"Live life on the Veg"
Guy Singh Watson
Riverford
Who is Guy Singh Watson?
He’s been on our list for a long time as someone to feature on Resilience Food Stories, but he was always too busy and never lacking in attention. For years we kept track of his achievements via the internet and read his weekly newsletters with their refreshingly honest reports of the trials and tribulations of producing organic food and ethical and business issues.
His films on his own YouTube channel have given him a powerful platform; a video about pesticides that went viral on Facebook was watched by 5.6 million people and shared 91,000 times. We were impressed by his inspiring, passionate and unique way of communicating.
Who is this headstrong figure, much admired in the world of organic farming, who started out thirty years ago with a wheelbarrow, delivering organic vegetables to friends?
He has grown Riverford into a company that delivers 50,000 veg boxes a week and last year had a turnover of 100 million pounds. He has twice been BBC Farmer of the Year and in 2015 the Riverford veg boxes were named Ethical Product of the Decade in the Observer Ethical Awards.
Guy has always believed that organic food must not be elitist but available to everyone. He created Riverford to ensure a fair deal all round, for growers, employees, customers and the planet.
Guy has always regarded profit as a means rather than an end. He has turned away countless investors and has always sworn never to let Riverford grow to become an undertaking guided purely by profit or controlled by external investors.
He has kept his word. On 8 June 2018 he sold 74% of Riverford to his employees for about a quarter of its market value. In May 2023 he sold the remainder of the shares, making Riverford 100% employee owned.
So who is Guy Singh Watson?
That’s what we asked him during our visit to Baddaford Farm, where he lives with his wife Geetie and their children.
In the film we made with him it becomes clear where his passion for growing healthy and delicious food comes from.
Guy grew up on a mixed farm belonging to his parents, with cows, pigs, sheep, chickens and organic vegetables. His mother was a great cook and she prepared meals from whatever the farm produced. Those meals, which he shared with his brothers and sisters and the farmworkers at a long table in the farmhouse kitchen, shaped his love of farming and of good food, and for Guy they are the foundations on which Riverford is based.
So Riverford is all about good food and sharing it with as many people as possible, thereby forming a connection with them.
For Guy, sustainability and ethical business are inseparably linked. That was also his most important reason for wanting to make Riverford completely employee owned. Guy doesn’t merely preach sustainability and ethical business, he lives and acts accordingly, and we believe he gets fun out of it too.
"A lot of people are more disconnected from their food than they ever were."
Edward Scott
Assistant Harvest Manager Riverford
Who is Edward Scott?
Edward is one of the twelve hundred employees of Riverford, or co-owners as we should call them, which was not what Edward had in mind when he came here. Having fled London, tired of the city, he arrived twenty-three years ago to work for a summer picking tomatoes in the Riverford greenhouses, and after a hot few months he wondered what it would be like to spend the winter here.
The Riverford Field Kitchen
It must have been inspired by Guy’s parents’ kitchen, where his mother cooked such delicious meals with the produce his father had grown. We experience it for ourselves when we eat there in the evening. The concept is simple and the only choice the menu offers is between meat and no meat. There is just one shift per evening; dinner begins at seven and everyone eats the same meal together.
In the footsteps of Guy's mother
Co-owner and chef Suzanne Corsar
The Riverford Field Kitchen
Fair about farming
In 2023 Guy started the Get Fair About Farming campaign at Riverford, aiming to make it the leading voice in sustainable food and farming. He creates headlines not for headlines’ sake but to give a voice to the farming community.
Research commissioned by Riverford among vegetable and fruit growers in the UK shows that almost half (49%) of them fear they will have to close down within the next twelve months.
The main cause? The big six; supermarkets and the suppliers: their behaviour, their lack of commitment and the low prices they pay to farmers for their produce. In his first few years in the business, Guy saw for himself how callously the supermarkets treated him. That was the driving force behind his initiative to deliver his products direct to the consumer. He wanted other farmers to have the same advantages and terms of trade as he was able to give his suppliers.
That becomes possible if the five simple rules laid down in the Get Fair About Farming charter are obeyed. It demands of governments that they make sure the supermarkets adhere to the Grocieries Supply Code of Practice, which sets out how retailers should treat suppliers: fairly, without exception.The campaign has persuaded 112,000 people to sign the parliamentary petition. It has also gained support for the issue in the House of Lords and among a growing number of MPs, celebrities and captains of industry.
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