156 157 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 overcultivating 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.
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