As the show begins, there are rumblings that beef farmers may organise illicit badger culls, so furious are they at the Government’s perceived inaction on bovine TB. After the show ended, there would be another blow, with the news that British-reared calves sent to the Netherlands have been found to have TB. Dutch farmers have now placed a ban on British imports. Then there’s the rocketing price of feed that has led pig farmers to holler that they might actually be wiped out altogether.

Yet there are reasons to be cheerful. Arable prices are rising, British consumers are suddenly terribly interested in buying local food, and new fears about “food security” (will we have enough?) are leading to calls for British farmers to produce more of the food we consume. So while there is no immediate reversal of fortune, there are signs that things could be on the up. At the very least, it’s no longer received wisdom that we should import most of our food.

It’s against this backdrop of doom and brightening skies that I’ve come to the showground, which feels in parts like an enormous village fête, with its celebration of old rural ways, and in other parts like a vast international trade fair (the 100,000 people attending come from some 50 different countries). A stand boasting “boiler suits in all sizes” abuts another (packed) tent flogging sunglasses by Prada and Oakley, while rope head collars hang next to a stall offering instant text-messaging for disease alerts. Good Life wannabes queue to inquire about Omlet’s chicken coops, but farmers head for the Energy and Sustainability Park, with its underground heating systems and “biomass boiler” fed on spare crops. As an avid listener to The Archers, I half expected to bump into Ruth and David looking for tips on the biodigester. Instead, I meet Ian Archer, a cattle farmer from Coventry. He stands by a huge banner proclaiming “The Blonde Society”. Beneath it, his heifers Barbie and Penelope Pitstop are standing, tossing their heads, the better to display their shimmering golden hides. They form a timeless, bucolic tableau.

“Beautiful, aren’t they?” says Archer, patting the enormous glistening rump of his bull, Alonso. But talk to Archer for even a few minutes, and you quickly realise what a technical exercise farming has become – at least if you want to survive. “These are Blondes d’Aquitaine,” he says. “It’s a French breed but because they’ve been in the country for 30 years and we’ve bred them smaller to suit the British market – so they finish quicker – we decided to call them British Blondes.” Despite bluetongue, Archer is unexpectedly cheery. “Even with feed and fertiliser prices going up like petrol, the general shortage of cattle numbers in the world makes us a bit optimistic,” he says. “After BSE, when we couldn’t export our beef, the supermarkets dropped the prices because they knew we didn’t have any other market. But now we can export, so the supermarkets are having to buy our beef, and give us a fairer price for it.”

Across the way, David Bell from Kenilworth has been titivating his Simmental heifer Crackley Cornelia with Paul Mitchell’s Sculpture Spray: “It brings the coats up.” Cornelia has just been declared Supreme Champion and Bell is delighted. “We sell embryos and semen,” he explains, “so it’s very good advertising for us.” For all his success, he feels unsure about the future. “Prices at the breeding end are a bit wobbly because of bluetongue,” he says. “People don’t know where things are going. The disease has 24 different strains and it’s taken them two years to get the vaccine up and running.”

Feed prices are a problem, too: “Our feed costs are virtually double what they were last year,” he says. “Our business has been on a knife edge ever since BSE, when we were doing very nicely, exporting our embryos. Since then, it’s been one thing after another. We must be mental cases to carry on, to be quite honest, but I’ve always done it, and you think it’s going to be better tomorrow. We keep smiling and holding the gun to our heads.”

Click on the gallery above to see pictures of the interviewees.

Jade Holland Cooper, 21, fashion designer and owner of Holland Cooper clothing, based in Suffolk

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