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Articles by Guy Singh-Watson
News from the farm: Desperate drought to luxuriant abundance
September and October have been near perfect for most farmers. Our 110mm of rain was well below the two-month average for our farm and has barely reached 100mm depth. So, following an extreme drought, it is perhaps surprising to see grass and veg growing with such luxuriance. Our neighbours have cut their maize for silage, most potatoes are in store and carrot harvest is well under way – all done in good conditions with the heavy machinery causing minimum soil damage.
News from the farm: We are all in it together
I am sure that I am not the only one struggling mentally under the heavy cloud that is the metacrisis; climate collapse, the fall of the international rules-based order, and wars waged under deranged leadership – all fuelled by growing wealth inequality and fascism rearing its ugly head again. Perhaps worst of all is societal division led by media bias and BS, which makes it all too easy to believe the bad guys are winning and that kindness and decency are on the retreat.
News from the farm: Creation, exits and truth
15 years ago, as I researched employee ownership, I found myself at the top of a glass-and-steel office tower, giddily looking down at the gleaming Thames and over the City. Much as I tried to absorb the governance details from Graeme Nuttall, a corporate lawyer, all I could think of was how many leeks I’d have to sell to pay the bill. Last month I found myself back in the same office with Graeme and 12 fellow founders who had all taken their businesses into employee ownership (EO).
News from the farm: Spuds, pubs, cider and community
September has been perfect; the slowly declining temperatures are still above average and enough rain has allowed winter crops of cabbage, kale, leeks and broccoli to make up growth lost during the drought. The squash are in store curing and the last borlotti beans will be picked this week. Walking around the packing barns, brimming with fresh produce, I am absorbing the vitality through my eyes and nose before I even open my mouth. Although, the effects of the drought are still with us.
News from the farm: Spuds, pubs, cider and community
September has been perfect; the slowly declining temperatures are still above average and enough rain has allowed winter crops of cabbage, kale, leeks and broccoli to make up growth lost during the drought. The squash are in store curing and the last borlotti beans will be picked this week. Walking around the packing barns, brimming with fresh produce, I am absorbing the vitality through my eyes and nose before I even open my mouth. Although, the effects of the drought are still with us.
News from the farm: Business, belief & back to beans
Our team is busy picking borlotti beans and harvesting squash. I watch them working their way up the field in the September sunshine with some envy while I type. I still proudly call myself a farmer, but at a creaky 66, there is more demand for my mouth than my muscle.
News from the farm: Nothing mellow in autumn’s fruitfulness
The steady rain falling outside amounts to 77 (very welcome) millimetres since the drought broke. Soil is swelling and cracks are closing but a little digging shows that the wetted horizon is no more than 100mm from the surface in most cases. Still, with shorter days, a lower sun and heavier dews we can relax and pack away the irrigation. For some crops it was too late, but most are recovering well. So far, the rain has been gentle and well-spaced; the ideal way to break a drought.
Waiting, watching & learning as summer slips away
We now have clouds but we are still waiting for meaningful rain. How it can be so hot for three months without thunderstorms defies fifty years of experience, but we are entering a new era with a new rulebook. Ground this dry becomes resistant to wetting, bringing the danger of intense rain disappearing down the deep cracks or running off and taking our soil with it. Ideally, we need a light drizzle, allowing the soil to soften and receive the rain it so badly needs.
News from the farm: Peat, EVs, capitalism and governance
As a reluctant capitalist, I acknowledge the extraordinary ability of business to innovate, flex, and get things done. But business will only do what it can make money from and thereby reward shareholders for, while working to increasingly short timeframes. What cannot be measured in money, or will be suffered by future generations, is rarely considered.
News from the farm: It’s getting serious (and data centres can’t help us)
For decades I have been infuriated by articles in The Economist, The Telegraph et al. suggesting that higher CO2 levels and rising temperatures would be a good thing for Europe’s farmers, increasing the rate of photosynthesis and hence yields. A few people further south might suffer (they don’t have much money anyway) but at least we would be OK. What are these pillars of rationality writing now as Europe burns?
News from the farm: Impossible choices we’re responsible for
Our squash have met across the rows, stretching their vines to cover the bare soil, their roots spreading below ground in search of water to feed the flowering and swelling fruit. How many they carry to maturity in late September will depend on rain and our management of the soil – a good drink might double the yield but any water we have left must be saved for higher value crops like raspberries and borlotti, lettuce and salad leaves.
News from the farm: Longing for Devon drizzle
Some fine hay has been made and most crops and pickers are showing surprising resilience but as the heat rises each day it is hard to avoid a sense of impending doom.
News from the farm: Keeping your head above water
Happy voices can be heard across the valley over the tick of the slowly moving planter edging up the hill. Picking is in full swing and the weeds are threatening to overwhelm those who succumbed to expansionist, seed-catalogue-inspired veg dreams formed in the calm of shorter days.
News from the farm: Acorns, jays and strawberries
Last week’s heatwave rapidly ripened our strawberries, with pickers starting at 5am before being driven from the fields by the heat. By contrast, the first three weeks of June were damp and cool, with berries slow to ripen and picking repeatedly disrupted by the light rain, which can compromise shelf life and flavour. At least the wet days gave us time to weed the trees we planted last winter – something I never expected in the midst of a manic summer.
News from the farm: Humbling river pebbles and devolution
In the 1960s & 70s, my father’s ploughman, who claimed to have ploughed most of the parish, initially with a horse, would occasionally catch a granite boulder in one of the lower fields with the tip of his plough shear. These “river pebbles”, weighing a ton or more, originated on Dartmoor and were rounded in their millennia-long journey down the River Dart, before being stranded and buried as the river changed course.
News from the farm: Hay, silage, strawberries & cream
Few smells are as sweet as that of well-made hay, rolled up ready to be baled. The sweetest of all is made in May, when there’s not a cloud in the sky, grass sugars are high, and young leaves are still highly digestible. Grass grows fastest from March to June. The farmer’s challenge is to conserve the excess with minimal loss of nutrients, to feed cows and sheep through the winter when growth is slow and the ground too wet to support grazing cattle without damage.
News from the farm: More than small talk at the Riverford suppliers’ conference
Last weekend, organic farmers & growers from Yorkshire to Devon and Andalucia to Sicily gathered in Devon for Riverford’s biennial suppliers’ conference. These are the people who keep your boxes full and varied through the year; many of them have done so for over 20 years, and for some, Riverford is their only customer.
News from the farm: The 170-year squeeze that led to cheap food and Grievous Biological Harm
In 1846, the year the protectionist Corn Laws were repealed, around 50% of UK household income was spent on food and about 70% of the price of a loaf would have gone to a local farmer for the wheat. This was the golden age of British farming, when Constable immortalised his hay wain, and landowners commissioned paintings of their prize bulls.
News from the farm: A better reason to slow down – join the FIT Count
Last week, I was accused of having a colonialist mindset by one of our more radical pickers. As we finished up the wild garlic season I was pondering whether we should consider roguing the woods to prevent the toxic garlic lookalike, lords- and-ladies, setting seed. By systematically identifying and removing this poisonous plant, I reckon we could double our picking speed and reduce the need for such skilled pickers to keep you safe.
News from the farm: It seemed to work for a while, but now we need a plan
I have been lucky enough to live my 65 years in a period of relative peace, stability, and prosperity. Since 1980, that stability has been accompanied by a quasi-religious belief that the free market and global supply chains will solve all our problems, thereby relieving government of the need to have coherent, joined up, forward-thinking policies.
News from the farm: The kiss of death
While most of Devon is bright green, an emerging patchwork of fields will turn yellow, then brown, then silver. This is the kiss of death from glyphosate, the “world’s favourite herbicide”. Most agriculture starts by removing any competing vegetation. In this case, the fields need to be cleared to sow maize for cow feed. The choice is normally either to plough, costing around £25 per acre, or to spray with glyphosate, costing around £15 per acre.
As a business founder and as a man, I regret the decades I spent confined by masculinity
Guy Singh-Watson at Riverford farm, Devon, in 2025. Photograph: Jim Wileman/The Guardian On International Women’s Day this year, I found myself in Selfridges listening to my wife, Geetie, talk about her experiences as a childhood communard, mother, restaurateur, environmental campaigner and, of course, as a woman. I was one of two men in the audience. Some might ask what a 65-year-old male farmer was doing there at all.
News from the farm: Closing the gap
We’ve all but finished the savoy and green cabbage, and the leeks are on their last legs too. At this point, cut any of these in half and you will see the centre lengthening, triffid-like, ready to burst into flower. We’ve had our final pick of kale, ploughed, and sown the grass and clover which will help restore the soil over a four-year break from the repeated cultivations needed to grow veg. Next week, we’ll pick the last shoots of purple sprouting broccoli.
News from the farm: Slurry, spring-sown stars, and feeding you all
Muck is flying, birds are nesting, and the geese are honking as they lap the farm surveying potential nest sites. After a three-month deluge of double our normal rainfall, three bright and (mostly) sunny weeks have let us get on the land, catch up, and start planting. Spring-sown broad beans, carrots, and potatoes are in the ground and this week will see us start the lettuce, onions, and cabbage in earnest.
News from the farm: Wild pickings & nettles in fine fettle
March has brought welcome glimpses of the sun and enough dry weather to allow us to mow off crop remains, spread some compost, and even start preparing the best-drained fields for early crops. For once I am glad of our steep, south-facing fields that drain so much faster than the deeper, more fertile soils in the valley. As last year’s crops approach their end, the first wild garlic is bursting through the leaf litter on the forest floor.
News from the farm: Time for men to step up & speak out
This Sunday is International Women’s Day. Some might ask what an ageing male farmer would have to add to the debate. Firstly, I would contend that, as many of the issues discussed on Sunday will relate to male behaviour, particularly of the rich and powerful, men should be paying as much attention as women. Secondly, that too many blokes being blokey doesn’t get the strawberries picked.
News from the farm: The right way is rarely the easy way
When I sowed my first leeks 40 years ago, they were the best, the freshest, and also some of the cheapest around. Our co-owner council frequently asks why our prices have risen relative to supermarkets over the years. Part of the answer is that, collectively, we’re not as mean and penny-pinching as I was in the early years (something imbibed from a father who was always on the verge of bankruptcy and happy to share it). I built a business, but it was not humanly or environmentally sustainable.
News from the farm: Weathering storms & speaking too soon
Last week I wrote, perhaps a little smugly, of the extraordinary resilience of crops and pickers in the face of two, now approaching three, months of double our average rainfall and the resulting waterlogged soils. Though this remains largely true of my own farm with its well-drained, steep fields that do not hold onto the water, no sooner had my words gone to print than I got wind of a very different story from our growers in Devon and Southern Europe.
Food production strain exposes limits of current healthy diet strategies
Food production systems are under growing pressure from climate volatility, rising input costs and labor shortages, exposing structural weaknesses that threaten the availability of healthy and sustainable diets, according to an analysis shared by Planeatry Alliance and reported by AgFunderNews. The warning comes as policymakers, producers and businesses increasingly link food security to public health and long-term economic stability across Europe and other global markets.
News from the farm: Rain down the neck & occasional sun on the cheek
December brought a foot of rain and January the same again – double the average and about half what you’d expect in a whole year. Everything takes more time and effort with a few kilos of mud clinging to each boot, but despite the gloom (and the rain always finding a way into your waterproofs), spirits are remarkably high in the fields; the crops are good, allowing faster picking. Selectively picking a poor crop in grim weather is what breaks the team.
News from the farm: Rotations, civilisation, and the avoidance of dogma
6000 years ago in the UK, our Neolithic ancestors transitioned from hunter-gatherers to farmers – learning from the migrant farmers of the Eastern Mediterranean. As all civilisations have discovered, the challenge facing a settled and growing population is how to maintain the fragile fertility of the soil that supports them. When populations were small and settlements moveable, the predominant practice was shifting cultivation.
News from the Farm - Grievous Biological Harm & banning glyphosate
While studying agriculture and forestry at Oxford in 1979, we were told that the broad spectrum, systemic herbicide, glyphosate, had zero mammalian toxicity, became immediately inactive on contact with the soil, and was safe enough to drink – according to then manufacturer, Monsanto.
News from the farm: A lot to learn before dusk descends
Already the evenings are drawing out, allowing us to work a little later before dusk descends and the frost returns. Two weeks of cold, dry, easterly winds with clear skies have given us hard frosts over Christmas and New Year, so we must wait until the worst of the frost melts before picking purple sprouting broccoli, cabbage, kale, and leeks before darkness forces us off the fields again.
News from the farm: Furrows, fairness & 40 years of Riverford
If birth is turning the first furrow, Riverford turns 40 this month. Having quit a lucrative, if morally bankrupt, job as a management consultant in NYC in 1985, I came home to spend the New Year at Riverford – the tenanted Devon farm where I had mucked out pigs and pitched bales ever since I pulled on my first pair of very small wellies.
News from the farm: Finding wonder in the underworld
Last month, I found myself peering into two unfamiliar worlds. The more I looked, the more I loved and wanted to understand these often neglected, abused, and exploited deeps. It is no exaggeration to say that our continuing life on earth depends on learning to appreciate, understand, and care for our soils and oceans.
News from the farm: Artisans, luddites, and hybrids
A good crop makes for happy pickers. Despite the rain, wind, and mud, beneath our waterproofs it is mostly smiles among the purple sprouting broccoli (PSB) this week. The heads are huge, uniform, and tender, allowing a good picker to harvest 40kg an hour (ordinarily, we’d barely manage 20kg). It’s been a good growing year at Riverford but our smiles owe a lot to plant breeding.
News from the farm: Common sense & uncommon commitment
During almost 40 years at Riverford, I’ve learned that sustained commercial, human, and environmental growth is invariably the result of functional and diverse teams working towards a common, long-term goal. Employee ownership has taken me on a journey of personal development and learning. I’m no longer the impatient, emotionally illiterate boss, who broke a lot of things and people, but got it just about right enough to survive.
News from the farm: Cider, community & muddled thinking
When my father took on the church tenancy of Riverford in 1951, he was assured by the retiring tenant that “cider would pay the rent”. At that time, almost every farm in the parish had its own orchards, apple mill, press, and cellar complete with rows of 250-litre hogshead wooden casks for maturing the cider. There were numerous local apple varieties: Slack Ma Girdle, Tom Putt, Brown’s, and Fair Maid of Devon – selected to tolerate our damp climate without succumbing to canker and scab.
News from the farm: Fuelling the fire - the biodiesel fantasy
In 2006, as we began seriously contemplating the reality of sustainability at Riverford, I employed an engineering graduate from the University of Exeter to ensure our policies were led by facts rather than fictional headlines. Another veg box delivery company had converted their vans to biodiesel and I wondered if we should be doing the same.
News from the farm: The best end to the best growing year
The last of the house martins and swallows have left us, replaced by a flock of fieldfares who have elected to make us their winter home for the first time since my childhood – perhaps drawn by a bumper crop of hawthorn berries that have turned some hedges red as the leaves drop. The 20cm deluge of early September rain was followed by a sunny end to the month, allowing us to harvest squash and make a start on main crop potatoes in ideal conditions.
News from the farm: Rewilding the croquet lawn
When I sowed my first leeks 40 years ago, I, like my father and neighbours, felt I was fulfilling a profound, even moral, purpose: to grow food and feed people (the more the better) and on every square metre that could be bent to my will. As ego subsided with age, and as the crisis of climate change and biodiversity loss emerged, so too did an awareness that we sit within nature as well as on top of it, and that wielding our power with insensitivity and ignorance would be our downfall.
News from the farm: Growing rains & patient harvests
The driest summer since 1976 has been followed by the wettest September we’ve ever recorded. The moisture combined with a warm active soil – recycling and releasing plenty of nutrients – has brought a riot of luxuriant late growth, especially from the brassicas. Oaks show no signs of abandoning their leaves and walnuts have pushed out a metre of new growth (though they often miscalculate and have to abort growth the following year).
News from the farm: Nutty project goes surprisingly well
In early 2022, we planted 1588 nut trees across four farms. Riverford customers who introduced their friends through our Refer a Friend scheme contributed to getting our inaugural agroforestry project off the ground – the money we would have spent on marketing to find new customers went instead towards planting trees, making us all winners. We’ve since planted over 16,000 trees – a mixture of woodland and agroforestry – to help sequester carbon, improve soils, and boost biodiversity.
News from the farm: Light beams & an end to summer
As a surfing vegetable grower, I think September and October must be my favourite months. Our summer ended abruptly last week with a series of depressions rushing in off the Atlantic and dumping 100mm of rain – more than most farmers in the east have seen all summer. The first, the remnants of hurricane Erin, also brought some beautiful waves; the first good swell in months. Parched soil sucked the rain in and down to replenish the deficit.
News from the farm: Diversity in the borlotti field
Last weekend, at the annual Organic Growers Gathering near Reading, I was among a small number of old-timers wheeled out to pass on our knowledge to the next generation. Mercifully, there were many more young entrants to our industry, most from non-farming backgrounds. For those not born into wellies, farming means learning an intimidating number of practical skills.
News from the farm: Fat cats & a fair share of the cream
My father sold the white stuff; it was taken away in churns, then in a bulk tank, but we never had any idea where it went or any means of connecting recipients to our cows, the farm, or the people who did the milking. We were commodity producers and price takers as a result. A brief spell as a management consultant in the 1980s disabused me of the naïve belief that “a good product will sell itself” or “if you work hard and do something well you will get a fair reward”.
News from the farm: A blessed year in the West
Returning to Devon from the parched East makes me glad that my father took on a farm here, however topographically and meteorologically challenging. In the words of my dairy-farming brother, Oliver: “There’s not much farming that can’t be done better, east of Haldon Hill” (the ridge you cross, west of Exeter, when entering the true South West). Over my 40-year growing career, almost all larger scale commercial horticulture has folded, apart from us and our suppliers.
News from the farm: Balancing good value with good values
Ever since telling a Sainsbury’s buyer where they could stick their measly 6p per lettuce, we have focused on selling directly to customers via our veg box scheme. From the start, we were able to set our prices at what it actually costs to grow, pack, and distribute great organic food, plus a little bit for profit and reinvestment. Initially – trained by those negotiations with supermarket buyers – I ran a very lean business, pushing myself and everyone else hard.
News from the farm: 20 years of emulating my mother
The most enjoyable meals I have eaten are always simple and informal, cooked by someone with the confidence to let the best seasonal, local ingredients speak for themselves. The service is generous and human, without being fawning, intrusive, or judgmental; I don’t want to have to prove I am worthy of the food. The joy they bring bears little relation to the price, and the surroundings are often humble.
News from the farm: A good end & a new beginning
After delivering our first, very basic, veg boxes in the early 90s, it became clear that even our more localvore customers needed more variety, particularly during the UK’s ‘Hungry Gap’ in late spring (after winter crops have finished, but before the new crops are ready). Early attempts at importing were disastrous, so, with the last of my brash arrogance, I decided to do it myself.
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