The Riverford Blog

This is being written in the Vendée, where the courgettes are growing so quickly that we have to pick them every day and even then the field is littered with discarded marrows that got away from us. The specification (35-50mm diameter) is the source of much mirth; my French is not up to much and I struggle to follow the field banter, but it seems to centre around the women having a more realistic estimate of size. When the courgettes are finished it is onto the bunched carrots; here the jokes are all about “carrottes amoureuses” where two roots have followed the same fissure down through the soil and become entwined. They are the happiest workforce I have ever known. The only other work around here is pulling the guts out of ducks at the local abattoir so perhaps it is not surprising that they seem so happy to be out in the fields.

I travelled down via London and the V&A where, amongst statues, jewels and porcelain, we collected the Observer Best Ethical Online Retailer award to add to the Best Ethical Business and Best Ethical Restaurant we won last year; most gratifying. Thanks to those of you who voted for us.

The yurt-housed Travelling Field Kitchen has been on the road for a month now, first in Hampshire and more recently at Freightliners City Farm in London. The food has been fantastic and the atmosphere harmonious and joyful. Logistically it is as difficult as getting a crusade to Jerusalem, but the contented hubbub of conversation from 80 well-fed diners reminds me why we embarked on this crazy project in the first place. At the end of July we take our yurt to WOMAD (23^rd-25^th July). As well as running a pared-down version of the restaurant in the mornings, we are sponsoring the Taste the World stage where, after performing on the main stages, musicians from all over the world come to cook, tell stories and play the occasional song to small and intimate audiences before sharing food with them. If, like me, you are a bit crowd phobic, with an eclectic taste in music, I cannot recommend WOMAD highly enough; it is a very civilised experience.

Guy Watson from Riverford in Devon

Despite being widely used in desserts, rhubarb is technically a vegetable; it’s a member of the polygonaceae family and related to sorrel. It has suffered in recent years along with many of Britain’s traditional crops as supermarkets started selling out-of-season produce from around the world. Rhubarb is an excellent crop to grow in Britain, enjoying cool climates and suffering very few pests. At home, it will keep for a week in a plastic bag in the bottom of your fridge, and can still be used after this. It also packs a flavoursome punch at the table. As well as the obvious crumble, enjoy its vibrant colour by swirling stewed rhubarb through creamy yoghurt for a quick breakfast or dessert. Its sharpness works beautifully with meat and fish, too.

free vanilla

Order a bundle of rhubarb alongside your vegbox for delivery between 7-19th June and we’ll include a free pack of vanilla pods so you can try our Rhubarb and Vanilla Yoghurt Cake (recipe available on the website). The cake is really quick to make and is good served warm or cold.

no carrots in the boxes

The carrot bunches on our farm in France were badly beaten up by the weeds and then seriously assaulted by an atrocious spring. The end result is a much lower yield than we had hoped for, with each carrot creeping towards a harvestable size much later than expected. Our own season has also started a couple of weeks late; we had hoped that the first bunches would be ready for the boxes this week, but they just aren’t quite there yet. Rather than harvest when they are too small or jump to buying substandard southern European carrots, we have decided to leave carrots out of the boxes this week. We are confident that the bunches from France, combined with bunches from Graham and Chris, our growers in Norfolk, will satisfy the needs of the boxes next week. By the end of June, with a little rain and some more sunshine, the crop should be racing away, with ample to go round. You will then enjoy bunches in the boxes through to August, when we return to loose carrots for the autumn.

My father gave me a pig for my eighth birthday. He didn’t believe in pocket money; the idea was that the pig would be the first of many and an introduction to farming and business. My pig faithfully produced thirteen healthy piglets twice a year but I didn’t share my father’s passion for pig-keeping (for forty years, as so many farmers moved towards factory farming, his enthusiasm was trying to develop an ethically acceptable way of keeping them), so I moved onto sheep, then milking cows before finding my vocation with vegetables.

That cabbage epiphany came nearly twenty five years ago and to this day, though not a vegetarian, my enthusiasm remains for vegetables: in the field, in the kitchen and on the plate. Meanwhile my brother Ben used those pigs to teach himself charcuterie and set up a farm shop in our garage, which thirty years later has developed into three shops and the meat boxes that we offer alongside the vegetables. Our siblings Oliver and Louise developed the cows and the dairy and raise some of the bull calves for beef. Our soils at Wash Farm in Devon are not inherently very fertile and we would really struggle to grow veg without the manure from the cows. On top of that, at least a third of the farm is too steep, or the soil too thin, to be suitable for anything other than grazing livestock.

We have many vegetarian customers and get the occasional letter questioning our position on meat, so the point of these ramblings is to give an agricultural and historical perspective to Riverford and meat. As a nation we undoubtedly eat more meat than is good for our health or the environment. Indeed, if we are to have any chance of feeding our burgeoning population whilst retaining any balance and beauty on our planet we must radically reduce our collective appetite for meat, dairy and poultry. So our position is to encourage the meat eaters among us to eat less and better. This means feeding sheep and cows their natural diet (ie. grass and clover, not grain), hanging meat properly and always using the whole carcass to best effect. Think thrifty pies, hashes and making stock with every last scrap. If we are going to eat meat, we should be smarter about it.
Guy Watson

The ground is hard as iron, the cabbage leaves as stiff as boards under the snow and the ice on our reservoirs thick enough for a light skater. At least the mud is frozen, making it easy to get about the fields; more than can be said for the roads. I hope that your orders have arrived more or less as expected over the last three weeks and, if not, that we have at least communicated satisfactorily with you. With people struggling to get to work we have often not had enough people to man the phones, let alone pick the veg. It’s pretty when the sun is out and my boys are loving it, but what started as a valiant struggle is descending into a trying fiasco.

Most days have seen a mini thaw in the afternoon when we rush out and pick what we can for the next day while the leaves are pliable enough to handle without shattering. The daily grab is then stashed in the banana room (kept at a steady 14C) overnight to thaw out ready for packing the next day. I hope it is holding up when it gets to you; it is always a bit unpredictable how things will last after such enforced thawing.

As I write I have no idea what will be in next week’s boxes but I suspect there will be plenty of roots from our stores, limited greenery from the fields and a lot of last minute substitutions according to what we can get out of the ground on the day. The last un harvested carrots will certainly be ruined but most crops survive this sort of dry cold far better than when frost gets in to waterlogged plants so I am confident that our losses will be small when things finally thaw out.

Last week saw the annual Oxford farming conference grabbing the headlines as never before. Just two years ago, with commodity prices on the floor and share prices on the ceiling, our government could not see much importance for agriculture and this bunch of tweed clad, conservative voting dinosaurs; “rich countries like us will always be able to buy our food (normally more cheaply) on the open market”.

This year Hillary Benn (secretary of state for the environment) chose the conference to unveil a raft of initiatives addressing food security while the reducing environmental impact of agriculture and connecting us with how our food is produced. It all sounds great if a little too overtly vote-grabbing in places; the problem lies in his suggestion that these changes would be led by pressure from informed consumers. One might ask where that information will come from when even the experts in his own department are unsure about how to measure a carbon footprint or balance the importance to water footprints with carbon footprints or all the other factors (Professor Lang thinks we should measure 18) that might make one food better for the world than another.  

In 2008, for a period, we worked out the weekly carbon footprint of each veg box with Exeter University and printed it on the newsletter and website. We explained the tortuous calculations on a dedicated website (www.riverfordenvironment.co.uk) in the absurdly naive assumption that caring consumers would choose a lower carbon box and hence incentivise us to be a lower carbon business.

Two million vegetable boxes later I have yet to hear from a customer who fully understood what we were up to and changed their buying as a result. Many respected the effort we had made (and the exercise did teach us a lot and helped us reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and reduce our carbon foot print so it was not wasted) but at the end of the day the process is too ambiguous and complex to practically guide consumer choice. I am convinced that carbon labelling as the tool that will enable consumers to exert pressure for lower carbon products is a waste of time; it is just too complex and hence open to abuse. We need leadership from our government not continued and irresponsible abdication of responsibility to market forces. When will we grow out of our simplistic faith in market forces to resolve complex social and environement problems? The cynic in me suspects that big business’s enthusiasm for carbon labelling and carbon trading is just a delaying tactic to deflect attention from the need effective legislation. What value is consumer choice when even an experts cannot decide what a good choice is? Must we go to hell in a hand cart in the name of market forces or will our governments show some leadership.        

I hope you approve of the new form newsletter complete with more recipes and that you have received a binder for filing them in as the year progresses. If, due to the currently pervading chaos, you have not received a folder let us know and we will deliver on next week.

As the days turn colder, thoughts turn to warming stews and casseroles full of comforting root veg. One root you’re bound to find in your box over the coming weeks and months is parsnip. Parsnips are only grown as a significant commercial crop in the UK. The French are particularly dismissive of them and use ‘le panais’ (parsnip) as an insult. But we think they are missing out. Our first crop is often ready by September but we wait until the temperature drops to start harvesting; the cold weather causes some of the starch in the root to convert to sugar, giving fantastic flavour. read more

We’ve been nominated in the ‘Favourite to-your-door food supplier’ category of the Good Housekeeping Food Awards. Please vote for us here - you might even win a luxury weekend break while you’re at it! Voting closes 21^st December.

Giles Coren reviewed our Field Kitchen restaurant in the Times calling it “the lunch of my life” and giving it a score of 9/10. It was following an unexpected visit on a fraught day last month – Jane Baxter our head cook had an accident earlier in the day and was rushed to A&E. A credit to Jane and the rest of the team that they can pull it off on possibly their trickiest day of the year so far!   Read more

Our mission for the coming months is to make life with a box easier. There will be a few minor changes like less clods of mud but mostly we want to do this by cooking with you; both virtually and in person. We plan to team up with around 100 like-minded professional cooks who are inspired by our veg and on a par with our chef, Jane Baxter when it comes to cooking them. They will work part-time with us and our customers, inspiring, teaching, demonstrating, creating recipes. We plan to run initiatives including affordable cookery classes and demos in homes, workplaces and community venues; lunch clubs, supper clubs and cooking clubs and a recipe exchange for customers. We have already run some pilot events and now we really want to get going. read more

We are back to our Devon drizzle and there is a side of me that is almost pleased. Some of our crops certainly needed the rain and we can finally pack away all those pumps and sprinklers for the year, secure in the knowledge that nothing will be thirsty for the next seven months. After two dreadful summers when the corn struggled to ripen, we downgraded our yield predictions and planted more acres to make up the numbers. This year the crop has been late and looked dodgy in July but the September sun saved us, bringing our highest yields ever. With it all ripening at the same time… read more…