Riverford Founder: 13 New Brand Building Laws + “£30 million will NEVER make you happier than £3 million”

0:00You know anyone who thinks that 30 million pounds is going to make them any happier than 3 million pounds is a complete idiot The standard of human behaviour from a supermarket buyer is just hideous. Now, Sonny, when we whistle, you jump. The only question is how high. That was it. I told him to f*** off. And the interesting thing is that I actually met this bloke about five years later. He was working for another car and he was a really nice bloke. It's just accepting you don't have to be perfect to love yourself. There were lots of things I wasn't good at, lots of people that I'd mistreated.

0:34but that doesn't mean that you have to loathe yourself for the rest of your life who are the people you'd wronged oh um guy thank you so much for doing this um especially in your wonderful abode i really appreciate it um love everything you've built uh with riverford i think i've read a lot of your newsletters i've consumed a lot of your uh videos over the last kind of week or so And I think what we'll really explore today is this kind of new way of doing business with the sort of the collective, not having to kind of follow the status quo and do what every other brand is kind of blindly maybe following, which is that big exit.

1:18I think you are paving a new way of doing business. I'm excited to explore that with you today. But what I'd love to start with is the, there was one article I read, which was brilliant, called Leaders and Their Demons. where you talk about watching succession i don't even remember writing that i don't actually let's start let's start with that and and it's interesting as you talk about in in the early days having you know my my demonic drive to overcome or destroy any barrier certainly helped riverford up to a point but since we became employee owned i have come to appreciate that dispersed power in consultation lead to better safer less impulsive decisions and they don't have to come at the price of bravery and responsiveness and then you go into how um you know when you're not in this sort of neoliberalist or neoliberalism way of working you can actually make make better decisions and that's what we're gonna we're gonna pull out and tease out today but i'd love to know what were those demons in the early days that actually drove you forward and then when you move to an employee-owned business how did those demons change yeah I've after quite a lot of introspection and a fair amount of therapy I have reached the conclusion that my early adult life and my adolescence probably I was driven by a need to prove myself and and probably mainly to prove myself to my father and that was the made so that's probably mainly you know we're talking ego really was driving me forward and leading me to work those ridiculous hours and sacrifice everything to be successful and sometimes to push others aside in a way which looking back I have some regrets and I know I was perceived as being you know probably quite an aggressive um yeah probably and then undecently commercially successful in a sector which was characterized by people who were driven by their beliefs I'm talking about being an organic grower here you know people with an obsession with the soil and trying to improve the world by improving soils and so on so yeah those were that that's what drove me forward and and um and I suppose through my 40s and 50s I I started to question that and and and realize that as a leader you know you have responsibilities and and one of those responsibilities is actually to understand what it is that genuinely drives your behavior and your decisions and um and and to come to terms with that so i i a lot of the entrepreneurs that i meet are deeply insecure people um and and it's that insecure and and need for approval which drives them forward now you know they often money becomes a proxy for approval even a proxy for love I think you know which we all need and and it's a very unsatisfactory proxy I think if people just had the courage to actually sit down and examine what was driving their decisions and really come to terms with that I think they would they would make better decisions they'd be less avaricious and we'd live in a kinder more sustainable world so i do think that that un slightly unhinged drive of um entrepreneurs which you know we hold in such high esteem in the uk and and it it is can deliver wonderful things but it can come at quite a high cost do you think we could get the amazing businesses and and that insatiable drive if founders weren't insecure it certainly seems to be the ones that are insecure that are most highly driven so um and indeed i remember my father who did finally you know very near the end pulled me towards him in bed and said son you've done well and um you know i just burst into tears because that's all I'd wanted him to say all my life.

5:34But I don't know whether it was because I finally felt I'd got his approval that I could then question what I was doing more broadly. But it leads to some pretty unhinged behaviours that I think can be. I think certainly we can have better models for business than that. And it's all been captured by, I would say, by neoliberalism, where money is the proxy for everything. Money is the only thing that matters. I don't know whether Margaret Thatcher actually did say it, but, you know, society doesn't exist. You know, that we're all just individuals and that we all struggle for, strive for our individual, you know, largely commercial benefit.

6:19You know, I think is, yeah. Sorry. No, I'm not going to. I'll just put it there and you won't hear it. Yeah, sorry about that. That's okay. So in your 40s, when you began to sort of analyse and pick apart those... I probably should, sorry to interrupt you, Dan, I probably should say I did, in my late 40s, have a sort of minor breakdown. It was very brief. I mean, I think I've always had depressive tendencies all my life. But I did, around my marriage, unwound, and I did find myself on my farm in France alone. um living in my bus which I used to take down there which was very lovely but I and everything just fell apart and for about a week I just couldn't do anything I couldn't make any decision I was just you know had a big wobbly bottom lip and didn't know whether I was coming or going it all just and that that was a bit of an epiphany for me and I did I got on my bicycle and cycled about 100 miles around the coastline I got back late at night and I'd I'd gone through it and I'd felt I'd found another me and and me that I was more sort of comfortable with and I think probably a much gentler kinder more considerate me and and I sort of feel I had to go through that and and I think my approach to things have changed since then and what's so you're on this bicycle going around France what are the sort of thoughts going through your head as you actually as your bike spinning what's spinning in your brain do you mean oh I think it was just trying to get the thoughts out of my head actually was that what needed to happen and and I think through just complete physical exhaustion uh I managed to sort of empty my head and and I did I woke up the next day a different person I mean some people do ayahuasca yeah you're going to cycle around fucking france and what what had changed in the guy and what was the yeah how what were some of the mental models that you'd hold on to before which was this insatiable drive to get your dad's approval you have this sort of rock bottom and you need to go to the bottom to go up you know i have depressive episodes i've run in the fucking summer right to go and see a therapist like i think if you've got a naturally creative brain it's just you can get into this um i think creativity is overthinking used positively and uh overthinking um used negatively is anxiety so you need they're two sides of the same coin you know that's why all these interesting rock stars and stuff they're the most creative people in the world when they're doing something good with it it's they're creating the best music in the world when they're not they're fucked up and they're like you know that's why we got the 27 club you know all those amy weinhaus jimmy hendrix i think it's a byproduct of creativity um so yeah what were the mental models that kind of changed post this cycling around france like a madman yeah it was it was it was um it's going to be like a therapy session yeah it's right we're gonna get onto animals and vegetables that's fine i wasn't it was straight away it was it was around um it was around accepting that you don't have to be perfect you can be it's okay to you know mess up it's it's okay to get things wrong it's it's it's okay to um yeah I think I beat myself up so much about the stuff that I got wrong and and the people that I wronged and and you know it's okay okay you want to change those behaviors so you don't wrong people as much or again but it it um it's just accepting you don't have to be perfect to love yourself and and um so I think it is about learning a bit of self-love and and and acceptance and and that for my mind that came out of accepting that I wasn't perfect there were lots of things I weren't good I wasn't good at there lots of people that I'd mistreated and that does but that doesn't mean that you have to loathe yourself for the rest of your life you You know, you can address those things.

10:28You can say sorry. You know, you can go round and apologise or just, or even not apologise, but just try and behave better to the, you know, people. Who are the people you'd wronged? Oh, you know, siblings to some extent, probably most notably my children. You know, I have had conversations, I think, with all of them around, And, you know, I was pretty absent, particularly when my first two children were born. I was just obsessed with growing vegetables. And, yeah, so.

11:05And then, you know, I do try now when I get things wrong. Often I know when I've overstepped the mark. As a matter of fact, it happened last night. What happened last night? Last night, one of my neighbors, who I quite like, my wife drove down, a tree had come down. one of my trees that had been cut up and he was there loading it into the back of his transit van so you know I just saw this is not the first time this has happened I just saw red and I went around to the house and I behaved really badly I just completely lost my rag in front of you know his children whatever it was completely out of order as it turned out the guy who had cut up the tree said he could help himself to it so I don't know why he said that but that's what he said so he hadn't done anything do you know what I mean I'd just complete and and in a previous life that would have just stayed with me and I would have been too proud to apologize but I went back and apologized and as a result I could get to sleep that night you know it's really apologizing when you get things it's really not that hard I think a lot of people especially blokes probably find it hard but it's really not and it's not a sign of weakness at all it's a sign of strength you know and and actually you know you have to be genuine about it I was very remorseful I behaved badly and you know I wanted to apologize and I do the same in board meetings I do sometimes lose my rag I'll get quite impatient with the whole process of board meetings and so on and I think sometimes I I stir it up just to stop myself falling asleep sometimes and sometimes it's like board meetings board as in b-a-o-a-r-d that's fucking boring as hell yeah like so you know so when I get it wrong apologizing is quite a powerful thing and as a matter of fact um it was my coach advised me that I should do this that to be her words were to be gratuitously offensive less often than when I am to apologize apologize publicly and quickly and those were extraordinary you know they were very powerful there was a very powerful lesson actually I only needed to be told it once and I found it very easy to change I'm not sure that other people would find it that and it changed the whole atmosphere of the rooms at the time we had a lot of quite macho you know What year was this?

13:13This was about six years ago. Right. So it was, I think I was well on my journey by then. So I just needed it to be pointed out that I was being a twat and I recognized it and it's quite easy to change. But that did change the whole, and it was noted actually around the business that instead of these blokes who went into the glass lined room and, you know, threw their weight around, it has become a much more, it was certainly, I think it was when we were on the journey to employee ownership. it has become a much more consultative and uh you know inclusive and less macho there are a lot more women in the room which probably helps as well and it has changed you know i think we have a very functional board now actually that i'm very proud of if you're a challenger brand that's absolutely killing it in d2c but you're struggling to crack retail then you've got to listen to this maybe you've got an ocado listing maybe you've got a whole foods listing maybe you're absolutely killing it in selfridges maybe absolutely killing it in your farm shop and your indies but my friends making the leap crossing el chasum crossing el rubicon to grocery retail is not easy it's the champions league of fmcg it's super hard it means playing at a higher level and that's where some new amazing brands sadly stumble look retailers want stories backed by data not dreams and a pretty pitch deck and let's be real supermarkets are not just going to magically make a space for you and your little brand.

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Their team are amazing and they actually get the challenger mindset northstar are your shortcut to smarter decisions stronger pitches and investor confidence all built specifically for challenger brands like yours you don't need a massive sales team you need northstar link in the show notes click that link and you'll be able to book a free demo with northstar highly highly recommend that and thank me later it's such a paradox isn't it because on the one hand to get the thing going you need that sort of masochistic demonic drive to push through obstacles and you need the insecurity and the ego because you know if you don't have that i think obstacles will come and that's where people that ability to lean into hard but at some point and as you say you went through it your 40s cycling around france as you need to that shit won't get you may get you from a to b it's not going to get you from b to c to the future is what we're talking about and what i wanted to get to which you've beautifully kind of detailed is how he came to sort of employee-owned collective very kind way of doing business where everyone is treated well and everyone has has ownership i'd love to know um kind of to get to that first i'd love to sort of discuss um neoliberalism sort of defining that from what i my reading on it is it's margaret thatcher and it's like the 80s people doing smashing coke making a fuckload of money in new york and that sort of created this insatiable drive for more and greed we kind of before that we had sort of the summer of love the beatles and all that shit i don't understand i'd love to sort of get kind of a quick history on how we got to this neoliberalist point of view and i think where we are now is kind of an extension of that and then that will set us up nicely for your new way of doing business which is this sort of employee collective owned kinder way of doing business yeah um well i'm not a social historian or whatever but yeah neoliberalism largely i think came about with reagan and thatcher didn't it and is it is it morgan friedland the economist they all and it was you know largely based on that you know greed is good that all we need to do is you know if it allow individuals to get rich and you know i think there was a belief and that we have to deregulate in order to do that give them the freedom you know to pursue their own economic interests and out of that wealth will be created and I think it probably did create a certain amount of wealth and maybe there was some regulation that needed to be dealt with but I mean I just think it went way way too far and and the idea that you know everything can be measured in money and in the particular sort of individual wealth and that all we care for is striving for our individual wealth is is just a lie i mean you just have to look around you and see how most people behave every day you know teachers when they're doing a good class are not thinking about you know whether they're going to um how much value added they're going to add to that pupil but this is how they talk you know and and how that will be measured and how that they will then be then transferred into their salary and their promotion this is the idea that we had you know in health care in in our you know in our penal system you know in education I mean it's just ridiculous when people go to work because they just want to do a good job you know they go into those professions you know a few people go into teaching because they like long holidays but I mean most people because they want to do a good job often they were inspired by a teacher at school and so on and so to treat them in that you know homus economicus or whatever you know as if we are just units of production and consumption is is I find it really really it's untrue and I find it really really offensive I find it demeaning to me as a human being and to the people that I share this planet with and you know I was in London last week and there's often many things I horrified about London and actually we went ate in some fancy restaurants and um you know spoke at a conference and so on and then but what I realized actually leaving London what I enjoyed about London was actually public transport and and and shared spaces you know I always loved going to the National Portrait Gallery and the things the things that actually weren't a commercial transaction were the things that I really valued and um yet we we sort of attribute no value to that and through my adult lifetime and and I've I've ended up actually I've been through anger I'm feeling slightly like I want to withdraw from the world now because I just do not understand I don't understand this behavior I don't understand why we're organizing ourselves in a way which is so obviously a lie and I'm I'm pretty upset about it actually the richer those small number of people get because everything's loaded to enable people like me to get even richer um the richer they get the more influence they have the more they could influence they can buy you know through lobbying you know affecting the you know our governance through advertising affecting the way that we consume things and whatever so these these small minority of of very wealthy often fairly demented sometimes sociopathic individuals are the ones are shaping our society and they are not the norm and and i i find that i'm i'm i've lived my life in this way i'm hoeing my way up and down rows of lettuces thinking about how the world could be a better place and i'm sorry we just keep on moving in in um in the wrong direction it's almost like the macro meta narrative is this neoliberalism more is more greed is greed it's almost again what we were saying before we hit before we hit record it's like people aren't questioning that meta narrative you know that's why people just in people listening to this podcast is like yeah i'll exit the business because that's the right thing to do that's what people have told me to do and that's when i'll make shit loads of money and that will give me money equals love i love that point but actually you think about it this macro meta narrative but on the micro which is sort of the day-to-day is people are actually much kinder than what the world tells us you know i think people pine for festivals i know this is a bit of an oxymoron but like a glass and brie is a money-making machine but like the whole idea of being at glasgow and why people call it this almost utopia for a few days is because a lot of those constructs of greed and grind are completely obviously a lot of people off their heads as well but like that probably helps with the situation but but but but i think there is i think it's a really interesting thing of like this this meta narrative of greed is good more is more uh wall street uh which which is kind of spun into today and i think you're right it's it's the tube is if you actually think about it is such a collective way of of being um there's a really interesting guy called jonathan hyatt hey it i think who wrote a book um what was the book he wrote uh he wrote the righteous mind 2012 and he says humans are 90 chimp and 10 b and i think it's really interesting because you know bees are collective and chimps are kind of self-sufficient uh or like kind of the ego and i think it's an interesting place to play this is what i asked some fucking random questions but you what what what have being in nature with um bees and ants i suppose they're the collective animals what has that taught you about human nature and then on the other side i'd say what what animal best represents greed and neoliberalism and what's that taught you um well being in nature certainly has tempered my um you know individualistic selfish it's big inclinations i think it's tempered them because it teaches you humility i mean especially if you're an organic farmer stuff does go wrong and you can't always you know reach for a chemical container and find the solution stuff goes wrong and um sometimes it's not as bad as you thought it was going to be and and sometimes it it self corrects itself and and and sometimes it is really awful but you don't die you know things carry on and that so I suppose there's a sort of humility that came out of that that I think that I think nature can be a good teacher and and and I probably it's getting a bit intellectual I think but you know there is nature there are lots of lessons you can learn like you know its strength lies in its diversity I think we could learn a lot from that what do you mean by strength lies and its diversity it's an ecological principle that the more species you have in a in a habitat the more stable it will be and so if things change a little bit like climate change it will be able to respond better because one of those species will find itself in in the is that why cities are so taking that ecological principle is that why cities are so strong because they're so diverse like somewhere like new york or is that me being a bit oh possibly i don't know i'm just thinking out loud possibly i mean you see i mean you sit around a boardroom table i mean strength comes from diversity having like if everyone's the same around that table you might make decisions very quickly but you're going to make some pretty bad ones so you need you need anyway so I think diversity and strength from diversity and stability coming out of diversity is is uh you know a pretty good um principle and I suppose sort of you learn yeah human I meant said humility but also sort of patience you know you get you get a sort of time of the seasons and so on and that you can't do everything instantly you know you have to be learning from observation i mean as an organic farmer you have to really immerse yourself in nature and you know understand the the ecosystem that is your farm in order to manage it and and i don't think you're going to be a very successful farmer if you're not you know spending a fair amount of time just walking around observing things uh and obviously in particular your crops and your livestock and how well they're doing and then relating that back to decisions that you may have taken and observations that you're making around around that so that that's you know the idea that you can just sort of superimpose something in the place of nature which i would say is largely how modern agriculture works you know you're superimposing normally a monoculture zero diversity so when you say superimposing a monoculture so you're taking a field well and you take lowland britain you take an oak forest you clear it you burn it you plow it and you know eventually you sow a field of wheat yeah and you just got one where you might have had hundreds of species you just have one species and that is a very unstable system so aphids will arrive you know they'll do quite well on that species there'll be nothing there to eat them and you'll have an outbreak of aphids so then you have to reach for the insecticide you know weeds will arrive and they'll thrive in that and then you have to reach for the herbicide so you end up using all these inputs to maintain what is intrinsically a very unstable system whereas if you'd grown a crop that was actually a mixture of crops as is sort of one of the principles organic farming and in particular permaculture you'll have a more stable system or in our case you know we have quite small fields surrounded by really abundant hedges and which harbor a lot of the the predators which then go in the aphids in the field so we i haven't used an insecticide on the farm for 25 years um and but that if i had much bigger fields and a much less stable system then then i would be yeah i'd find farming much more difficult what other principles have being in nature taught you about business i think that's such an interesting crux to play with well i do that i'll come back to humility i do think not thinking that you can control everything i sit around the boardroom table actually and listen to people talk as if we can control the behavior of you know our customers or what's going on in the bigger world you know we're just a cork being buffeted along the stream you know or you can you know yes you can to some extent you know you can put out a few messages and try and influence the agenda what people are talking about but mostly you just have to you know respond to what's going on uh and you know i think i am not a fan of of spending ages coming up with a business plan we do do it I mean I have to understand that other people within the business need that structure that I'm a pretty anarchic person and I think I struggle with structure and so my way is to is very sort of freewheeling responsive you know come up with lots of ideas implement one every day sort of thing whereas you know the the plan that most businesses you know will be that they'll They'll have a three, five, maybe a 10-year plan and lay out what they're going to achieve and then put in a strategy to deliver that, which definitely has its advantages.

28:20I definitely think you should know where you're heading and have a rough idea where you're getting there. But I would generally favor being more flexible. Yeah, it's like having a compass versus having a map. I think everyone wants a map, but actually we just had a compass. I think the humility point is very interesting. is like as you say you you could be walking along with the best map in the world or mess best business plan suddenly it fucking starts snowing or there's a thunderstorm you realize that you know the map is not the terrain is one of my favorite quotes you know it's not you could have the business plan but it doesn't tell you what's going to be happening this and the nuance and the speed bumps along the way yeah and i think the being in the nature really kind of like i mean it's beautiful doing this podcast here because we're literally kind of enveloped in nature the um what what sort of and what sort of the learnings you've taken from moving to this collective is it collectivist business or collective are you talking because we do riverford is employee owned employee owned yeah and then baddaford where we are now we have a group of businesses which we do call the baddaford collective right i'm talking about riverford so you've moved it to because you gave a lot of away most of your wealth to the employees i sold the first 74 % of the shares in Riverford to the then employees, now co-owners, for about a quarter of what the accountants told us it was worth.

29:39And many people thought that was an odd thing to do. I mean, some people thought it was a very generous thing to do. I think most people thought it was a bit strange. And a few people were outright offended by it. And why did you do it? I did it. A number of reasons. I wanted to leave the business in safe hands where I'd witnessed a lot of other businesses that had been sold to venture capitalists and had just been destroyed. They were set up by founders who had a genuine enthusiasm for what they did. and I'm not saying they wanted to make a return on their capital for sure but they had an enthusiasm for whatever it was you know making crisp vodka the best chocolate you know the best yogurt and and that was what really drove them and they just had to run a business in order to be able to do that and that was certainly how Riverford was set up I did have this need to prove myself but as it went on I just got obsessed by growing vegetables and I just wanted to do it well and I always quote the um famous drug dealer Mr Nice is that the Welsh the Welsh guy yeah yeah yeah yeah he said I never wanted to be a drug dealer I just couldn't smoke it all myself yeah so if I could have eaten all the vegetables myself maybe that would have made me happy and and uh and I'm losing myself a little bit Dan you're gonna have to remind me what the question was no it was um um we were talking about like um that's a good that's a good point i've sort of forgotten the thread we were on so we were talking about how um why you were doing the collective uh business why you gave it to an employees and you were basically saying how you still you'd saw these brands the founders you know the the weed mr nye saying i've had to smoke it i had to give it away because i couldn't smoke it all myself and it's that i agree it's this it's kind of as we were saying you need that insecurity and that to that drive to get to get the thing going but then you also need this and i think most founders start with a genuine desire to create something good and they're obsessed with that and the business is sort of the byproduct of doing that i would agree with that and then to and then you were saying then the venture capitalist comes in sort of like a hungry lion and fucking rips it up and chews it up and spits it out and then you're kind of left with your business is sort of dissolved into some sort of abyss you gave it to an employee and we're sort of exploring that what why what was how did that keep it alive okay one to protect the values of the business that it was founded on and i would i feel believe very strongly that the people most likely to do that are the people that are actually doing the work who are close to the action they're the people who feel you know the passion i suppose so so um and and that has been proven that in the last six years i feel absolutely confident that that was the right decision and one bit of it was I felt I talked quite a lot about um that I you know that my beliefs and uh well I mean one is that really I I sat down and I thought what do I want to do with my rest of my life and I and I just couldn't see how three million pounds wouldn't be enough you know uh you know anyone who thinks that 30 million pounds is going to make them any happier than three million pounds is a complete idiot why just look at the evidence you know who's happy all you get that sort of money all you're doing is excluding yourself from other people really you're isolating yourself with a bunch of um you know often quite unpleasant people i'm sorry i don't like rich people very much the ones i meet i you know i feel very little sort of empathy with them i don't want to spend my life with them so that That's how you send up locking yourself in a room with a bunch of twats.

33:33And that's not how I want to live my life. I want to live, you know, I want to shit. So you gave away 22 million to the team. How did it work? I mean, you might say I sold it for about 15 million less than it was valued. Right. However, you know, the honest truth of that is that I hung on to 26%. And I always said, I'm going to sell this 26 % at market value. And when the time came after five years, I did sell it market value. and it was an extraordinary amount of money yeah and and and and and i have um and you've kept that money i've kept that money and i've given some away you know i spend quite a lot of work time working for a lot of charities there's one in particular and all my all the work that i do speaking fees publishing and so on all the money goes to them but still you know when you've got that amount of money it just keeps on growing i mean you you know that's what sort of annoying people who say that these people are the wealth creators you know i'm not a wealth creator the people who are creating the wealth are the people who are doing the money it's right no worries you know they're doing the money you know sorry the people who are creating the world the people doing the work yeah they're the wealth creators i may be a risk taker i've invested in a couple of things businesses that i like and i'd like to see to grow up given some away to community things some to charity and i you know i plan to die you know having given it all away that's yeah I actually campaign for people like me to be taxed better through an organization called Patriotic Millionaires.

35:00So, I mean, I do that. I do feel I do feel it very strongly. And the idea that I am irrational in doing this and some people even believe slightly immoral because they have elevated neoliberalism and greed to the level of a religion. I really think it's got to be that extreme in the US and the UK. And they are offended by my actions. I just think you know they're just so deluded I'm not the idiot you know they are if they think that money is going to make them any happier or it's going to make their children love them anymore you know or it's going to make their children's lives any better yeah there's no doubt that a certain amount of money and in the world we live in having access to secure a secure place to live and not paying a bloody landlord half your income is a pretty important part and I am helping my children to do that but other than that they're on their own and they don't actually they've actually said they don't want to be separated from the people they grew up with by having large amounts of wealth i mean two of them have actually said that it's what when you said there it's but neoliberalism and money and greed have become a religion especially in the states it's and i think at the beginning you said you know people go to religion for a form of of love and self acceptance and now i think the thing you said at the beginning guy about you know money's a form of love for some people it gives you that self-validation and i think it's interesting in terms of it doesn't really it doesn't know it's it's fake very shallow it's like putting a plaster on cancer it's not going to solve it's not going to solve the problem when you i don't understand how the mechanics work so the employees made a load of money or like are they they are they incentives to stay on because i don't because in my head i'm like right i've worked at riverford guys give me x amount of cash like what's in what's the incentive because again another thing in nature i've been reading a lot about like charlie munger's book is human nature is driven by incentives so what are the incentives to keep people on and keep doing good do you mean if they made a load of cashish like trying to get it um well i don't actually agree that or depends what you call incentives if you draw that broadly enough it might be i don't mean i don't mean neoliberalism incentives it could be incentives in terms of like caring is an incentive yeah that if you include intrinsic yeah motivations within that then i would i would subscribe to that yeah um so the model that we followed there are two models of employer well to start with With employee ownership, I would say the key part of it is that the co-owners have a meaningful say in the decisions and the direction that the business take and that they have a share in the profits.

37:26That, I would say, were the main talents of employee ownerships. And there are two forms of employee ownership. We're called direct share ownership, where the staff co-owners actually own the shares directly, individually, and when they leave, they can sell them. or there's indirect co-ownership and John Lewis would be the most famous example of that in the UK where the shares are held in trust for the benefit of the current workers there and that's the model that Riverford went down the form of direct ownership it probably gives you a slightly more entrepreneurial culture within the business and we went around and visited a lot of co-owned businesses and talk to them however I suppose it fundamentally depends on what you believe in I mean I'm I am attracted to an entrepreneurial innovative culture that's where I feel comfortable however I also believe that we're not motivated by greed and greed alone so and if you are you know if if you believe in a sort of collective collectivity the indirect model where they're held in trust for the benefit of current employees it did seem to be the model to go with but I just couldn't make up my mind and nor could the other directors and actually we left it to a group of a sort of council of um of workers at Riverford and actually they came up and it was the one of the first steps in the employee ownership I think I cried in the room actually they were the most the highest paid and probably most eloquent people were the ones who would be able to own most shares and would benefit from a direct ownership model however these 30 people in a room some of whom were you know planting potatoes or bringing a packing machine or whatever you wouldn't think and probably left school at 16 I mean you the sophistication and the generosity of their thought it just blew me away actually and and they collectively decided together that though it would not be in the interest of of several quite a lot of the people in the room that they felt it was the best interest for Riverford and for the staff at Riverford to go for a trust model, so an employee benefit trust, which is what we went for.

39:35And I'm so glad that we did. So employee benefit trust, how does... So the shares are owned by the benefit trust. Yep. And they have a board of trustees who keep an eye on the way that Riverford is run and make sure that it is actually run for the benefit of the co-owners. And that quite a little also has to be for the benefit of the suppliers and nature and so on there's quite a lot of other things written in there but essentially it is run in in that way I know that's quite complicated for people to get their head around but I think it works really really well and and we have an elected co-owner council which has quite a lot of clout I mean it wasn't obvious how they were going to work but they often raise issues for the board I mean beyond that the management structure is fairly sort of conventional but we we use the council a lot to to sound out ideas i mean they run they decide who what everyone's paid essentially we have a remuneration committee which um two council members sit on and a couple of externals and they decide what everyone was paid from me the ceo you know right down through the business and they are you know their decision making is incredibly sophisticated one thing i was going to ask is what are some of the unforeseen or maybe opaque slash hidden challenges in this opaque sorry in this collective kind of business model because i think every model has challenges yeah okay well one thing that came up um in the in our path to employee ownership was people kept on asking isn't all this consultation going to slow down decision making and make us less responsive and flexible which I was amazed that people who you know these aren't people who have been to business school as I say a lot of people who probably left school with no qualifications at all and yet they were you know had the really pretty sophisticated understanding of how the world worked around them so I was amazed by that and it hasn't proven to be the case I don't think we've become any less were they worried about decision by committee kind of thing yeah yeah yeah yeah i think that sort of thing which i think is fair i think fair and what you would expect so that would be one thing which it hasn't so far proven and what have you put in place to do because i think this is a great lesson just doesn't matter what organization is to decision by committee especially as you're building a small challenge brand is is putting brakes on or putting an anchor on the speedboat like how do you what are the things you put in place to avoid that actually I can only say that from my experience, that's not the case.

42:14I don't actually agree with that. Certainly, that's what I would have assumed and expected to happen. But I've seen no signs of decision-making being slow. I think there's a real... We don't consult on everything. You know, we will consult on, I don't know, anything to do with benefits or pay or...

42:37So good. it will consult on anything to do with benefits or pay um but anyway yeah i can only say it hasn't slowed down decision making it's certainly helped us to make better decisions um and safer decisions and i think it's been very good for the business um yeah so so so it's when you said it's made it's helped you make better decisions how so like what's the nuance in this in this way of work? Well I think by consulting more widely you you make sure that you are actually you know a good decision you should have thought through its impacts on everyone that it touches I mean it's quite difficult to do that but you know as a manager that absolutely should be your you know you should have a little checklist that you go through with your brain and and the more people that have that checklist the less likely it is that you're going to you know neglect to consider a particular group so you make better decisions I do I wouldn't you I'm not speaking to someone who holds this as a philosophical belief.

43:35I'm speaking to someone who didn't think that would be the case and has through experience found it works. Yeah, exactly. That's why I think it's a fascinating place to play. I'm saying it with a fair degree of confidence. Another problem with employee ownership is that, and this is something that our lawyers and advised us quite, I was absolutely adamant that I was selling this business at a quarter of its worth and it wasn't going to be demutualized as demutualized as so you know we had you're probably too young to remember you know if you had a mortgage it would be with a a building society and those building societies were owned by their members you know and um and that's what most people had and they've all been and and many farmers were part of a cooperative that would was owned collectively and they've all been sold off into you know the the they often And typically they had quite a lot of assets which were attractive to the, you know, the asset strip and, you know, venture capitalists.

44:32So they come in and they'd buy it and typically strip it of all its assets and run it into the ground. That's normally what happened. And I was absolutely adamant that that wasn't going to happen to Riverford. We had quite a lot of assets. It was potentially worth a lot of money. And, you know, people would come in and say, I'll give each employee£50 ,000 and walk off with the business. So the kind of legal stuff around the business, I can't remember what the terms are now. Anyway, if it is sold, all the money goes to charity. No one can benefit to an extent, I think, more than their statutory, twice their statutory redundancy.

45:12So there is no incentive for anyone to sell it. But that means that it is very difficult to raise capital. So were we to get into difficulties and wanted to raise money or sell equity, it's virtually impossible. Were we to want to expand hugely, we saw some opportunity and we wanted to raise funds for that, that would be very difficult. But I sat down and I thought about that and I thought, you know what, if we get in that much trouble, it's probably all over anyway. So why not just let it go? And I don't want Riverford to go on some acquisition spree. I see this happen so much. It's, you know, normally driven by the ego of the board.

45:51Typically, the FD or CEO, you know, want to grow, grow, grow. And that's where a lot of businesses get lumbered in debt. They bring in shareholders who have different aspirations. So but it is a risk, you know. Well, actually, I don't think it is a risk. It was cited as a risk by our lawyers and financial advisors that we were putting the business in a vulnerable state by making it impossible to sell equity and raise funds in that way. we haven't had to yet i mean i've never borrowed substantially you know the business has always grown on profits and very very modest borrowings uh and that continues to be the case and long may it be so i mean you know when during covid like many home delivery food businesses we made a pile of money sure and um but we knew that that was this wasn't going to last and we put that pile of money in the bank and uh and it's still there and we are slowly spending it on various projects environmental investments and so on electrifying our delivery fleet and putting solar panels on all the sheds and all that sort of thing a lot of our competitors doing the similar thing you know they they made a load of money and when covid came to an end and their customer numbers uh started dwindling they went on a you know marketing spree and just spent it all trying to maintain that growth and then they couldn't maintain it and they are in a far worse position than us most to them now so you know yeah just being i don't know i think having a sense i think the internal approach to to risk and capital that we have i'm perfectly happy with it but i it was cited as a risk that's probably way too long an answer dan no no no it's good well it's great because it is super nuanced and i think you've teased all those things out it's not like a it's not a binary decision there's a lot of nuance to it and i think but what you were saying there it's almost this you know one of the themes today is this neoliberalism as religion and i think people don't question why we grow grow grow i interviewed do you know david hyatt who does hyatt denim you don't it's not david is it it's just david david and claire yeah um yeah i just watch you called him charles just now did i call him i think you called him charles hyatt i know yeah i know david david hyatt so yeah i've got quite a lot of time for him i'll tell you a little story about yeah well yeah go for it yeah i'm i went to give a talk at his do lectures in pembershire one year and he's anyway we got to know each other and anyway he came to visit me in devon and uh you know he's an absolute master at sort of i don't know whether it's still called guerrilla marketing but that sort of thing of you know how challenger brands can behave differently and he came down and he talked we got gathered our marketing team together uh and he said there in the meeting yeah if you want these guys to be creative the last thing you want to do is give them any money and they were a bit shocked because they was hoping this sort of guru of alternative marketing was going to come down and tell us how it's done which must involve some big marketing spends but he it's never the things he does are never big spends are they you know that's his is about it's about being different and what did you implement off off the back of his talk um i can't i can't remember actually but it was I think a bit like when we spoke to Perry at Big Fish it was a lot of it was about just being confident in who you are and uh and in being different and in not trying to be like everyone not trying to copy copy you know other businesses you know that spend a fortune on marketing uh and normally through fairly conventional channels and I think as a you know as a result and the way riverford did we spend very little on conventional marketing almost nothing actually but we will spend money on i mean now on sort of campaigns so there are always things that we genuinely feel strongly about so at the moment we have one running on farm washing supermarkets pretending they're buying from small british family farms when actually in reality they're you know undermining those farms and driving them out of business so we have a campaign running on that at the moment and you know pre so we will often try and be initiating a sort of debate and a discussion and that you know the we're able to pay for that by virtue that it does boost our own sort of awareness of Riverford I suppose but I'm much I would much rather spend the money doing something like that that has you know I believe is genuinely good for the world than in just spending a fortune bidding for words, you know, with Google or, you know, putting a lot of leaflets through people's doors in the old days was, you know, what happened, or, you know, paying for posters in the tube or something, yeah.

50:34I actually, I watched your talk last night, actually, I don't know why, it was about 12 years ago, it went on YouTube about 12 years ago, at the Do Lecture. At the Do Lecture. And there was something you said which really struck a chord, and you were saying when you show different kids around, you were saying the kids from sort of lower income backgrounds and state schools are actually more interesting to show around the fields and farms because they ask better questions. I'd love to know why that is and, in your opinion, what sort of questions they were asking you, if you can remember, not say the questions, but the insights you were getting.

51:12I used to do all the school tours. I'm probably going back 20 years now or something, certainly 15 years. And I did used to really enjoy them. They were completely exhausting. I mean, it was a performance. But you're right, I did particularly enjoy, you know, showing around the, let's say, you know, the rougher kids that, you know, didn't have a little crib sheet of questions that they had to answer at the end. You know, these were kids who were on the farm because they were a nightmare to have in the classroom usually. And they were often a nightmare for the first half hour or so on. But, you know, if you let them out in the fields and give them a chance to actually pull vegetables up and eat them or whatever, they normally got really pretty engaged.

51:50And it was quite, I used to quite enjoy the challenge of engaging the more rebellious, I suppose, and disengaged. And it did make, I don't know, I've always felt that there was a real opportunity to get people on farms. it could be an enriching experience that farming could be about a lot more than just producing food actually I have to say that as the years have gone by and I've got busy with other things we've done less and less of that which I do feel a bit regretful of um yeah no I think I suppose it's the fact that I wanted to do that and I enjoyed doing it and reward and found it rewarding I think was to do with the fact that I do on some level seem to quite enjoy the sort of storytelling aspect of what we do and of course and I think that's what most well good marketing in our way anyway is it's always it's about some sort of storytelling and using that storytelling to differentiate you know what you do and that can consume quite a lot of resources but it's normally well my experience it's been a a cheaper way of getting your name out there yeah yeah and to just buy your way yeah buy your reputation i suppose which is what most people do they go to an agency and give them hundreds of thousands of pounds to go and have a campaign and um off they go you talked about having like and working with perry and stuff and having confidence in in your brand this is what that's what i was doing with exploding bakery yesterday with this the session we were doing the workshop i was doing with them it's like they had this great brand and then they're sort of sales they got these sales opportunities and actually we were saying that the the the sales almost dictated the creative whereby you ended up being kind of not they're not a wishy-washy brand but they've got like four or five different messages they've got kind of a health message a taste message a fun and frivolous brand a serious and it's like and i think at some point along your journey look they're 14 years in i think those guys and they're amazing i've got so much fun for them the brand can become a little bit muddled which is what's happened to them which strip it back yeah but one of the issues they were saying is we don't because we've been doing this so long it's like having the confidence just to go like that and you know what perry was saying about live life on the veg or however how did you when did how did you lose the confidence as a brand so i think that can actually happen and something i haven't really talked about on this podcast and then how did you find it again just to kind of go right live life on the other edge this is what we're doing do you know what i mean well it's very easy to lose confidence when everyone around you is is reading from a different script which is you know if you want to sell more of your product get more customers you know you go to an agency and spend a lot of money and it's just about slapping people around the head with you know your name and the hope that it will stick and it does work you know that's how most marketing works and and and it does work I mean it's very expensive but it I just I just hate it I deeply resent every penny spent on marketing I just want to grow you know really good vegetables and sell them to people as cheaply as possible so they're accessible to people on all incomes and yeah and the more you spend on marketing the less you're going to be able to do that so yeah I could so you know I constantly bang on you know I'm on my path to retirement now but in board meetings about you know the basis of our marketing and sales it has to be what's different about us you know and there is so much that's different we're following such a different path to the you know supermarket supply chain which i think is just devastating british farming and devastating british food and devastating british rural society actually i mean there's so much that we that do the different everything everything we do should be angled should be shouting difference so from the and that's just not not just the words that you use because people forget words very quickly it's it's you know the product that you sell you know celebrating the weird and wonderful it's being innovative in your packaging and being prepared to i don't know use wooden boxes rather than plastic ones and uh and punnets and so on and every opportunity that you have to to to actually demonstrate how different you are so our packaging prince i mean most people uh you know it's vital that the the packaging if you do use plastic that is completely um trans transparent so that you can see the product and even as it shines at you we don't need to do that i mean by the time the products delivered to people's doorstep they bought it anyway so you know we use compostable packaging which is quite sort of opaque and it doesn't need to be it actually it may not on the surface of it look attractive in the same way that things scream at you as you walk down a supermarket aisle but we're in a different environment we can use a different material you know it's 100 home compostable and we don't have to make it look like plastic so you know it just so actually making a point of it being different you know it it's yeah so it's it's just always i mean there's no point in being it's just churlish being different just for the point of being different i mean it's a bit childish i think so we do but we don't we try and learn whatever we can from the industry around us but we don't slavishly and unthinkingly follow it i think what you said there is the storytelling doesn't have to be words which i really liked and that's something seth godin he was on the podcast the other week don't you know the marketeer Seth Godin is a genius I've heard of him yeah and um yeah he was saying stories doesn't have to be words I'd love to understand you know Henry Dimbleby's coming on the podcast in December I've read his book Ravenous it's great and uh I'm really trying to understand how how this food system has become so fucked basically I'd love to go through sort of the history and I'm not saying you're kind of a historian on this but just to get some context of how the food system how the food system was then i think it's world war ii was what happened with all this corn stuff started happening to keep us going in the war and then what was the sort of the birth of the supermarket i'd love to sort of go through that and then we can understand how they've sort of ravaged you to smithereens and or tried to i should say um well henry dimbleby will be a much best person to talk to on this i mean he's very you know he's done a lot of work in this area but I mean, I don't know how far back you want to go to the pre-industrial revolution.

58:19go as far as you can yeah i'd actually quite like to go back as far as you can like well maybe we started like well if you go back the eighth days or something like that like go back to a truly rural agrarian community where there were you know very small what year is that sort of like so you're going back to the 1600s i would say okay right let's start there yeah and um you know and most people you know were living a rural existence you know most of their disposable income would go on food and as we industrialized through the 1700s I suppose you know people started moving to cities there was a more of a tradable market for food and and farmers you know and got a sort of heyday I mean in the UK there was the heyday of British agriculture which ran up to the mid 1800s when there was the repeal of the corn laws which effectively protected British farmers from food being imported particularly from the USA and that the prairies were being opened at that time so I think the repeal corn laws repealed in 1846 then they had the civil war so it took until about 1870 for all to start flooding in and indeed it did start flooding in British agriculture went into a sort of terminal decline which arguably it's never really recovered from so you know the beautiful stone buildings there you can look whenever you see a big barn like that you know it was built before 1870 because there was no money in farming to build buildings like that after that right yeah so okay you have big modern sheds but nothing sort of built to last yeah yeah you know like that you know so that was the heyday of British agriculture and it went into a decline from then after you know with two you know the first and second world war obviously we were almost starved into submission by what happened in the first and obviously like yeah in the first and second world war what were the changes that happened well particularly the second world war we were we had become highly dependent on imports and we couldn't import because you know hitler kept sinking the boats with his u-boats and we were almost starved into submission so from after the and that's because they were bombing us like they Yeah, and sinking the ships coming over from the States.

1:00:34As in we couldn't grow our own stuff. Yeah, we were probably down to less than 50 % self-sufficiency. Because they were bombing us. No, no, by the time the outbreak of the Second World War, 1939, I'm guessing, but it was pretty low. We were importing a lot of stuff. You know, we still had most of the empire and a lot of food was coming in from there. You know, you might say we were, you know, raping the rest of the world to feed our industrialized society. Society. And then, yeah, but that, you know, almost brought us to our knees, or did bring us to our knees during the war. So after the war, and during the war, there was the dig for victory thing.

1:01:09So massively elevated the status of farmers. And then farming was quite heavily subsidized and protected after war to make sure that never happened again. Yep. So my parents started farming in 1951, which was still in food rationing. And they became farmers because... Was your dad in the war? Yeah. Yeah. So when he was demobbed, he studied agriculture. He came from a family of decaying minor aristocrats, I suppose. But there was no empire for the useless children to go and exploit anymore. So he decided, you know, he wanted to do something useful with his life. And for him, that meant being a farmer.

1:01:44And I have a huge amount of admiration, actually, and affection for their generation, you know, that were, you know, Britain was more indebted than it is now. I think debt, I think I'm right in saying it was twice GDP, whereas it's about one times GDP. So we were absolutely fucked. Yet we still managed to, you know, found, well, the aim was to create a country fit for heroes. So, you know, we founded the welfare state, the NHS, you know, we massively boosted food production. So we weren't in that state again. And indeed, it went right on until the birth of neoliberalism. So from, let's say, you know, 1945, the end of the war to 1980.

1:02:26by 1980 we were 80 percent self-sufficient in food what was that the 60s and 70s was like the sort of the peace and the love and the the hippies and the beetles like that was was that almost like a kind of swinging it back post all the destruction in the war because i don't understand how he kind of got from that to this this yeah greed period you know i mean it's kind of a weird yeah actually happened not necessarily i don't i i'm not a historian i don't really understand that was also if you're in the states that was the we've never had it so good era wasn't it i mean that we were you know it was a time of extraordinary growth in wealth for most people not for everyone but i mean but i think there was also quite a lot of regulation in the economy which ensured that the uh that the inequalities weren't too bad that you know everyone's wealth you know and that became you know where home ownership became the norm um and uh and then that all but it came with lots of problems as well maybe we got fat maybe we were the power of the unions was excessive i don't know depends on your political point of view and we got to the 1980s and margaret thatcher being elected and the birth of neoliberalism and it's all about you know greed is good and the the um us all being individuals and making individual selfish decisions.

1:03:46When was the genesis of the supermarket and why was that? Well I think you probably trace the history of Sainsbury's and Marks and Spencer's you know back to sort of the between wars years I don't know but I think their growth was probably when they really became the dominant retailing model was I'm saying going to say between 1960 1960 and 1980 that you know prior to that there would have been a lot of independence you know whereas now if you look at groceries I think the supermarkets the big six account for 90 plus of our groceries and the independents are I mean where are the independents there's probably more food sold in garages now than there is in you know in the high street through independence you know we have farm shops I mean there are precious few independent food retailers i think that that loss of diversity come back to the word we used earlier is is tragic i think in all sorts of ways i mean because those with the the retail market is concentrated in in six businesses hands really that that they want to buy from big suppliers who can provide them with continuity and consistency so that's driven a concentration and specialization in farming um you know i would say since it's probably been going on for a long time but i would say particularly since 1980 whereas if you go back to pre-1980 the norm would have been a mixed farm you know multi-enterprise you know my father used to keep chickens sheep pigs cows were always the big thing he grew barley and wheat and oats and turnips for the cows and kale and whatever it was probably mixed farming now you know you look around here you know either your combinable crops or your dairy and if you're dairy you're probably going to be a big dairy because all the small ones going out of business or the only ones the the the one small family farms have are hanging on in sheep and beef but i would say if you look at poultry it's gone huge highly specialized controlled by a small number of companies uh you know pigs has gone the same way my father used to keep 30 ,000 he got up to about 100 and then it just wasn't you know now you have to have a thousand and being part of some huge contract as well.

1:06:08Poultry has certainly gone the same way. Dairy is really, really quickly going from, you know, small herds of, you know, 100 cows out grazing to herds of 1 ,000 or more kept inside. 50 % of milk sold to dairies, sold to buy supermarkets from cows that haven't been outside. They're just kept inside on concrete, you know, throughout their 10-month lactation, and the food is brought to them, and they're just milk machines. you know they die live a miserable life and die at an early age you know probably i think the average is two point something lactations in the uk from an animal so it's probably going to be about four when it dies from an animal that's natural life is probably 20 years uh you know it is they die of mastitis lameness or they become infertile and the shot you know because their body cannot stand the metabolic demands being placed on it by you know intensive dairy production so I really lament the direction that dairying has gone I lament the direction of pigs and and chickens are gone and this has been driven I you know I'm not saying it wouldn't have happened with supermarkets but it certainly happened a lot quicker and to a much greater extent because that's how supermarkets they want to buy off larger producers it reduces their transactional costs and enables them to drive down the costs of production so yeah I think supermarkets have really driven the concentration and the fact that they are so powerful in this country i'm not saying it's happened across europe but it hasn't happened to the same extent it has here and we have a particularly retailing model that really lacks diversity yeah what other countries have got a slightly different model in europe and or maybe i don't know where else you've been um well it's um actually all of them i mean i do have a farm in france and they have you know a lot more diversity in their farming a lot more smaller farms they seem to be better at sort of cooperating together and that I think has helped to sustain the smaller farmers and give them the benefits of scale that would normally only belong to much bigger companies so yeah France definitely I mean you know either the Netherlands which has really led vegetable production there are you know they are you know exceedingly good at what they do but I I mean, I would say the typical vegetable farm would be under 100 hectares and they would probably be part of selling through a cooperative.

1:08:38Whereas now we have a situation in the UK where vegetable production is, I mean, there are four or five companies. I mean, there's one company that probably produces over 90 % of the country's celery and probably a lot of its green salads as well, well, over 50 % of the green salad. just in one company and they'll have farms in the uk you know mostly in the east quite a lot on the fens um you know in poland in morocco in senegal in spain uh that's that's the reality of how your food is produced vegetables but it's not coming from small family farms and in those fields there are vast harvesting rigs trundling across the fields um barely a word of english spoken um it used to be until brexit russian i mean today you know it could be indonesian but there are not very few uk nationals working those fields because it's become a sort of underclass i think it's you know it's morally and socially reprehensible that we are relying on an underclass to produce our food because we're not prepared to pay you know what it would cost you know to make it an attractive proposition for for our own people i mean i don't know it just seems all wrong to me What was the most heinous thing the supermarkets did to you when you were a farmer that made you forge this other path with Riverford?

1:09:58Oh, I mean, they're buying departments and I really don't think this has changed very much. You know, the standard of human behavior from a supermarket buyer is just hideous. How so? Well, I'll tell you my story. This is when I gave up supplying supermarkets. or just before it I was getting ready I'd put in my crop program they'd agreed they were going to buy a certain amount the buyer rang me up and said we'd like to be we'd like you to come and meet our technical guy next Thursday in London and I said oh that's great great there's no chance we could make it Friday is it because I'm going to be in London for the weekend anyway and the phone went dead on me i rang him back and i said i'm terribly sorry i think we got cut off there and he said now sonny when we whistle you jump the only question is how high and that was it i told him to fuck off i i at that i've never supplied a supermarket directly and then no one you know no one should treat another human being like that it's just appalling and the interesting thing is that I actually met this bloke about five years later.

1:11:16He was working for another company, and he was a really nice bloke. I couldn't believe it. When I met him, he was this cuddly man sitting in a corner in a tweed suit, actually, and he was a teddy bear. But that's the way he behaved. That's what we were saying earlier. It's the macro religion of neoliberalism, but on the micro, people are actually just warm, cuddly human beings. It's the mixing of the two where it gets convoluted. It's behaviour that becomes normalised. I mean, I, you know, I still believe, I firmly believe that most people are good and want to do good things most of the time. But we are, we're strongly affected by the norms that we see around us.

1:11:54So if you are in a supermarket buyer's office, surrounded mostly in those days anyway, by, you know, testosterone-fueled young men, you know, and it's very, very aggressive environment. and you are moved around so that you never actually form a relationship with the people you're buying off so you don't have those sort of responsibilities as a human being you know that's where you you're rewarded for how much you know margin per push and a foot of shelf space you generate whether you're selling knickers or digestive biscuits or brussel sprouts and you're moved around those departments so you never have a direct relationship with any of your suppliers so you can be inhumane and never witness the consequences.

1:12:37You know, that's how people behave. That's the normalized pattern of behavior. And then what, you know, really upsets me is the mendacity of those supermarkets who then will have a corporate, you know, they'll have a load of stuff on corporate social responsible or ESG as they call it now. They'll have an environmental policy. There are policies on everything. But if you actually speak to the buyer and said, oh but your you know head of organics said this this and this they don't even know who he is that there is no connection between their statements of morality and the actual people who are driving their behavior which is the buyers they i don't know i think they live in a different building i mean it is it's just rank hypocrisy and what are they doing to the farmers now because i've watched a few videos and it's like they're just obviously just it's almost they're forcing a race to the bottom and then there's all this farm washing stuff which is basically a quasi brand where they're saying that it is so you can go and buy a packet of strawberries and it will have the british flag on it but it could be from fucking anywhere to be fair it probably if it's got the british flag on it i'm fairly confident saying it will have been produced in the uk but you will walk in farm washing then so well so you walk into the you walk i would say you walk into that supermarket aisle yeah they're union jacks all around the place and um there are lots of statements about supporting british farming the tote bag that you walk away will have a british farmer on it you know you you're sold that's the sort of backdrop and then those strawberries i'm not quite sure for strawberries but i can't remember the name but if you go to tesco's and you buy a pepper uh i think it's rosedean farm they have the same for chicken willow farm so they're sold under these farm names but actually the pepper it might be produced in the uk in a limited season but it could equally well be produced in morocco senegal the netherlands uh and it's all under the brand of yeah and it will there will be a thing on the packet saying that it's produced in that country it'll be quite small it'll be much smaller than the one saying rose dean farm which clearly implies it's produced in britain but Legally, they have fulfilled their obligations, you know, and the Union Jack's everywhere, despite the fact, you know, many times a year, there's more Spanish stuff there than British.

1:15:01So it is it's a sort of deceit. And based on the fact that, you know, we're all we're all busy, aren't we? We don't you know, when you go to a supermarket, you read every label, really. I mean, we just don't have the time. So we're forming these, you know, we're cognitive misers. You know, we don't have the time to gather all that information and process it. we are emotional decision makers on the whole you know 90 of our behavior is driven by our emotions and you know supermarkets and their you know marketing advisors know that only too well and they play office so they give us the emotional feel that we're supporting a british farmer when in reality you know their trading practices are undermining british farming you know and and destroying the family farms that i think most people would like to support you know so and at a really alarming pace this is not something that's happening gradually i mean the movement of dairy cows from small family farms to large dairies where they never go outside is happening really quickly i mean it's happened over the last 10 years so that now you know 10 years ago 90 of them would have been relatively small farms out grazing the pastures today over 50 of the milk you buy in the supermarket will come from a cow that has not been outside during its lactation and um you know the food is brought to it and it's just a you know milk producing machine living a miserable stressed life so that that you know farm washing is the you know dishonesty by which it's almost it's a it's almost a a a sort of odious growth or boil out of the sort of neo-liberalism that we were talking about at the beginning and it's greed going further and it's really hard to argue with it i mean you know a supermarket will put forward a spokesperson who will say that they're keeping food you know affordable to all and and that if we listen to this weird bloke guy sing watson and did his thing everything would be more expensive and it would be exclusive in fact you know it's it's an affront because he wants food to be more expensive actually i do want food to be more expensive well i want farmers to be paid more for it i don't think that necessarily means it's more expensive because farmers you know we get veg we get about 25 pence in the pound for a vegetable fruit and vegetable so the supermarkets and the middlemen take the rest you know so actually doesn't necessarily maybe they could cut their margins a bit and we could be paid what it genuinely costs to produce a strawberry and have you know a uk national picket under reasonable working conditions and you know it's anyway yeah what's the feeling amongst farmers now because i think it is you know when when as you say you're in london you're going into a tesco extra or sainsbury's local had a stressful day at work you're just thinking fuck it i'll pick that up eat it and i think you just do again through these norms you just kind of eat food without necessary and i do this whole time without necessarily understanding where it's come from uh what's the feeling amongst farmers like in the zeitgeist about how it's all going to play out uh the mood in the industry is pretty bleak actually and has probably been getting worse for a few years now i mean that is the result of i would say the supermarket buying practice is the biggest factor but you know climate change has thrown some real challenges at british farming um i mean not this spring 23 spring well actually this spring was pretty bad So we've had two very wet springs in the previous winter.

1:18:34A lot of farmers were unable to sow their crops because it was just too wet. I mean, weather patterns are changing. They're becoming less predictable. That is making life really hard for British farmers. I'd say particularly arable farmers, but even livestock farmers have had their challenges. Yeah, so climate change is an issue. Brexit and the associated changes in farming policy have introduced a level of uncertainty, which British farming could really have done without. I mean, it may be that the ELMS environmental land management schemes and the greater emphasis on delivering environmental and social goods.

1:19:10You know, I think it could be a good thing in the long run, but we are going to have a period of disruption and uncertainty, which, you know, any industry, you know, we just want a stable environment to operate in and run our businesses. like any so that you know it's been massively disruptive you think that 50 percent of farm incomes comes from you know various government payers essentially from the payments essentially from the taxpayer uh and those are really being they're not only are they being reduced threatened and reduced but they are how they will be paid is being massively changed and the administrative bureaucratical cost of accessing those funds is becoming really very substantial to the extent that I do actually worry that you know we're a small 150 acre farm and we've done very well out of it but only by virtue of Riverford paying for someone to fill in all the forms I couldn't have done it for our mid-tier stewardship form and they've done a very good job and we've done well so it is a good thing but I do worry that smaller farmers won't be able to afford to access it so it could it could in worst case scenario become yet another pressure towards scale because it will be the large landowners who can afford to employ the consultants to fill in the forms.

1:20:25I'm sorry, that's the way it's turned out. So uncertainty around Brexit and another big factor in that is the availability of labour. You know, we have an industry that used to be very dependent on Eastern European labour. It's no longer available. So we're, you know, sending planes around the world to try and bring in people from, you know, who knows where. And often people who have been really badly exploited in that process. it's pretty shameful some of the stuff you read about it's not necessarily what's happening actually on the farms it's often the people they've had to pay to get to the farm in the first place though yeah so there are a lot of a lot of you know climate change brexit supermarket pressure are all you know putting a lot of pressure on british farming and and to the extent that you know according to our research i think it was 61 percent of farmers fear that they're going to be out of business in 18 months and those will be mostly the smaller family farms what's not this yeah what's the sort of utopia or the desired outcome which which isn't going to change the infrastructure again this is a seth golden podcast i did it's like and he talks about the flow of he uses nature as the analogy and it's about going with with the flow of the current or you can push against it and it's like a utopia maybe let's get rid of supermarkets but like in let's be pragmatic here like the rivers they're already entrenched in the system and there's only so much you can do to change the system on a massive level but what would you say are like some actual like what's the utopia in your head but then what is probably the pragmatic place that we're actually could get to with some of the changes that you want to put in place you know as as you kind of take a step back from riverhood riverford well my utopia and i find it very difficult to see a route to this utopia but my utopia would be a food and farming system in the UK.