After delivering our first, very basic, veg boxes in the early 90s, it became clear that even our more localvore customers needed more variety, particularly during the UK’s ‘Hungry Gap’ in late spring (after winter crops have finished, but before the new crops are ready). Early attempts at importing were disastrous, so, with the last of my brash arrogance, I decided to do it myself. After studying climatic maps of Europe, I reckoned a farm in the Vendée region of France would be ready to harvest six weeks earlier than the UK, and plug the worst of the Hungry Gap.
In 2009, Didier Mouilleau sold us 300 acres of gently rolling land ten miles from the coast, with plenty of water for irrigation. Critically, he agreed to stay on, joining our team and helping me negotiate French bureaucracy, employment law, and the occasional tricky neighbour. It took an exhausting and turbulent ten years to adapt Devon crop varieties, farming techniques, and employment practices to the Vendée, but eventually, with investment and an emerging, skilled core team, the farm became profitable, and a key supplier to Riverford. With growing confidence and competence on the farm, my monthly visits became quarterly, and then sporadic. The farm became an experiment in lean management combined with trusting, benign neglect; a dangerous but underrated management style that I enjoy, and that allowed the team to blossom.
With declining energy, I started to look for a buyer – but none seemed fit to adopt the child I had spawned. They don’t do employee ownership in France, but eventually – perhaps after meeting unscrupulous potential buyers – my two senior staff Marco and Romain proposed to buy me out over a number of years, with support (which would never be available in the UK) from our French bank. With some sadness on my part, the deal was done this spring. Visiting yesterday to find Didier’s grandson Noé picking Padron peppers alongside a happy and mostly local team, Romain and his children moving into the house, his partner’s horses in the paddock, and Marco’s wife doing the books, I felt hugely proud of the journey we have walked together. Without the reliable support of Riverford, and ultimately you as a customer, we would have failed. But with the trust that has been built, Riverford Vendée will continue to fill our Hungry Gap long after I have hung up my hoe.
Our News from the Farm posts come from Riverford. They are the digital versions of the printed letters which go out to customers, every week via Riverford’s veg boxes. Guy Singh-Watson’s weekly newsletters connect people to the farm with refreshingly honest accounts of the trials and tribulations of producing organic food, and the occasional rant about farming, ethical and business issues he feels strongly about.
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