It was 2006 and I was working on our little vegetable patch where many of our polytunnels now stand. Our next-door neighbour, a curious, sauntering type of person, one that clearly knows better and one that really wanted our family farm came over the joining wall to inspect my work. “What are you doing?” he asked. “weeding” I said. His response: “that’s ridiculous that won’t work, you need Roundup”. I can’t remember what I said, but as we are still “weeding” and growing vegetables today, we neither used Roundup nor sold the farm.
But that is the thing, what is the right thing to do? That weeding was hard, and seemed futile, I was getting nowhere, no sooner had I finished one part of the field than I had to start again at the beginning. Was it a good decision? Well, I believe it was and overtime I learned to grow better crops and the weeds became less of a problem.
What constitutes good decisions? We are all everyday caught in the cross winds of life, it is so difficult to figure out what is right and then it requires a whole other pile of energy to do the right thing.
By the very virtue of the fact that you are reading this, and you have gotten this far you are amongst the very few who are doing the right thing. If you came on this message in one of our printed sheets you are an active customer, that probably puts you in the top 20% of people taking positive action for the planet and for your health, that is amazing, think about it.
Unfortunately, most people still want to do as the Ostrich does. It is easy to think that the processed food we eat today does not affect us and that factory farmed meat is fine, but in time we find that it is not. That’s the problem with food, doing the right thing can be difficult and doing the “wrong” thing is easy and the consequences of our poor choices are hidden from us by time and shiny packaging.
But you it seems are not that person. You have spent the energy and made the decision that food is worth taking seriously or maybe more importantly you have decided that your health and the health of our planet is worth taking seriously. You probably know that like all good habits (they require discipline, there are no short cuts) the impact is seen in time, no instant gratification here. So, you too are like us, and this is very important to us.
It was close to 20 years ago when myself and my wife Jenny started thinking about taking over my dad’s farm to create a sustainable business. This was a major milestone in our lives, when like you we decided we had to do something to right the wrongs. We were young naïve and didn’t consider in any shape the risks or the pitfalls. But there was one thing that kept us going, and as I look back now it was that unwavering belief that what we were doing was worthwhile.
What you are doing is worthwhile.
You have chosen us to bring decent wholesome sustainable food into your home, we will not let you down, that trust means everything to us. We will never abuse it and we will always honour our founding principles which is to put your health and our planet first in all the decisions we make.
Thank you for being one of us.
Kenneth
