The Riverford Blog

At this time of year we should be seeing plenty of purple sprouting broccoli (psb), cauliflower and cabbages but growers have had some of their cabbage crop damaged by the cold and snow we had at the turn of the year and cabbages are small.   We’ve bought in cabbages from growers in the midlands and east of the country over the past month so customers have not felt the full force of our crop failures in the south.

The cauliflower season has been halved with the cold weather destroying some 60,000 heads. Once the weather warms up they will start growing again according to Peter Morton our agronomist.  It looks as though there will also be small picks of cauli and psb next week.

It is likely that cauliflower, psb and local cabbage will not start again until mid–late March with the spring greens starting in April as the frost has pushed them back one month as well.                

The weather on the continent has also been tricky with our Spanish, French, Moroccan and Italian growers having very heavy rain and a lot of cloud cover.  Supply of tomatoes and peppers has helped ease the shortfall in local veg but because of lower than usual light levels the flavour is not quite what we’ve had in the past.                 

We do have plenty of parsnips and a small volume of swede and  jerusalem artichokes.  We are planning to use them all in the boxes in March with potatoes and carrots.

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

Will a hard winter mean fewer pests this year? I’m not holding out much hope. It all depends whether you believe the path to redemption lies in ordered hygiene or dynamic balance. In favour of hygiene, the cold will have cleaned things up; a lot of aphids will have perished and leaves and roots harbouring disease will have been killed, thus breaking the disease-carrying bridge between seasons.

Unfortunately my experience of cold winters past is that any benefit will be short lived. Taking an ecological “balance” perspective, this is easily explained. Most pests that make a meal of our crops are also a meal for someone else: aphids are eaten by ladybirds, lacewing and hover fly larvae and parasitized by certain wasps, slugs are eaten by carabid beetles and toads and predated by nematodes. Red spider mites are controlled by the predatory mite phytoseiulus. Unfortunately these farmer friendly “beneficial” organisms will have also suffered in the cold; in fact they tend to be more affected by the cold than the pests (not only do many die, the survivors get dopey and less hungry).

Some pests always survive and, after a cold winter, there are fewer predators to keep them in check. As pests tend to get going sooner and breed faster, a cold winter might be expected to result in a higher population peak before the predators catch up. Hence cold winters may help the hygiene approach to pest management (as propounded by pesticide salesmen) but are not much help to those looking for balance.

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.

At Riverford we develop long term relationships with growers who share our values. It generally takes years to build up the trust and understanding that encourages farmers to commit to growing for the box scheme and to concentrate on flavour rather than yield. When it all works (and I think it usually does) this close relationship enables us to deliver that flavour plus the social and environmental ethics in your box each week without a price premium. I went to school with several of our co-op members in Devon and after 12 years things run incredibly smoothly. But the more distant the grower, the more challenging building a relationship of trust becomes.

Earlier this year Armando from Brazil visited and shared a cup of his coffee while he told me the story behind the co-operative of 23 Demeter certified biodynamic family farms in North East Brazil where the beans were grown. Twenty years ago 65% of Brazilian coffee was grown by small family farms. Today the figure is 25% with the remaining 75% being grown by large farms and corporations on large, mechanised and chemically intensive farms. The displaced farmers and their families are mostly condemned to the grinding poverty of migrant seasonal workers or have moved to the urban slums of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The resulting coffee is traded as an anonymous international commodity. Under our agreement with Armando, the growers of our new Floresta organic coffee are paid at least 40% more than the Fairtrade price for the green (fresh) beans plus an extra 40% of the profits on the sale of the roasted coffee.

The best thing of all is the coffee itself. 100% Arabica, single estate, slow roasted and because it is delivered without any middlemen, competitively priced at £3.95 for 250g.

I have since enjoyed many cups with Armando, who has become a trusted friend, and I am really happy to be selling it. I would have liked to have visited the co-op myself, but in the meantime am reassured by Andrew Purvis, a friend who has written an article about it for the Observer Food Monthly ”wake up and smell the biodynamic coffee”.

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