An organic farmer's blog

June 2010

There have been many changes at Stowey Rocks since March, most notably the arrival of our daughter May on 7 April. There are moments in our lives when events cut through the paraphernalia that clutters our existence and we are laid bare. May's birth was one such life affirming event. As Laurie Lee wrote "she is of course just an ordinary miracle but is also the late wonder of my life." We have changed our business name to Plowright Organic and we have a new logo and website, all, I think inspired by new life. I only hope the changes also inspire new customers, which would be very handy indeed.

The old season was slow to come to an end and we were harvesting the remnants of our 2009 vegetables (leeks, cabbage and purple sprouting) much later into April than has been usual. Correspondingly the new season was late to start and has been very dry in our neck of the woods. The dry weather was accompanied initially by very cold conditions and more recently by hot. We seem to have missed out the warm and wet bit. In my March blog I wrote about the fear that the end of one dry spell might see a spell of continuous rain. Well that particular period of rain in March turned out to be the last for a long time. In fact we have not had any significant rain since. So we swing from washout one year to drought the next and on balance I think I prefer the washout. We have a bore hole and can irrigate half an acre at a time but it is time consuming dragging pipes, drip tape and sprinklers around and once you have started, the equipment is always in the way. Leave your vacuum cleaner in the middle of your living room floor and you will see what I mean. This analogy works best if you leave the hoses and flex extended. I heard yesterday that it has been the driest half year in the last 80. Another record and it would be nice to think that 2010 weather will not set any other new records but I would not bet on it.

For the first time since I became a professional vegetable grower ten years ago we have been self sufficient in potatoes and onions; still eating the barn stored crops from 2009 when the earlies became ready in early June. There is something fundamentally satisfying about self sufficiency. It must be deep rooted in our psyche as it remains significant despite our lives of plenty. As we don’t have long term cold storage it must have been the cold winter which prolonged the life of our stored crops.

The new regime without my partner Remke has been quite tough. Odd really because I always accused her of not pulling her weight. She must have been doing something after all! We have attempted to plug the gap with temporary workers and we also had a second apprentice on trial but it has proved more difficult than I feared to replace her. I have had to work even longer hours (last week I did about 90 hours) to the detriment of everything else in my life. I keep saying to myself that soon it will be easier. I hope so.

The biggest challenge of all, however, is the market which appears to be continuing to shrink. Competition has always been intense in our area (there are at least three other vegbox schemes apart from ours) and recently it has increased from unlikely sources. The Soil Association, for one, have made preliminary steps to set up a community supported scheme in our area. Which is nice. I thought I might invite people in Bristol to set up their own organic farming charity (only joking). My friend John G, who I often refer to in these pages, is also poised to step into the fray. It is fairly obvious that there is no point in growing vegetables if you can’t sell them but to be a grower you do need to have a certain optimism and occasionally take a chance on growing a crop before the orders are confirmed. I know growers who won’t plant anything without a market and those who hope they can find markets later. So, my parsnip experience last year exposed my frivolous, optimistic nature! Optimism is not something I am often accused of, but I do have my moments. We have spent more time and money on marketing this year than in any of our previous years, and there has been a reasonable response particularly in the farm shop and I wonder whether folk are expressing a desire to choose exactly what vegetables they want rather than have a seasonal vegbox.

Just to finish I should let you know that Somerset county council is looking at their farm assets with a clear intention to try to sell them. Like so many councils Somerset has a large financial deficit but to sell their farm assets rather than looking imaginatively at ways to make them work harder for the benefit of council tax payers, is very short sighted. We would be facing eviction in 2016 but that is not long in farming terms. Certainly our plans for a new twin span polytunnel would have to be reconsidered. Some of our neighbours are potentially facing notices to quit next year. After early meetings a decision will be delayed pending the outcome of a review. I only hope that the review is genuine and not a smoke screen as so many are.

My campaign to discourage people from growing there own vegetables does not seem to be building momentum. The tide is flowing the other way. "I am growing my own veg" is now the most common reason for cancelling the vegbox or downsizing. I think it is code for 'I am now shopping in the supermarket'.
Richard Plowright, Plowright Organic, Somerset

March 2010

A period of high pressure with sunny days and cold nights has come to an end to be replaced by more typical wet and windy March weather and already I am wishing that I had made better use of the dry spell to 'work down ground' as they say in these parts. The "if only I had done that earlier" feeling is not uncommon in my experience of growing vegetables but a succession of bad summers have intensified  the experience because any period of wet weather is now accompanied by a sense that it will never be dry again.  This is of course just an anxious thought and there will be time enough to do all the preparation work before the taking of tea.

In fact we are getting along with the early season work quite well. The early spuds and carrots are in, the onions and leeks are sown and a range of early crops (spinach, leaf beets, beetroot, salad onions, lettuce, cabbage, kohl rabi and fennel) are progressing in our propagation tunnel.  At least we are not rebuilding snow crushed polytunnels like we were last year.  How did we do that along with everything else last year?

We are still harvesting and selling the tail end of the last year's crops (potatoes, onions, leeks).  We also have some lovely cabbage and the cauli have come good in spite of the attentions of the pigeons.  We even have some purple sprouting which turns out to be something of a rarity since vast swathes of the nation's purple was destroyed in the freezing temperatures this winter.  We have had to sell the parsnips into the non-organic market at a lower price than we would have liked but it has been good to shift a couple of tons rather than have to rotavate them back into the ground.

This year I have spread some green waste compost.  The requirement to put more back into the ground this year was increased because the winter hardiness of our green manure crops was severely tested and crops which looked thin to start with have deteriorated to the point of extinction.  The compost looks okay but it looks like it has some composting to do before it is the finished product.  I suspect it will lock up nitrogen for the first year. Furthermore, it is expensive at around £8 per ton including delivery. Time will tell whether we will see an improvement.

This last weekend I attended the AGM of the Organic Growers Alliance at the beautiful Penpont near Brecon in South Wales. The meeting was followed by great food and a social evening which to some extent is the raison d'etre but don't tell anyone.  As I have said before in my blogs I have met some great folk through vegetable growing.  I am continually surprised by the relationships I have made in a relatively short time.  The strong bonds are, I believe, born out of the profound shared experience of creating a livelihood by growing vegetables in good times and in bad.
Richard Plowright, Stowey Rocks farm, Somerset

February 2010

I rang Triodos, my bank, the other day to transfer some money and in the course of the transaction the woman asked me "what was the sort code there (i.e. the sort code for the receiving bank)”. I found myself saying “Don’t you mean what is the sort code, not was “. Surely, I explained to Remke it is the current sort code that is of interest not what it might have been in the past. Apparently this is a modern usage of the word ‘was’ and it confirms that I am officially a grumpy old man. I thought about ringing to apologise to the woman (Kate), but Remke convinced me that I just need to learn to accept myself.

Nevertheless such was my feeling of guilt that I found myself relating the story to Simon from the bank when he visited on Friday. Visits from the bank are always slightly scary events for me. Simon does a very good job of putting me at ease but I find it hard to escape the unequal nature of the relationship and I think I tend to talk too much. In fact the accounts looked OK to me and Simon also thought so although his keen eye spotted a few things which I had over-looked and which are only border-line OK. To be fair, I don’t study my accounts in great detail: if they look good from a distance that’s fine by me. I know that I have to grow my market and grow my own vegetables and in this quest my mind slips forward to July and I wonder what the weather will hold. Anyway, Kate, if you are reading this, I am sorry if I offended you. I love banking with Triodos!

One of the delights of retailing vegetables is the daily interaction with customers. Of course this relationship is not without its stresses. It’s not often that they correct my grammar but there can be something of a 'call centre’ mentality. This is usually demonstrated by new customers (yes, we still have a few) who, for example, want to be put through to ‘customer service’:
“That’s me” I’ll say.
“Oh, right. Well, can you tell your delivery man to knock and wait next time? He had gone before I get to the door”.
“I’ll have a word with him” I say, rather than acknowledging that I am also the delivery man and the account manager and the vegetable grower.

A lot has happened since my last blog. Mostly it has been very cold and snowy and I reckon the first week of January was our toughest harvesting week ever. The snow made even finding the vegetables difficult but we were lucky that the fall was only 5 inches or so. Any deeper and we would have been truly lost. Harvesting leeks was particularly difficult. The tractor was unable to pull our under-cutter through the frozen ground and so, not for the first time, we resorted to the faithful pick-axe to release leeks one at a time from the ground. That week we delivered frozen vegetables in our vegboxes for the first time in 9 years.

In the end, it was not the freezing temperatures which cost us dear because all of our roots, including celeriac, survived and our potatoes & squash survived in store. It was the snow which cost us. As the local pigeon population soared high in the sky surveying the fields for breakfast that morning, only our kale, purple sprouting and cauliflowers jutted from the white landscape. They descended silently, that grey feathered plague, to satisfy their hunger. They left not a single leaf of kale or purple and not one cauliflower of 5000 untouched. The inflateable ‘scary man’ had himself become buried in snow and ice, unwittingly deserting his post. I found him lying down on the job.

The parsnip situation is becoming critical. Thus far we have sold only a ton of the ten or fifteen tons in the field. It turns out that 2009 was a good parsnip year and many have a surplus. So I picked a bad year to grow them successfully. It feels worse than previous years when the crop failed earlier for a variety of reasons. Now I have something to sell and it could go to waste. It’s hard to fall at the final fence.

Oh well! It’s just a variation on the pigeon losses and, if you want to be a commercial vegetable grower, you have to learn to deal with adversity. You might be thinking "Stop feeling sorry for yourself, it’s the same in any job" but I would have to say “No, listen, you don’t understand”. It’s like you go to work and someone has burned your desk and destroyed that beautiful thing which was so close to completion. On top of that, you get told that you are not being paid.

It appears that more and more people are growing their own vegetables. Encouraged by celebrity chefs and gardeners and enticed by the dual rewards of health and cheaper, fresher vegetables, loads of folk are having a go at it. Whilst we can see the benefits of 'growing your own’, we can also see some major drawbacks of this trend in relation to our livelihoods. So, starting here, I want to launch the Stop Growing Your Own campaign. Look, don’t do it. It’s much harder than it looks from the comfort of your settee. You’ll only hurt your back. Rabbits & slugs will eat most of it and pigeons will eat what's left. It’s a waste of time! Take up jogging and support your local producer instead.

It was a beautiful day today. I shed a layer of thermals and my hat. Remke and I went to the wood to look at the first snowdrops and the daffodils poking through. The sun had some warmth in it and the ground looked dry enough to till. The new season has started. It’s going to be a strange one, with a baby arriving in March. I must admit I feel some trepidation and then I thought to myself: OK Plowright, let's do it.
Richard Plowright, Stowey Rocks farm, Somerset

November 2009

I have just put the phone down after a 40 minute conversation with my fellow vegetable grower John G. It’s Sunday morning and he is walking a field of some 50,000 Savoy cabbage, thinking that they are ready to cut and hoping he can sell them soon. We talk about vegetables and the conversation usually covers aspects of soils, growing, harvesting and marketing and because we can talk about vegetable growing forever our conversations rarely reach a conclusion. Usually one of us will acknowledge that we have talked enough for one day with something like “I’d better let you get on” and the conversation will be paused. This time, somewhere near the end however, we touched on the heart of the matter agreeing that there is, and always will be more to learn.

In my last blog I wrote of the flat vegetable sales as the ‘fly in the ointment’ of our bountiful crops and tempted fate by claiming that we had not noticed much change in the market for organic vegetables. I now think it is more of a moth than a fly and I sense that it is starting to thrash about a bit. At the moment this means we have to work much harder to sell our vegetables. Prices are reducing and costs seem to be increasing so we will have to tighten our belts and inevitably do more work for less return. So if you are reading this, please remind your self that ‘you are what you eat’. Don’t cut back on the quality of your food. The environmental and health benefits of organic food have not gone away because of the recession. They are more important than ever.

Eat organic!

Personally I would particularly like you to eat organic parsnips because having tried for several seasons to grow a moderate acreage I have finally succeeded just as the market for parsnips has declined. I had forgotten the second law of farming. The second law, which is really an extension of the first (If it can go wrong it will) states that just when you think everything is fine something unexpected will occur with catastrophic consequences. These laws might sound a bit grim to the uninitiated but they arise as a consequence of working with the natural world. This world is complex, unpredictable and for the most part, poorly understood.

My tractor returned with all of its 24 gears fully functional, just in time for me to broadcast green manure crops of mixed rye and vetch. In Somerset our warm, dry autumn finished abruptly about an hour after I had put my set of light drag harrows back in the shed. At about the same time, day became night and it has rained ever since.

A few weeks ago during breakfast Remke announced that she might be pregnant. “Oh” I said, trying to remain ‘low key,’ “who’s the father?” Well, now she is pregnant and it seems I am the father. “What about the vegetables” I enquired sensitively, “How will we manage without your free labour?” As the weeks have progressed Remke’s focus has naturally drifted and she is even taking time off work to attend pregnancy yoga. I ask you!

Joking apart 2010 will inevitably be different and we are in the process of planning for vegetable growing without the same input from Remke. ‘They’ say that to replace one family member you need two people, so somehow we will need to run a tighter ship.

Anyway I’d better go and cut some cauliflowers and grade some potatoes for Mondays’ orders.
Richard Plowright, Stowey Rocks farm, Somerset

September 2009

It is four months since I wrote my last organic farmer’s blog which used to inhabit the whyorganic website. Browsing the new Soil Association website yesterday I found the empty space where the new blog is supposed to be and decided that the time had come for me to fill it. Right?

”Haven’t you said everything that there is to be said?” Remke has just this second called dismissively from the kitchen, “you’ve been writing for over a year.”
“It’s a new audience and new things happen every day” I called back.
“No it’s not, it’s the same people. They are probably fed up of you!”
“My tractor is stuck in low range. That’s never happened before!”

To introduce myself; in brief I am Richard Plowright, I have been growing organic vegetables commercially for about nine years, and three years ago moved to Stowey Rocks farm near Over Stowey, on the Quantock hills in Somerset. Stowey Rocks is a county council farm and should be my home for the next 7 years or so. I live here with my partner Remke Cool, although she might challenge my use of the word ‘live’. So yes, we grow organic vegetables for a living on about 30 acres of the farm, and retail through our vegbox scheme and small farm shop, and wholesale to a small number of local customers in Somerset and occasionally beyond.

Growing organic vegetables has been a bit of a challenge during the very wet summers of 2007 and 2008 and drove us and many others to despair. For a while back in July this year, we had uncomfortable feelings of deja-vu as the sun shrank and the rain came down. A month ago I was lying awake in my bed at night, worrying whether we would ever be able to harvest our onions without resort to expensive drying. Now, with the onions safely dry in store, along with our potatoes and with our squash ripening in the late September sunshine, I can afford a cautious smile of satisfaction. Weather wise it has been a perfect month for us, we coughed and spluttered in the rains of July and early August but survived to have reasonably good vegetable crops. We have the best crop of parsnips we have ever grown.

If you've read my blog before you might not expect me to maintain this uncharacteristic level of optimism, and if there is a ‘fly in the ointment’ it is that we are told that sales of wholesale vegetables are down on a year ago. I have to say that we have not yet noticed a reduction but neither has there been any growth in our markets. Just to add some more balance, I should tell you that most of whatever profit we might make is about to disappear on a tractor repair.

You may not know this, but tractors have lots of gears. When mine is working it has 12 forward and 12 reverse gears. That is, a low, medium and high range, each with four gears. A separate lever determines whether I go forward or backward in each gear; complicated isn’t it? At the moment my tractor is stuck in the low range, giving me just four gears. Now you might think that four gears should be enough for any man, but in reality it is not. We are harvesting potatoes which I do in gear one in the low range, so that is fine. The problem is getting to the field, which is taking a considerable amount of time and is extremely frustrating. If you are a commuter and not a farmer, try driving to work in first gear when you are in a hurry and you will see what I mean.

Why don’t I get it fixed? Well I will but the tractor will have to be off the farm for about three days, according to Jeremy our tractor fixing man, and I want to finish the harvest whilst the weather's good. The repair will probably cost about £1000. Most tractor repairs seem to be around this amount, I don't know why. I don’t bother to ask for quotes anymore. “What do you reckon, about a thousand?” After the customary intake of breath through clenched teeth, accompanied by gentle head shaking the mechanic will reply “Yeah, won’t be far off.”
I thought so!
Richard Plowright, Stowey Rocks farm, Somerset