I became an organic grower 13 years ago. I was 22, living above a corner shop in east London and studying for a Masters. I was studying film and anthropology and found it fascinating, but I was struggling to see the point of doing it as a career. I come from a line of doctors, teachers, and vets so purposeful work, as it turned out, was very important to me. And at this point in my life, with a degree and a first class Masters to my name, I felt anything but useful.
I grew up in rural Leicestershire in a small village enveloped by farmland and spent a lot of time on the farm of my childhood best friend, Emma. On special occasions, her dad would take us on rides in the bucket of his tractor and we would explore the farm for what felt like days. There was a barn full of old bikes that her dad bought at farm auctions and we would pick one and ride out around the fields, visiting the cows. One night, her mum took us out to the cowsheds to show us a stillborn calf. She thought it was important that we saw it. I remember it vividly to this day; it taught me that death is a part of life. There was always a shiny metal pail of fresh milk in their fridge, complete with a creamy top, and yet they bought most of their food in Costco. The family never seemed to have much money, they never went on holiday, in fact we took Emma on her first foreign holiday at 15, for which she packed an extra large jar or marmite, but they felt so rich in other ways to me. I loved the farm. There was always so much going on, so much life, so many siblings, machines, dogs, and her parents were busy but always home. I loved the name too: Home Farm.
While I was at secondary school, the farmers we knew were all in the process of ‘diversifying’. It was a big buzz word. It was just after the foot and mouth outbreak and the adults were all talking about farmers struggling, though as kids, we didn’t fully understand. Emma’s family opened a kennels, the Wrights started making ice cream, and it was not uncommon to hear a story of a local farmer who had hanged themselves in a barn. After this point, my idyllic memories of farms stop. I think my hormones must have kicked in and I became more interested in French cinema and boys from the high school; the fields became backdrops for arty photographs or places for kissing. The farmers I knew faded into the background and Emma and I grew apart.
But those days had more of an effect on me than I realised, and when I found myself in my early twenties, despondent and struggling to make sense of living in London, with all of my qualifications, I knew what I needed. I wanted to be outside, to see green. I started to volunteer at a community garden in Dalston and I immediately started to feel better. It also turned out that I knew quite a lot about plants and what to do with them. It felt good. From there, I retrained and completed an apprenticeship in urban food growing; I worked part time in growing for a few years and have done it full time ever since. I have found a deep purpose in growing food and in being connected to the natural world, but I am now not sure how to carry on.
Over the years, I have learned about plant biology, the wonders of symbiotic interspecies relationships, the magical complexity of the soil, but I was never taught about how to balance the books, and I still don’t know if it’s possible, with the kind of smaller scale nature friendly growing that I want to do. I am torn and have found myself wondering how I got here, so I’ve been retracing the steps of my growing career.
Through the community garden, I joined a box scheme and applied for a traineeship in urban food growing with the organisation that ran it. Over the course of a season, I spent one day a week on one of the ‘patchwork farms’, which at its heyday, was a network of 12 microsites across London that grew different salad leaves using organic methods. I discovered mustard greens, edible flowers, radicchio and the wonders of rainbow chard and learnt how to care for them all.
At the end of a day on site, around a dozen growers would come together to pack the leaves up into ‘Hackney Salad’, a beautiful mixed salad that we lovingly mixed and bagged by hand at an enormous mixing trough, over stimulating conversation, and laughter. This was, and still is sold through the organisation’s box scheme or to wholesale customers.
We weren’t paid during this apprenticeship, but we got a weekly veg bag and to me it didn’t matter because I was enjoying it so much. I could also afford to do it. I had my maintenance loan from my Masters and was doing other paid work. I honestly didn’t even think of asking to be paid at the time. I felt privileged to be able to learn. In peak season, we would sometimes be packing until 8pm, and I developed a repetitive stress injury on my wrist. But I was young and it all felt so important so I carried on, kept harvesting and kept packing, and it still hurts to this day.
A few years after this, some wiser younger apprentices complained about the very long days, and asked to be paid to do the pack. Us alumni realised we hadn’t even thought of this, and said good for them. This was over ten years ago, and the patchwork farm project has since reduced in size and scale and relies on funding to continue. It is not possible to make it viable through sales of produce alone, mainly because the sites are too small and the labour wage in the city is too high. The patchwork farm remains, however, an incredibly important training space, and a way for urban communities to interact with how their food is grown. During our training, we learned about pests, diseases, crop rotation and the soil. It was all fascinating and I lapped it up. But money was something that was never discussed – we never learned about how we could actually make this into a viable career, that always remained unspoken.
In the exit interview, the head grower told me I was ‘naturally green fingered’ and I thought it was the best compliment I had ever had; I was immensely proud, and I had an inkling that my upbringing had taught me a lot. When we finished the apprenticeship, I jumped at the chance of taking on a site. It felt like the natural progression. I assumed that running a site came with a salary – that would make sense after all. I waited for someone to give me the details but didn’t worry too much about it. So when it came to the handover with the previous grower, I finally discovered that we were paid in what we sold, £15 a kilo.. I remember being surprised, but moved onto another assumption, that the weights we would get would be sufficient to make it pay. The sites we looked after were no bigger than a large back garden, and were often pretty unsuitable for growing produce. I worked in the back garden of a bank and in a shady church yard where we battled shade and slugs. I earned around £200-£300 a month, from April to November, but the day’s work including the pack was probably 9-10 hours. However you calculate it, and however joyous the whole thing was, the hourly rate comes in well under minimum wage.
In 2016, after three seasons of being a part-time film maker and a part-time grower, I’d had enough of the city and thought the countryside might hold the answer. I took a seasonal job in the Herefordshire countryside on a biodynamic farm. I lived in a static caravan in one of the fields. There was no hot water or toilet and the water came from a standpipe just outside the door. To go to the bathroom, I either peed in the field, or walked across the road and into the workers’ toilet that adjoined the owner’s house. Sometimes I would cross the road in my dressing gown in the morning and surprise a neighbour driving past. I remember thinking I’d lucked out. I was paid £18,000 a year but the caravan was included, so compared to London rent and bills, I felt quite flush. At this point I had no financial duties beyond a phone bill and was able to up and leave London. I was very lucky to have inherited some money from a grandparent and an uncle so was able to pay off my student loan quickly, and buy an old mini to get me from London to the farm.
At the interview, they promised half days on a Friday, so I thought I’d be able to get back to London easily to see my then boyfriend, now husband. In reality we worked from 8am – 6pm every day, and the work was often brutal and repetitive. The farm was beautiful, and had what seemed to me at the time, a perfect ecosystem. The hedgerows were dotted with wild strawberries and cowslips in Spring, and thrumming with birds, and the iron red soil was clearly very fertile, both crops and weeds seemed to spring from the ground while your back was turned.
The work was incredibly hard. I could spend an entire day weeding a carrot field by hand or on my hands and knees picking strawberries on my own. Workers and volunteers alike were treated with a certain disdain, unless you were from somewhere near London. I was considered difficult because I asked questions. Again, I had been naive, and the deal was too good to be true. Though I learnt an awful lot about unusual varieties, flowers and perseverance, and got experience working at scale and with machinery, the farm took advantage of its workers and there were many unsafe practices. I have no idea if the farm was profitable or not. The produce was grown for a prestigious restaurant in London and as far as I could tell, there were no local customers. I’m not sure the farm has ever kept a worker for longer than a few seasons, and frustratingly it still has a good reputation in London and hordes of instagram followers. The woman who ran the farm was bitter and unkind, and thought we owed everything to her farm and she and the farm owed those that worked there nothing. I was determined to not end up like that but I could see how it could happen.
This was also the year that Brexit happened. The countryside was covered in ‘leave’ posters. I had naively assumed that organic farmers were at least a little bit left wing. But farmers everywhere were wanting out. They assumed that we would get something better – could it get any worse? It was a surreal year in many ways. I got most of my news through the radio as there was no phone signal at the farm, and we weren’t allowed access to the wifi, except via a cable in a cold washroom. I would come back to London to sit in a busy pub on a Friday night and feel overwhelmed, and I struggled to put the voices I heard on the radio to the faces on the news.
I left the farm in October, when it became hard to sleep in the caravan because of the cold, to come back to London and move in with my partner. I spent a few years doing various jobs for a series of stressed and stretched organisations and side-stepped into community food growing and education as I needed a job. These were after all the kind of jobs that existed in London for growers. As much as I had loved working on a large-scale farm, I didn’t want to just supply high end restaurants, I wanted the food I grew to be attainable and to nourish people every day.
In 2019, whilst working on a small kitchen garden in Suffolk, where the head chef preferred to buy in little gems in plastic rather than use the leaves I was growing, I met a man who would give me my next job. He was what you might call (if you weren’t feeling too kind) a washed-up celebrity and was interested in regenerative farming as well as a lot of other wellness-based activities including trampolining to improve the lymphatic system. He wanted to set up an educational farm that would teach children about their relationship to the world around them, or as he described it, ‘a jedi school’.
He had a state secondary school on board for his project with a lovely head teacher and a large field and he was looking for someone to set up the farm. He showed me a deck that had the head grower on £40,000 starting salary, something that unsurprisingly, never happened. He waxed lyrical about how we needed to pay farmers more and that it was all totally possible. There were pages full of numbers that looked impressive. He sent it to me an hour before I met him and I scanned it on the bus. Again, I was naive and he was charming. I wanted to believe it could be possible and I wanted to leave my job. I took the job and I didn’t think too much about it. I helped to set up the project and worked there for five years, building the farm from scratch on an empty field. It was an incredible time, and I learnt so much, but the farm was never going to work financially. Nobody really asked me to do any in-depth planning for the farm, nobody asked for any financial forecasts, in fact no one had ever had really discussed that kind of thing in all my years as a grower, so we just started doing it anyway.
We got funding for polytunnels and equipment and began to grow for the restaurants. I based my plans on JM Fortier. He made it look so easy and was always talking about how farms could earn more if we were just more efficient. But the project wasn’t just a farm, it was so much more. after a few years, the founder moved away and the charity has gone from strength to strength and now runs a range of programmes for school children and the community that are incredibly important, particularly targeting families on low incomes who are less likely to access the outdoors. I am so proud of the work I did there, but each year as we added more strings to our bow, the farm got less of the time it needed and made less and less money, while the weeds encroached and I slowly but surely burnt out.
I was the only experienced grower on the senior team and found it surprisingly difficult to have to make the case for the farm and why it made no money, to people who didn’t understand the intricacies of the food system, and why food couldn’t be ‘cheap’ because we wanted it to be. The reality was, and is, that for a farm to make money, it needs serious investment, a certain scale, and time, and we didn’t have any of those things. Add to this that I had been struggling with quite debilitating symptoms of long COVID, on and off for three years… it became too much.
I had to have months off work off at a time, and was wracked with anxiety and a host of unthinkable symptoms, that would get worse when I stepped foot on the farm. I am sure that my long COVID was wrapped up with fighting the uphill battle to make a small farm work and instead of looking at the wider picture, I put myself in the firing line, giving more and more to the farm. But eventually my body gave out, and I had to look at the reality of the situation – it wasn’t working. It was a gut wrench to leave, I had poured everything into that field, but I knew I had to do it for my own health and sanity. It was the right thing to do.
When I decided I was leaving, I had to think about what was next. Because we were a charity, I’d been lucky to have slightly higher salary than most small scale farmers, who typically earn anything from £18,000 – £30,000. I had started to do some landscape design work on the side. For this work, I was being paid £500 a day, for a skillset that had come about through years of working with plants and with my hands in the soil. It seemed grossly unfair. The work was a doddle compared to farming. But I couldn’t bring myself to leave growing; it would have been too sad and I still felt a duty.
So around a year ago I took a job at a fairly new organic farm in South London. I took a pay cut, making my salary just £2000 above London living wage. I did this because I wanted to find a way to make small scale farming work for me. I am, it turns out, an idealist, and I have managed to wilfully ignore all of the warning signs around small scale farming for over a decade. I now have 13 years’ experience as an organic grower, have set up a farm myself, and have reached the top of the pay scale for my sector, at £30,000. I make more money in four days of design work, than for a month on the farm. Myself and another grower were recruited through charitable funding to help expand the farm operation and support the founder who was juggling many plates, including a young family, and who was yet to pay herself a minimum wage salary, after three years.
At first, I went into overdrive. I designed spreadsheets, I agreed to set up a schools programme, and I started work at 7.30am to get more done and avoid the worst of the Blackwall Tunnel, and juggled corporate days, courses and growing, but after a few months of this, I got the tingling sensation of long COVID symptoms again and it was a much needed alarm bell; I wasn’t willing to be the one to suffer to make it work anymore, and the farm, though it was solvent and doing well compared to many other farms, was not the golden goose. A pitfall that many small farms fall into, given that they are too small to receive subsidy, is to widen out into ventures that make more money, like corporate volunteering or education. This on paper makes a lot of sense; subsidise the low earning aspects of the business with something that brings in more money.
But in reality, we’re talking about very small organisations with a handful of staff who just don’t have enough time to juggle all of these strands, because food growing requires all of your attention, all of the time.
Around this time, I had started to notice just how many of my peers were working like crazy, for not much over minimum wage, and that the small farms that were ‘working’ depended on these hard working people, who were willing to make themselves the collateral of the farm, but I didn’t want to do it anymore, I physically couldn’t. The magic had worn off and I could see what was really happening. Around this time, we also had the happy news that we were expecting a baby, so things were put even more into perspective. I didn’t want to give all my energy to the farm anymore, and be left exhausted each night and weekend, having to take on higher paid work on top of farm work to earn enough for the month. I knew that having a child would be exhausting enough, and I wanted to teach him to show himself love and respect, to be able to be calm and rest, all skills that I was still fine tuning.
So as I write this, I am still deciding what to do next. I am torn between the reality of the situation and the pull of the farm. I worry that I would lose a huge part of myself without farming, but I need it to work for me and my family. Over the last year, my eyes have been opened to the number of farmers, of all scales, who are not able to pay themselves a living wage, and who continue to do it for the love, honour and duty of being a farmer. This sadly includes some surprising examples of growers who have been an inspiration for many new entrant farmers, myself included.
Many of us are living in denial, and we’re not helping ourselves. The public have no idea what is happening, most have no idea how their food is grown, and would they really continue to expect such impossibly cheap food if they knew what it was doing to us?
It feels that something big and bad is around the corner. We’re already losing so many farmers from the industry, and no one seems to be noticing. We carry on blithely buying our tomatoes from thousands of miles away, from supermarket aisles decked with British flags, espousing that they ‘support British farmers’, and the supermarkets continue to get away with it.
We see the news of the farmers protesting, but how many people truly understand what is actually going on? Or understand the intricacies of ELMS vs Basic payments? We, as farmers, are the privileged ones who understand how food is grown, what it takes and what it costs, we are the experts. We understand the seasons and the deep rhythms of the whole thing, and how fine a balance it all is. We are also the ones who are seeing that it’s all falling apart around us. And maybe now it’s our job to shout about it a little more – to help others understand.
Because how can you begin to understand what we’re talking about when we summon this deep connection and duty, if you’ve never felt it yourself? Since the industrial revolution, we have, as a society, disconnected slowly but surely from the natural world, and now we are feeling the effects. I would argue that every major problem we are facing as a planet boils down to this fact; that most of us feel separate from ‘nature’ and not a part of it.
I don’t know what the answer is to this crisis, it’s surely as complex and complicated as the whole system itself, but I know this; we have to respect and encourage farmers, we have to allow them to do the magical things they do for us and enable them to live a decent life, and to do this we have to make an effort to understand their lives, and not just expect our food to turn up for us, ready wrapped in plastic, without asking any questions. As farmers and growers, we have to wake up and realise that we are not helping ourselves, and that many of us have internalised this lack of respect for food production that is rife in the system: we must learn to respect and value ourselves, and ask for more.
Food is medicine and well-grown food should be as precious to us as the NHS is. Farmers and growers can be a huge part of the solution to the climate crisis, with nature friendly farming holding the potential to create resilient local food systems and store carbon. Farmers can also be part of the solution to many of the health problems we face, by producing nutrient dense, healing food. We can also be a part of helping with the mental health epidemic, by fostering meaningful connections to the world around us from a young age, and creating meaningful work. I have been a part of all of these solutions for the last decade.
One interesting proposal to deal with the issue is Basic Income for Farmers. It’s not an answer to the whole systemic problem, but it does offer a lot of solutions that could help us to avoid hemorrhaging farmers from the industry, allowing them more time and space to farm in tune with nature and to bring new, younger growers from different backgrounds into the industry. And I believe that it would solve my conundrum of whether I can stay in the industry or not. In fact, it would most likely allow me to pursue my dream of setting up my own growing site and starting my own business.
I have, over 13 years, learned many ways not to do things, but I’ve also learned how to do things well. I want to be able to train up future growers who can grow exceptional food, but who can also feed themselves and pay their bills, and I want to be honest about the whole thing. But for now, it doesn’t quite feel like it’s possible, or even sensible to take that risk. I know I’m not alone in feeling this, but I’m still determined to do something about it.
Sarah is an organic grower and landscape designer based in London. She has worked in nature friendly food growing for the last 13 years. She grew up in a small village in the Midlands amongst many farms with green-fingered parents and grandparents. After moving to London for university, she had a short career in film before she found her way back to the outdoors. She retrained through the Growing Communities traineeship in urban food growing and has since worked at a variety of sites of different shapes and sizes. She has grown on rooftops in Holborn, in churchyards and parks in Hackney, in school gardens, and on larger scale organic and biodynamic farms. She currently works as Head of Growth at Sitopia Farm in Greenwich as well as working on freelance landscape design projects. She was one of the founding members at GROW, where she set up and ran a six acre farm and educational hub for 5 years. Sarah is obsessed with all things to do with plants and the outdoors and is driven by a desire to share this knowledge to help people feel a sense of purpose.
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