A day on the farm calls for quite a few changes of clothes.

A typical day at the Bowman family farm can, bizarrely enough, sometimes bear comparison with being backstage at a fashion show.

One minute Brian Bowman is donning his overalls to milk his herd of Jerseys and the next he is pulling on his sales hat to promote his ice-cream to potential customers.

Then there are the whites the family must wear when whipping up batches of ice-cream.

"Combining the roles can be a little precarious at times and involves several changes of clothes," admits Brian, who established the Cowpots brand with his wife, Mary-Lou, and sons, Will and Martyn, two years ago.

The family had been milking a high yielding herd of 90 Holstein Friesians in Hampshire before realising their ambition to move to west Wales to establish a farm-based business.

They bought 12 pedigree Jerseys from a farm which produced ice-cream in Hampshire and moved to Pen-y-Back Farm near Whitland.

The transition was rapid, as William recalls: "During the summer of 2004 I was driving a tractor on my uncle's arable farm and the following summer I was in a 20ft by 8ft redundant shipping container making ice-cream!"

For Brian, the change meant he had to learn to farm all over again. His farm in Hampshire was on grade three land with an annual rainfall of only 16 inches. At Pen-y-Back he has a farm which grows grass well.

Although the farm could support a far larger herd than they have, the Bowmans say that moving to west Wales to produce milk as a commodity was never an option.

They needed to add value to make it commercially viable.

A litre of their ice-cream retails at many times more than the current milk price, which is hovering around 20p a litre.

Although they have production costs to factor into that price, including filling pots by hand, they are also creating a business and a brand which in itself has a value.

The ice-cream was developed through trial and error. They made mistakes along the way but by learning from these they perfected the product before launching it.

Will is modest about the skills necessary to produce ice-cream but acknowledges there is more to it than production alone.

"If you can bake a cake you can make ice-cream if you have the right equipment and a cookery book.

"But what is important is to make the right product for the target market and to sell it at the price you would like to charge," he says.

The Bowmans are not alone in producing ice-cream.

There are many excellent and established brands already being produced in Wales so they have concentrated on the taste to set it apart and the unique texture which Channel Island milk gives it.

"We have gone as premium as we can while keeping the price at a sensible level," says Brian.

He milks the cows twice a day and their average yield of 3,500 litres is more than adequate for the current requirement of the business.

However, to serve the needs of the business as it grows, there will be home-bred Cowpots heifers coming into the herd next year.

"We didn't want to start off with too many cows and to be left not knowing what to do with the milk," says Brian.

One of the most difficult barriers they came up against when they launched their brand was to convince pubs, restaurants and retailers to buy their ice-cream.

"Effectively you are asking someone to break with their existing supplier so they need to be sure that you are going to be in business the following year "The lead-in time for a new business is a lot longer than people might think," says Brian.

But convince them they did and their partnership with a Pembrokeshire wholesaler has secured many new outlets for their product.

The wet summer flattened sales this season, although sales still grew by 70% compared with the previous year.

But as it has become fashionable to eat ice-cream all the year round they are optimistic for future growth.

"Bridget Jones did a lot for ice-cream sales!" says Brian.