When other farmers fumed about a ban on straw burning, Charles Peers was already getting himself into hot water.

The reason he positively glowed with quiet satisfaction back in 1992 was that he was already way ahead of the field, after successfully finding a way to use his straw as fuel.

Some had sniggered at the idea of burning hundreds of straw bales to fuel the water-heating system for the six holiday flats on his farm.

A decade on, the holidaymakers are still there, often blissfully unaware that every time they take a bath or turn up the central heating they are helping to clean up the farm.

And now it seems Great Milton's remarkably determined man-of-straw has a new burning ambition for 2000.

He hopes to expand the straw operation at Views Farm to heat new offices being created in the spring from old farm buildings.

Mr Peers, 62, a leading Oxfordshire organic farmer, says: "I now burn between 50 to 60 acres of straw a year, equivalent to 100 tonnes. "The running cost comes to about £3,000 a year. When you think that provides hot water and heating in six flats and an office, it is not a bad return."

The Peers family's decision to go ahead with an imaginative barn conversion to self create self-catering flats at Views Farm was no fanciful pursuit of a fashionable form of diversification. He had to borrow £250,000 to pay for the cottage-style apartments and they have ensured the survival of the farm. "Like any other farmer I have all my capital tied up. So the units were all paid for with borrowed money. I believe that we would not today be farming 400 acres, if we hadn't built the flats." And he has no doubt that the straw burning, in turn, was crucial to the profitability of the holiday-side of the business.

In the early years he used to stoke up the large boiler himself both at night and early in the morning, with the straw also used to heat the National Farmers' Union offices, which stand just across a courtyard from the apartments.

It has proved a messy business with straw often blown around the courtyard. The tar which accumulated from the burning straw also meant that the boiler and flues had to be regularly cleaned. But now he is hoping to acquire a conveyor to feed straw into the boiler as and when required. As for the tar problem, that has largely been overcome by ensuring all the straw used is tinder dry. Even the ash from the burned straw is put to good use, mixed with manure and put back on the crops.

Since the stubble burning ban, farmers have been chopping up straw and ploughing it into the land, something that is both time consuming and hardly environmentally friendly, given that it involves using fuel-hungry combines.

But Mr Peers, who runs the farm with his 32-year-old son Robert, is now in the happy position of getting straw from local farms and selling it on at a profit. Changing farming systems and anti-pollution legislation means that far more straw is being baled up and used for livestock.

"I am now sending a lot down to livestock farmers in Devon and the West Country," he says. "I sell all the remaining straw from our farm and now take it in from local farmers." The Oxford, Thame and Henley branch of the NFU will be moving into one of the new bigger offices, with preliminary work starting over the winter. The office on the farm that they will vacate is expected to become a conference centre. There could be between two and three offices created from old cattle sheds, depending on the sizes required. Yet Mr Peers is not in the slightest surprised that other farmers have not followed his example by using their straw for water-heating systems.

In Mr Peers' view, the bigger the complex, the more worthwhile it is. And at the moment, he also happens to believe that farmers have little cause to rush into catering for tourists after experiencing one of his most difficult years as far as holiday trade is concerned.

Mr Peers says: "Whenever farmers ask me for my advice, I always tell them that the farm accommodation and the number of visitors to the area are now about in balance. We are certainly not turning people away."

Mr Peers, who moved to the farm in 1974, puts the fall off in the self catering business to the strength of the pound putting off foreign visitors, and cheap holidays abroad deterring British holidaymakers. We are normally more than half full from the beginning of November to the end of February."

Not that the fall-off in the run-up to Christmas has left him with too much time on his hands. For the last five years he has been the chairman of Organic Farmers & Growers Ltd, the organisation created to promote the concept and principles of organic food production.

About half Views Farm's production is now organic and he sees it as one of the most exciting sectors within the agricultural industry. And who would argue with a man who can get hot baths out of fields of corn and barley.

Story date: Tuesday 07 December

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.