“Cardoons are a perennial crop – they keep coming back every year,” says Guy Singh-Watson, as his dog, Artichoke, roots around for voles among the tall thistle-like plants. “They would be a dream crop – if only people liked eating them.”
Cardoons, which Singh-Watson learned to love while snowed in on a Sicilian mountain, are not your typical vegetable. But then the Riverford veg box founder is not your typical farmer, despite still living only a few miles from the farm where he was born.
Unlike most farmers, Singh-Watson says we need to eat less meat, that large-scale farmers should pay inheritance tax and that Brexit has been “a complete and utter fuck-up”. He has opposed foxhunting, banned the badger cull from his land and supported the climate protesters of Extinction Rebellion. He once even voted for Jeremy Corbyn. When it comes to the challenges agriculture faces, he is the most brutally honest farmer in the UK.
Ploughing this lonely furrow has not limited his success. Riverford, now owned by its employees, had a turnover of £113m in 2023-24 and made a profit of £5.7m. He has also been awarded farmer of the year by the BBC twice.
But how did Singh-Watson come to follow this path? In a long conversation outside the Riverford Field Kitchen restaurant, he talked to the Guardian about his unconventional father, a mother who made good food the beating heart of the farm and revealed his autism, diagnosed formally only recently.
Cucumber stew
Gillian and John Watson arrived at Riverford Farm in 1951, both from colonial families returning home as the British empire faded. “My parents wanted to do something useful with their lives, and at a time when there was still food rationing,” says Singh-Watson.
“They were Liberals all their life, in quite an old-school, perhaps almost patronising way … They had a social conscience and believed that being wealthy and privileged came with responsibilities.” This was not a given, he says. “My father’s family were absolutely hideous – the worst sort of rich, wealthy twats and racists. But he made something better from that.”
His father was always unconventional. “He never really wanted to do things the way other people did and was always experimenting with different things – we were the first people to have a combine harvester in the village. Then he got into pigs in a big way. He was always building different housing setups for them, most of which didn’t work.”
The farm did, like most others, intensify, embracing pesticides and fertilisers. “Then, in the 1970s, reading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and through his own observation, he was starting to question farming intensively.”
Singh-Watson says his father was an “awful cook”, remembering his cucumber stew at one meal. His mother had a degree in agriculture and wanted to farm, “but those were chauvinist times and she was just the most amazing cook”. She made bread and hams, and grew herbs, but was also an experimenter. “She was making kombucha in about 1980,” he says.
“My mum didn’t survive to eat in the Field Kitchen,” he says. The Riverford restaurant, now celebrating its 20th year, is the most exceptional part of the business in his opinion. “If she had, I think she would have absolutely loved it. It was very much based on that experience of growing up in a busy farmhouse with a big, long table, where the whole family and half a dozen people from the farm would come and eat together: great food from really good ingredients, mostly from the farm.”
‘I was unemployable’
The Riverford organic veg business began in 1986 when Singh-Watson returned to the family farm for Christmas after giving up a management consultancy job in New York. “I had decided by then that I was unemployable, that I really couldn’t work for anyone else,” he says. “I’m just too pigheaded and stubborn to ever work for anyone else. I also knew I wanted to be outside.
“People seemed to be talking about organic vegetables and I thought, there’s an opportunity here,” he says. He started with three acres. His short business career had taught him that controlling the access to market was key and in 1993 he decided to deliver the veg direct to customers in an old yellow Citroën Dyane.
“That was definitely a plan, and also an emotional thing, that no one was going to fuck me over like I was fucked over by supermarkets and their very unpleasant buyers,” he says. The break came when he told a Safeway’s buyer where they could stick their measly 6p per lettuce. Since then, Riverford has gone from selling only veg from its own farm to founding a co-operative of south Devon organic farms in the late 1990s to today, when it works with than 100 suppliers in the UK and Europe to fill its boxes.
Singh-Watson got a formal diagnosis of autism in April. “It made me feel all the more that I don’t have to live by other people’s rules,” he says. “I’m different – so what? I find it really difficult to understand how people are able to just lie so easily, and to serve their own ends.”
He cites fossil fuel and chemical company boards covering up evidence of harm. “I mean, who the fuck makes those decisions, knowing that they are fucking the planet for their children.” He said the autism diagnosis had helped him understand why this upset him so much and why he had never needed the approval of others: “I don’t really care.”
But Singh-Watson says he has softened with time and the help of therapy. “I was definitely like, ‘I’m going to say this because it’s true, and I don’t give a fuck if you find it offensive’. But I try not to do that now because offending people gratuitously is just stupid and childish really.”
‘Just eat less meat’
Singh-Watson may believe he has softened. But for many years he has been an iconoclastic voice among farmers. Take meat: most British farmers reject calls to eat less red meat to reduce damage to the environment and people’s health. Singh-Watson says eat good meat but less often: just 5% of what Riverford sells is meat. He had shared an organic chicken with eight people the previous evening: “I probably won’t buy another one for a month.”
“I spent a lot of time looking at the evidence on [the impact of meat] and it was overwhelming,” he says. “Ten billion people can’t live sustainably on this planet if we are eating anything like the level of meat consumed in a western diet. The only answer is we just eat less meat, dairy and eggs.”
“[Some cattle and sheep farmers] will tell you that that grassland is sequestering as much carbon as a rainforest – it’s absolutely fucking tosh but it doesn’t stop them saying it,” he says.
Singh-Watson’s parents were livestock farmers, and his four siblings all work in meat and dairy businesses. “I love seeing the cows and sheep in the fields, and I’m not a vegan or vegetarian,” he says. “I just think we should try harder to eat less meat and to farm in a better way.”
‘Emotive tosh’
That approach has made Singh-Watson a rich man: he sold his last share of Riverford to its 1,000 employees for £10m in 2023 and owns a 150-acre farm nearby.
So his support for the Labour government’s move to end an exclusion from inheritance tax for farms worth more than £1m once again put him at odds with his peers. In January, he called protests against the tax change “emotive tosh”.
“My starting point is that we desperately need to raise tax revenue to rebuild our country and rich people, the ones who have been the beneficiaries of all the growth the last 20 years, are the people who should be paying it,” he says, although he says he would have set the threshold higher than £1m.
Under the new rules inheritance tax will be levied at 20% – half the standard rate – and with 10 years interest-free to pay. “That is a pretty major concession, and if you give your land to your children seven years before you die, they don’t pay inheritance tax anyway,” Singh-Watson says.
“If you’re a farmer owning a farmhouse and 200 acres of land, you’re going to be worth at least £3.2m – that puts you in the top 1% of wealth in this country,” he says. “And if you’re farming 500-acres-plus, and you’re worth £10m, you should pay the whole fucking lot – forget the 50% discount. You should just pay your tax like anyone else. They are immensely wealthy, and though they are relatively poor in terms of income, they do have options. You can sell a field.” He says the children of parents owning a family pub, bakery or brewery may be just as invested in their business as farmers, but do not get any tax breaks.
Singh-Watson also backs a wealth tax: “The rich need to pay their share to restore the services that are wanted. That’s why I’m a member of Patriotic Millionaires UK.”
“But the easiest way to get money out of the farming sector would be to capture the 100-fold increase in land value when planning permission is granted to build houses on it,” he says. “I don’t see why the farmer should be the beneficiary of that. Maybe they should get double the agricultural value, but the rest of it should go into the public purse.” His rough estimate of how much that would raise when the government’s target of 300,000 new homes are built is £10bn – 25 times more than the inheritance tax changes.
‘Crawling back to Europe’
Of all the positions he has taken, opposing Brexit brought him the most hate, he says. “But just about everything that I said has turned out to be true: it has been a complete and utter fuck-up. How can anyone argue anything else? Now we’re having to crawl back to Europe.”
He excoriates the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. “This alliance between the working poor and a load of rich rightwing toffs has been the basis of fascism for a century. How can we still be living it out? I find it really upsetting.”
Singh-Watson says he usually votes Liberal Democrat or Green: “But when I was registered in London for a bit, when I was living with my wife there, I actually voted for [local MP] Jeremy Corbyn. I’m unsure how I feel about him now.”
He says the EU’s common agricultural policy was “appalling”, but with farming making up only 1% of the UK’s GDP, was not a justification for Brexit by itself.
“The biggest problem with Brexit is just how incredibly disruptive it has been,” he says. “Businesses mostly want government to piss off and leave them alone with a stable [regulatory] environment, whether that’s workers’ rights, environmental legislation, trading agreements – they just want a stable base, and I think Labour have done better than the Tories on that.”
Singh-Watson has no time for the National Farmers’ Union, by far the loudest voice for agriculture in the UK: “I disengaged with the NFU a long time ago – all they seem to do is want to protect the status quo.
“They represent the older, richer, more conservative farmers,” he says. “But there are a lot of young people who have a much more radical approach to farming but who don’t have access to land. I want to hear their voices, but I think they’re completely unrepresented by the NFU.”
Expensive luxury?
A common critique of the kind of organic veg Riveford supplies is that it is an expensive luxury, affordable to relatively few people. The real problem, counters Singh-Watson, is low incomes and supermarket profits.
“The phrase ‘food poverty’ infuriates me. We have a real issue with poverty, but very little of it has to do with food,” he says. “Most people spend 10% of their income on food and for poorer people, it might be 15%.”
“But for everyone it’s still less than they pay on rent, and how much do we talk about ‘rent poverty’?” he says. “The reason people are poor is because they’re not paid enough and because housing is too expensive in this country. All the research suggests that most people, even people on lower incomes, want to feed their families better and they are prepared to pay a bit more for it.”
“And what about the supermarkets? Why aren’t we talking about what they are sucking out of the food chain?” he asks. “Vegetables prices are typically multiplied four times between leaving the field and arriving on the supermarket shelf. We’re talking about the wrong thing.”
Nonetheless, Riverford recently cut the price of 20 staple items in its veg boxes. How? “We’re going to make less money,” Singh-Watson says.
“We were very affordable for a long time – cheaper than conventional veg in Tesco – but that came with compromises” on staff pay and being green, he says. “Arguably, over the last five to 10 years, we’ve swung the other way, and we’re absolutely uncompromising.”
Forty years on from its founding, what does Singh-Watson hope the coming decades will bring for Riverford? “In an ideal world, it would be commercially successful without compromising on its values, and thereby show that it is possible to do business in a different way,” he says. “The No 1 thing I want to show is that unregulated, brutal capitalism is not the way forward, and that we can behave another way. I would go as far as to say the future of our planet depends on it.”
The last chapter of his late father’s life was establishing a low-carbon commune, collecting waifs and strays, says Singh-Watson. Now at 65, he says: “I don’t want to retire but I like doing stuff that I can get my arms around and say I did that. I’ve been building stone walls for the last month, and nothing makes me happier.”
Going around the fields picking veg and then going home to cook it, as his mother did, also makes him very happy. As for the cardoons, Singh-Watson recommends frying the tough, bitter leaf stems in breadcrumbs with a Sicilian dip called bagna cauda, made of olive oil, garlic and anchovies: “All the best food is peasant food.”