Our team is busy picking borlotti beans and harvesting squash. I watch them working their way up the field in the September sunshine with some envy while I type. I still proudly call myself a farmer, but at a creaky 66, there is more demand for my mouth than my muscle. Fortunately, I am happy to embrace an emerging role, challenging the norms of business at corporate conferences – the token maverick who built an ethical brand against the odds, brought in to demonstrate environmental or social credentials.
I am invited because – despite my outspoken views on corporate greenwash, inequality, and the dehumanising nature of shareholder capitalism – I have been commercially successful. My influence in these spaces comes from my cash which frustrates attempts to write me off as a naïve idealist. It outrages me that the rich should be given a louder voice and that no one has credibility in these spaces unless they can speak the reductionist language of profit; indeed they also risk everything if they value anything beyond making shareholders richer.
The richest 50 families in the UK now own more than the poorest 34 million combined. The richer this tiny minority gets, the more they’re able to influence the rules the rest of us live under. As shared and communal spaces shrink, the influence of concentrated wealth grows… but leaving the conference centre and stepping out onto the bustling streets of London, filled with buses and bicycles, I am struck by how cooperative, helpful, and honest most of us are, most of the time.
We are an inherently social species and so much better than the divisive politics of the day would have us believe. If we cannot buy influence, we must demonstrate and celebrate our better natures by sharing and building communities in our real lives at every opportunity. In retrospect, I realise that this is why Riverford became fully employee-owned in 2023 (one of the happiest moments of my life). I’ll keep protesting the nobility of our species to anyone who will listen, but if I ever sound as though I believe my words are worth more than those of a bean picker, it will be time for me to get back to the fields.
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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