My father sold the white stuff; it was taken away in churns, then in a bulk tank, but we never had any idea where it went or any means of connecting recipients to our cows, the farm, or the people who did the milking. We were commodity producers and price takers as a result.
A brief spell as a management consultant in the 1980s disabused me of the naïve belief that “a good product will sell itself” or “if you work hard and do something well you will get a fair reward”. Those who control the market are the ones rewarded in proportion to the power they wield rather than the value they create.
Mostly, I just love growing veg and cooking it; as the notorious 1960s drug dealer Howard “Mr Nice” Marks, reputedly said, “I tried to smoke it all. There was just too much of it.” The need to sell was an unwelcome result of an excessive passion for my product – a passion that’s helped us tell the story direct to our customers and escape the squeeze of the supermarkets. Data and recommendation had yet to be packaged and monetised.
The arrival of the internet was an exciting addition that initially made things much easier but progressively, control, our data, and our rewards fell to a bunch of increasingly rich & unscrupulous Californian tech bros who have squeezed as hard as any supermarket to get their ever-growing slice. In the 90s, it cost less than £5 to recruit a customer; now it costs £50-100.
As a result, much of the benefit of our direct relationship with customers has been eroded by the power of these digital giants. Pulling leeks in the rain is made all the harder for knowing that our labour funds questionable politics and extravagances as big as their owners’ egos; a long way from Tim Berners-Lee’s idealistic dreams when he bequeathed his invention of the World Wide Web to us all.
We’d love to cut out the fat cats and you can help us. So, here is the deal: if you refer a friend (or better still a neighbour, which helps us reduce mileage) we will give you both £15 each, and donate another £2 to FareShare South West, who help get our surpluses to those without access to good food. Everyone wins (other than the bros) and we can get on with growing vegetables.
Image: Guy Singh-Watson in the earliest days of Riverford, loading up his trusty Citroën with local veg box deliveries.
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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