154 155 Outside the box: a conversation with Guy Watson, the organic farmer who revolutionised delivery (and the agricultural system) in UK Sandro Di Domenico 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 nonexecutive 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.
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