“I am involved in a number of businesses, one of which is farming. You may wonder what an Iranian is doing farming in the depths of Norfolk in England. After all, this is a pursuit of the indigenous people of this country. You are absolutely right. This is a question that I ask myself many times when I am confronting problems and dealing with matters that are not part of my mainstream business. However, it is very exciting. In two ways I was encouraged to get involved with farming. One is that the ownership of land and growing things on it is in my view a very exciting pursuit in itself. It could be the epitome of any other kind of business. You struggle hard, you take risks, put seed in the ground, you play with your luck and the weather and other perils such as pests, weeds and so on, so that five, six or nine months later you have a crop that can be sold at a premium price. You hope that your crop will be in demand at the prices that you counted on at cultivation time. In other words, playing the future market. We do not always get this right.
However, the idea of farming ensures that my feet are firmly on the ground and in touch with the reality of life. But I also wanted to do farming, especially organic farming, for a particular reason. At the time (1994) I was inspired by a number of people I knew who helped me to realise the need to ensure that the food that we eat is produced locally, is fresh and is not treated with chemicals and so on. Furthermore, on the business side it had become apparent to me over the years that the farm gate prices appear to be enormously out of step with supermarket shelf prices. Prices are generally far higher than farm gate prices. For example, look at some basic products like potatoes. The farm gate price of potatoes is somewhere between £600 to £6,000 a ton depending on the variety. Furthermore, the supermarket that is selling the product is often not taking the risk on the actual sale of the product. So if the supermarket does not sell then it does not pay and the product is returned to the farmer. I may be corrected on this, but from my limited experience so far the retailer does it that way then he will ensure that out of the crop that the farmer produces he selects the absolute premium quality element of the crop only, which may be somewhere between 30% to 60% of the farmer's total harvest. So somewhere between 70% and 40% of the harvest may be discarded or bought at much lower prices by supermarkets or other retailers.
Disparity between the farm gate prices and the retail is so much that I felt that with my marketing skills I could potentially benefit from some of that profit, especially if organic farming methods are used. By this means the premium can be improved even further. Only 1% of the food sold in the UK is organic and the demand is increasing by 40% per year. 70% of organic food is imported. So there is also a business plan!
I have been farming for five years and the conversion period of organic farming is quite long. Usually for normal arable land (arable being land that grows cereal crops such as wheat, barley etc.) is two and a half years. So for two and a half years you are building fertility and "in conversion" without the use of chemicals. So you cultivate grass and clover, which are then ploughed back into the land in order to enrich the soil. Once the soil is enriched with nitrogen, released by the clover and grass, it is time to start growing crops. Usually once the land is converted by organic methods, you rotate one season of grass and clover with four seasons of crops. Crops can vary between high energy and high density products such as potatoes, sugar beet or vegetables like leek; and the three cereal crops such as wheat, oats or barley. Therefore in the first ten years, taking into account two and a half years of conversion period and further one year of fertility building, there is 6.5 years of crop harvest.
Ardeshire Naghshineh Addresses the BIBA General Meeting
Ardeshire Naghshineh Tending To Hurd
In the second ten years you will have eight years of harvest as the conversion period no longer applies.
I also wanted to ensure that my farm was a mixed farm and included cattle and sheep. That it also employed local people with knowledge, which is rapidly disappearing because of the mechanisation of farming in general. I wanted the farm to involve the sale of its produce locally to start with, and then to start expanding out. I want to ensure that we sell directly from the farm to the consumer and that we use minimal packaging and so take some of the premium between the farm gate prices and the shelf prices. My program is a ten year program from the start, i.e. another five to go! The objective in five years time is to have capital growth in the value of my farm. This means creating a farm which is clear of all chemicals, is well planted and well hedged; and which has a produce of the highest quality, and is fresh with not an iota of suspicion of any tampering to promote accelerated growth in order to increase yield. In other words producing through use of good management system and selling direct to the consumer. Hopefully also growing crops, which are indigenous to the UK. I don't think I will growing mangos or bananas!
So if in ten years time the agricultural land values drop by 50% and the produce costs also reduce by 50%, leading to large losses for my venture, I am sure a fully flourished and successful BIBA at that time won't be asking me to give a talk on the subject! They probably will not find me because I have gone bankrupt! My gut feeling is that such a scenario will be unlikely. There is a Government, Local Government and European Government and backed initiative called Food Link , which has a pilot program in East Anglia and one or two other areas. The object of the Food Link program is to encourage local farmers to locally produce food organically. Food Link had a conference at our farm at Salle Moor Hall, and BBC Look East television news program covered this.