Growing food at the best of times is not a money-making enterprise, far from it, we only ever expect the farm to break even and most years this is a stretch to achieve. In fact nearly every year of the last 5 years, our retail business has made up for the losses we have incurred on our farm.
You can see the little video from our tomato polytunnel where I talk about the challenges of the last five weeks, click here to watch.
We grow the food, because we love to do it, because sustainable agriculture is something we strongly believe in, and we believe is the key to a healthier future.
We have PV cells generating our electricity, we have invested in a zero-emission electric van, we collect our rainwater, we plant trees, and hedgerows, we use only plastic free packaging. We educate people on how important biodiversity and sustainable growing is through social media, blog posts and farm walks. To get everybody involved in thinking about the planet and the environment, where our food comes and how it is produced is our critical philosophy.
All of this takes time and energy, it all costs money and at the end of the day although everybody wants to enjoy their job and although nearly everybody that works with us believes in our values and our mission, they still need to get paid.
The last two weeks I have been very focused on farm field work which has been a nice distraction from the other challenges in our business at the moment. At least to some extent you can grapple with machines and plants and mostly you know where you stand. But there is no doubt this is the worst commercial growing period we have experienced in our 18 years. This is now heading into 2 growing seasons of devastation from relentless climate related damage, nonstop rain for nearly 12 months give or take.
All that aside it has been a pleasant respite from business related woes, woes to an extent that we have brought upon ourselves. At this point if I had known the real cost and the damage a system change would have done, I would have thought long and hard about whether it was the right thing to do. I guess any major change from website to business administration will be complex and take its toll, change is hard, but as we head into week 5 post new website launch, we are staring at 5 straight weeks of lost customers. At this stage we have fixed a good portion of the problems with our website, and we continue to work on others. Things are certainly much better than they were 5 weeks ago, but we are still missing a good portion of you our customers. We know that when a habit is broken it is hard to reinstate it.
But as we head into the season when we have commitments to honour to our farm to other Irish farmers, to our own team of people here and many more, I would ask you to please if you have not restarted ordering with us again to please do so. It makes such a difference, it keeps us viable, it keeps the very best healthiest food on your table, and without you we would be no more, so if you can at all please take the time and revisit our site. Our team in customer service are on hand to answer all your questions 9 am-3.30 pm, 5 days per week and they are more than happy to help in any way they can.
So, this is a plea, a plea to ask you to order next week, to find a way (if you can at all) to continue to support us, and as we start to see the level of Irish produce increase this is more important than ever.
Thank you,
Kenneth
PS Please click here to login and place an order.