Outside the box. A conversation with Guy Watson

from Ossigeno 14

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Mr. Watson, people know your official story, the Wikipedia one, but who’s Guy Watson?
Well, Wikipedia says I’m the chairman of Riverford, but actually I’m not. I’m a non executive director. I still do quite a lot of the public-facing work, so if anyone wants to talk about Riverford, it would normally be me. I’m 64 or so, and at some point that will become a problem. I mean, someone else will have to take on that role, but actually that is what I do. And I write quite a lot. I enjoy writing. I sometimes enjoy presenting. So, my official role is founder and non-executive director. A lot of it is talking to the media and giving presentations, and then sometimes I’m still a director – and sometimes, if I’m in disagreement, I might try to make suggestions about how things could be done, but that’s less and less now. Really, I’m pretty happy to leave the executive team to get on with it.

Going back in time, how did you start organic farming, and why?
I was born in 1960. I grew up on the farm. It was a Church of England farm. My father was a tenant. I always wanted to be a farmer. When I grew up I went away for a couple of years, in London and New York, and then came back. I started in 1986, when the farm wasn’t organic, beginning to grow organic vegetables in 1987. I just took a field next to the house where I was born and that’s where I started, on a very small scale. And it grew from there. There have been some bumps on the road, and my dad, John Watson, was reasonably encouraging. About halfway through his life he became a committed environmentalist, because the farms of his day were intensive, using a lot of fertiliser and so on. He was part of that in the 50s and 60s. And I think in the 70s he started to have his doubts about the impact on the soil and on nature, in particular. And then in the 80s, when I came back, he was quite encouraging. He believed that children should be challenged, but he was generally supportive. And my mother Gillian, I should mention, she was also very influential. She was a fantastic cook, and quite unfashionable in Britain at that time. She cooked mainly with raw ingredients, most of which came from the farm. My dad’s pigs, we had cows, we had chickens, she had her own garden and grew most of her own vegetables and everything. She was what has become very fashionable now as a sort of idyllic lifestyle, certainly among the middle classes in Britain. She was probably quite influenced by French and Italian food. I don’t know where she learnt what she learnt, she was just the most amazing cook and made everything from scratch. So, we grew up around the kitchen table with someone who was always cooking. They had five children, and in the 60s and 70s we were all back on the farm, and we’re all farming and crazy about food. And we’ve built our businesses around that.

A family story for a successful family business. Did you have a plan for what would happen next?
There was never a big plan, I don’t really believe in business plans. I just started and didn’t know what I was doing, and I stumbled around and I just tried a lot of things. I always think of it like this: you stumble into a room, maybe it’s got, you know, several doors out of it, and you’re walking around in the dark, banging on the doors, and eventually one opens and you find yourself in another room, with another set of doors, and one of them opens and you find yourself in yet another room; and that went on for forty years, really. And through good judgement and quite a lot of luck, I think I fell through the right door. As a small business, you are often sort of buffeted by the events happening around you, and you should just have an idea of where you want to go, what you believe in and where you want to get to. The reality is that you spend a lot of your time just reacting to what’s going on around you. Certainly, if you’re in a consumer-facing business. And I think that’s what I’ve done. Now that we have 1,200 co-owners, it is much more structured. And that’s probably part of the reason why I have handed the business over to a more experienced, slightly more corporate team, who are happy to work in that environment. It’s not an environment that I’m particularly comfortable in. I think I’m probably fairly anarchic in my inclinations. Yeah. I’d like to be able to just go on and do what I want, but you can’t really do that, when you’ve got that number of people around you.

What was it like being such a “fairly anarchic” boss, while Riverford was growing so fast? In other words, does power change people and has it changed you?
I believe, and would like to live, in a more cooperative, more consensual world, that spreads power around and that doesn’t leave all of it in the hands of a few people. That’s the world I want to live in. However, the reality is that I’m actually a bit of a loner. Like most entrepreneurs who start businesses, I had to learn how to work in a team. It’s not something that came naturally to me. And I’ve enjoyed learning it, but I’ve probably learned it in my later years. I would say, in the last ten years I’ve really come to appreciate my impact on other people and the responsibilities I have as a leader. And I think a lot of the problem with people who end up with power and influence – I don’t really know about Mussolini, but in the case of Napoleon or Hitler – they were pretty mad people. They were unfit to hold that power. And I would say they were unfit to hold it because they didn’t really understand their own motivations, and why they did what they did. And I think it’s incumbent upon people who have found themselves as leaders to really look inside themselves and understand why they do what they do, and it’s not always pretty. I mean, especially the people who find their way to the top are very often emotionally disturbed, and I think that’s the cause of a lot of our problems. You only have to look at America now, or Britain when we had Boris Johnson. And I think the same in business. I think power is attractive to people who are insecure. I find it’s very common… maybe they didn’t feel confident that their parents loved them. We have a saying in English, I expect you have the same in Italian: all power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. It does. When I hire people, I don’t hire them to say yes. I want them to challenge me. That’s especially true in senior positions, but really in any position. I want people to have their own ideas. And if they think I’m doing something wrong, I want them to challenge me, and that often takes a lot of bravery. It depends on the culture of your organisation, but I think if you don’t have that culture and you’re not challenged, it’s very dangerous. And things can go seriously wrong.

Do you feel a responsibility to use your power in the right way – for example, to make sure that a product is affordable for everyone?
Yes, I do feel that responsibility. I mean, the reality is that it’s very difficult to deliver food, good quality food, grown in the right way, with respect for people and the environment, and also to make it affordable. Especially in the UK, we have very cheap food. People typically spend 8% of their GDP on it, and I suppose it is higher in Italy. I’m sure it’s much higher in France. But anyway, food is cheap, so it’s very difficult. The price has been driven down by the supermarkets, which have all the commercial power. They’re very big, the farmers are very small. Prices have been driven down and production standards have been driven down as well, with sort of tragic consequences for nature and for the farming community. But actually it is difficult to change that, because it costs more to produce food well. It certainly costs more in the short term – maybe not if you look at it over a hundred, or fifty, or even twenty years. If you look after the soil, the people who are working it will end up with better farms and will be able to produce better food. But that’s a long-term thing, and most people don’t have the luxury of looking at the long term.

In this issue of Ossigeno, we host a conversation with Roman Krznaric about the future and his theory of the good ancestor. Do you feel that you’re a good ancestor for future generations?
Yes, I do. I’m quite proud of what I’ve done. I mean, I know it’s not perfect, I can see a lot of problems, but I do think we’ve set a good example. We’ve set an alternative example. And I’m not particularly talking about my environmental credentials, which I think are fine, but I’m most proud of challenging the assumption that the only value that guides us in life is greed. I feel very strongly that yes, we all have greed in us, and we all have basic needs that really need to be met, but… as human beings, we’re so much more than that. And I think in my lifetime – in the era of neo-liberal economics, where the market has the solution to everything and even to have a moral point of view has almost come to be seen as immoral in itself, and that we have to leave everything to the market – is deeply offensive, although it has become almost a religion, certainly a political philosophy. I find that really demeaning to us as human beings. And I don’t think most people believe that, but we’re sort of told that there is no alternative, and what I’m particularly proud of is that I think I’ve demonstrated that there is an alternative – and part of that is through my personal behaviour, just not accumulating more and more money. I mean, I’ve become a very rich man and I’ve got more money than I have ever really used, and I’m busy trying to find ways to get rid of it before I die, but I mean, I have very humble tastes. I do not have a Ferrari. I have a very old pickup truck. I have got several surfboards, and I’ve got a small boat that I built with a friend, and I see people in huge powerboats, and that’s just not what I want.

I admit, if I were you I’d buy a Ferrari, or at least a Harley, but back to Riverford: what was the biggest problem in converting your farm from a traditional to an organic one? What has been the biggest challenge of your farming life?
The problems are maintaining soil fertility without chemical fertilisers, and we have found ways of doing that. It’s taken me a lifetime. And now we make a lot of compost and use it on the farm, but it took me a long time to get there. For years we just used cow manure. Pest and disease control was another big thing. And also weed control was a very big one. But of all those things, I suppose the biggest challenge was my own ignorance. I had to learn a lot, and there was no one to teach me, because there weren’t many other organic farmers.

But, correct me if I’m wrong, I read that you studied Agricultural Science at Oxford. Didn’t your university studies help you?
No, definitely not. I went to Oxford and studied agriculture, and I was lucky enough to have a lot of ecology in my degree course. I think understanding where you sit within the ecosystem was a good start to my learning, along with a good dose of soil science. But mostly you were taught how to get the highest yield out of a dairy cow, and how to get the best response from fertiliser. I think even today, maybe there’s a bit of ecology and agro-ecology in degrees, but I think it’s still mainly about how to use inputs most effectively to get the biggest yields. That’s mostly what we’ve been taught.

And with fruit and vegetables, what was your biggest issue at Riverford?
I remember the first few years: it was a dairy farm, and dairy farms have a lot of grass, with a lot of perennial weeds. And learning how to control those weeds without over cultivating was quite a challenge, because every time you cultivate the soil you damage it, and probably lose some fertility. So, it’s been quite a big issue over the years.

When did Riverford become 100% employee-owned? And how big has Riverford become over the years?
I no longer own Riverford, I sold my last shares two years ago. Riverford is probably about 1,000 hectares or so. It’s not a lot. But most of the vegetables that Riverford sells come from farmers. We work very closely with them, but we don’t own the land. We help them technically to be better at it, and then we market all the produce, and we also sell the beef and lamb and eggs and chickens.

Do you remember when and how your idea became big?
Well, it just happened over many years. I guess at the beginning the growth was 50%, then it probably slowed down to 30%, and now I think it stands at 10% – so, it’s just grown steadily. Sometimes I look back and sure enough, much of the time, it all seemed too fast, and consequently very stressful. I guess the fastest growth we had was between 2000 and 2007. That was crazy. That’s when it became a really, really big business, really quickly, quite out of control. Looking back on it, I don’t think we did things well, I don’t think we took care of our people well, there were a lot of problems at the time. I think we could do much more better now. In the last ten years, where we’ve grown more slowly, it’s been better for us, in many ways. I didn’t have the skills to manage a business that was growing at that rate, and when it finally got to a certain size, which I think was around 2007, I went and hired a professional CEO who, for better or worse, brought in a lot of conventional business practices. Some good things and some bad things. Looking back, I still don’t really know if it was the right thing to do, but he made Riverford much more conventional and, ultimately, he had to go because I didn’t like the way he was running the business, but anyway it was sort of growing up. I suppose he forced us to grow up, and we probably needed it.

Here in Italy we have the zero-kilometre distribution, but it has never been a great success. In your opinion, why doesn’t this system work in our country?
I know France better, but I suppose you have more alternatives. You have better markets. Maybe it’s easier to buy products directly from a farm, at a local market or something, so there are other alternatives that we don’t really have. We were the first country to have an industrial revolution, to become largely urbanised. So, we cut our cord with the countryside much earlier than France and Italy, and almost everywhere else. As a result, we have this kind of disconnect between the lives that most people lead… And I think our Box Scheme [Riverford’s weekly delivery schedule of boxes of locally grown produce, sent straight to customers’ doors, Editor’s Note] is a bit about wanting to reconnect with both farming and the farmers. And so maybe there’s more of a demand for that in England, because you can’t find it in other ways. I think that’s probably the case in France, but I don’t know Italy that well.

And what about your success?
The reason why we’ve probably been the most successful – but there’s also another company, Abel & Cole, that has done pretty well – is because we’ve been at it a long time, and we’ve learned a lot, and we are really, really good at it. I hope that doesn’t sound arrogant, but it’s taken forty years of just patient attention to detail. You know, we haven’t had any clever buggers come in and want us to grow, to acquire other companies… We’re quite good at selling stories, but perhaps we’re not that kind of marketing aces. We’re not driven by the market, we have pretty strong beliefs that inform all of our decisions, we enjoy a lot of trust from our customers. And I think that, probably, the fact that we are so different – a fact for which I feel personally responsible – and that we are becoming more and more renowned, is because we are challenging an unfair world, that a lot of people are unhappy with. And we are seen as a beacon of hope, I suppose. And it’s not just about food. I think it’s also in the way we treat people, it’s in being employee-owned. It’s a willingness to collaborate, and share, and so on. It’s about fairness… We have the most incredible inequality in the UK, only the US has more of it, and it’s becoming a huge problem. So I think we are offering an alternative for a lot of people who are unhappy with the direction that farming, food industry, retailing, but also society, government and business are going in. These are all quite philosophical issues. The reason we’ve been successful – which was your question – is that we’ve managed to combine all of that with the fact that we’re actually technically good at what we do. We really know fruit and vegetables, whereas a lot of our competitors have just been led by either finance or marketing. They haven’t really recognised that vegetables are very demanding. One has to understand what good quality is, how you can achieve it, how it can be maintained through the supply chain. These are very detailed aspects, in which we have put a lot of effort, in order to know our business and do it well. And I believe that the combination of our storytelling with being challenging, and being different is the reason why we’ve been successful.
That’s quite a long answer, I hope it makes sense…

That’s a good answer, for sure. And do you think that the responsibility to be fair, challenging and alternative, according to your philosophy, has come with some kind of sacrifice? I mean, you’ve never been driven by profit, I see…

I don’t feel like I’ve made any sacrifices, because I have no desire to have more money than I have. I feel that I have everything. I do what I love, I have the autonomy to do it the way I want to for most of my life, I have more money than I’ll ever know what to do with. So, I mean, I’ve got everything. I don’t feel like I’ve made any sacrifices. There’s no doubt that I could have sold the company for a lot more than I did, but that wouldn’t have made me happier, so I don’t feel like I’ve made any sacrifice. A lot of people think I’m crazy and that it was immoral not to have maximised shareholder value because many people, probably most people, believe that this is the purpose of business. But I don’t think I’m the crazy one, I think they’re the crazy ones. I mean, anyone who thinks that twenty million pounds are going to make you happier than five million pounds is just an idiot. Look around you: are those rich people happy? Living in their gated communities, with their huge yachts, constantly afraid of being robbed and worried about whether their friends like them for their money, or for who they really are. I do not want that. Who would want to live like this, to be divided from the rest of humanity? I see no joy in it, at all. My second wife taught me how to enjoy my wealth a little more. Money gives us the freedom to do what we want: I can enjoy staying in a nice hotel and going to a fancy restaurant up to a point, but after a couple of days, I just want to come home and work on the farm. And in general, I enjoy working people and my interactions with them far more than my interactions with rich people. Mostly, I don’t like rich people. I know, that’s a prejudiced thing to say, but I find them vulgar and I don’t want to spend my time with them. Part of the problem with having a lot of money is that you find yourself in situations where there are a lot of other people with a lot of money, and most of the time I don’t like them. I’d rather spend my time with the people who work on the farm, than with those who own hundred million pound companies. I find the former far more interesting, because they have far more humanity.