The Riverford Blog

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The tiny leek seedlings we are out planting now will mean many tasty soups and stir-fries for you over the autumn and winter months ahead.

Can it be a coincidence? Spookily, just as Rhiannon’s song ‘Umbrella’ gets knocked off the number one spot after nine weeks, suddenly the weather gets better… Who knows?

On the farm we’re certainly making the most of the change and are out planting and harvesting everything as fast as we can. Most of the winter crops are in now - so the boxes should be well supplied for the coming months - and apart from runner beans, most of the summer crops have survived ok.

Amongst all the debate and discussion of the recent floods, there was an interesting piece in the Sunday Times pointing the finger at the unusually heavy rains - of course - but also at the way we treat our landscape.

“In our rush for cut-price diets we have created a wipe-down agricultural landscape empty of hedges and trees,” writes Richard Girling. “Where, for convenience, land is too often ploughed in the direction of the slope rather than across it. Instead of retaining water, every furrow becomes a channel that sluices it downhill.”

Girling’s call for us to think seriously about working with the landscape, rather than trying to impose our concrete will upon it, has much in common with the approach of organic farmers, who work with nature rather than against it, and it’s a compelling argument.

Boys from Landsgrove primary school dig up spuds from their patch on Riverford farm - will they make chips?

Here at Riverford we’ve been cooking the school dinners for a local primary school since 2005, but last year we thought it would be fun to give the kids a patch of land on the farm to grow their own vegetables to put in the meals.

The results were a huge success. The children grew onions, potatoes, tomatoes and many other crops that they had chosen themselves. All the year groups got involved.

We recently had a little harvest festival so the children could show their parents what they had been up to - and you can see the results here!

The debate is really hotting up about ‘green’ consumerism.

George Monbiot wrote a piece in the Guardian recently arguing that buying green is not good enough, we should be buying less, and ‘ethical’ options are becoming just another way of showing how rich you are. Now the chief executive of the National Consumer Council, Ed Mayo, has written a piece in response saying that buying green does make a difference.

Presumably the sensible middle ground is to buy less rubbish, and make sure the stuff you need - like food - is sourced as ethically as possible? Besides, it doesn’t even have to be more expensive. A Riverford box is ususally cheaper than supermarket organic food, and compares very favourably with their non-organic produce.

One of the worst things about the supermarket dominated food supply system is the way it has undermined this country’s long established horticultural grower base.

On a recent trip to Moss Side to see potential partners or growers for our network of farms, I was struck by the general air of despair in an area that, not so long ago, was thriving on providing excellent produce for nearby Manchester. It seems to be a similar story in Evesham and Kent.

Many smaller growers have been beaten into submission by the demands of the supermarkets’ centralised supply chain and all the prescriptive stuff that goes with it.

I admit that I had no idea the extent of what I was getting into when harvesting my first vegetables onto a wheelbarrow in 1986 or even when delivering the first boxes from a beaten up transit in 1993.

Though I am very proud that so many people across the country now enjoy our boxes and that our co-op members have a secure market for their produce, I never wanted to run a huge company and remain sceptical of the ongoing benefits of scale.

So, we are in the process of joining forces with farmers in other parts of the UK. The idea is to retain the social, environmental and economic benefits of small, local businesses, so retaining autonomy and regional character, while sharing the benefits of accumulated knowledge - be it the best carrot variety, how to control weeds in rhubarb or what to put in a box in February.

If our sister farms continue to grow at the present rate we will divide them to reduce food miles further and keep them at a personal size. The only hard and fast rule for our partnership of farms is that our decisions will be made as locally and with as few rules as possible, even if this does result in a little anarchy.

Well, the weather finally seems to have changed - at least for a bit! And with a couple of fine days on the trot we have been out madly trying to catch up with our planting. In order to keep our boxes full through the autumn and winter we need to plant hundreds of thousands of seedlings during the summer months. For what seems like weeks now we have been unable to get out planting because of the weather, and we were falling badly behind. But it’s not too late - yet! - and as long as we get a bit more good weather we will get everything in, although we will have to work some long days…