Conquering hero
Alex James
Iwas in a meeting a year or so ago about a charity record for Darfur. Mick was on board. Bono was confirmed. It was all looking good — good for Darfur, as the benevolent gods of rock assembled to come to the rescue.
Amy Winehouse’s name was mentioned. ‘Isn’t she a bit tricky?’ said someone. Then an executive I’d only ever met after midnight, someone I’d always privately believed to be a simpleton, said something I’ll always remember. ‘People say she’s difficult. That means she is brilliant. It always does. You can’t be difficult and not be brilliant in this business. No one will tolerate it.’ I recalled those unexpected words of wisdom, sadly perhaps the best thing to come out of that meeting, as I travelled to Laverstoke Park on Tuesday. It was Charles Campion who suggested I went down there. He knows more about food than anyone else. ‘You need to go and see what Jody Scheckter is up to,’ he said. When Charles tells you something, it’s true. So, I went.
Well, Jody Scheckter was a Formula One world champion, for Ferrari. He retired from motor racing, moved from here to America and started a company that had a hundred million dollar annual turnover by the time he sold it and moved back to England. He is a winner, a conqueror. Since he returned to these shores, he has been pouring his considerable verve and inestimable wealth into a farm project.
I’m a farmer myself, and there is nothing that delights a farmer more than snooping around other people’s farms. It has been a great pleasure to be one of the judging panel for the BBC’s Farmer of the Year this year. I’ve been up and down the country, having a wonderful time, admiring the best of the best.
Jody probably wouldn’t qualify for farmer of the year because I doubt he is making a profit and I mentioned the Amy Winehouse story because in the weeks leading up to my visit to Jody at Laverstoke Park, it seemed words like ‘tricky’, ‘difficult’ and even ‘impossible’ were cropping up whenever I said his name, but from the moment I arrived I was utterly staggered, rendered speechless apart from swear-words by the man’s vision. I’m still reeling. It is without doubt the best farm in the world, the best farm imaginable. It’s the farm of the future. It’s a billion dollar biodynamic beano.
Many of our most progressive farmers have made their fortunes elsewhere. The Bamfords who own JCB are doing wonderful things with Daylesford Organic. The Dorling Kindersley people, the Kindersleys, have a fantastic set up at Sheepdrove. Prince Charles is perhaps best known as an organic farmer. He was way ahead, there.
Agriculture makes great advances through the efforts of these people and others like them, people whose principal interest isn’t profit. Although they aim to be profitable, they make their money elsewhere.
These are people who can afford to say, not ‘how do we make some money out of this?’ but ‘how should we really be doing this?’ and, boy, do we need them. But for the efforts of a few, agriculture would still be languishing in its very own dark age. We love food; suddenly, we love chefs — they are the new rock stars — but we just don’t care about farmers. Making a soufflé is easy but making the ingredients for a soufflé is a very clever trick. In future we will look back on chemical pesticides and fertilisers as we look back now at the Romans’ use of lead pipes for drinking water. What we feed our plants and animals is what we feed ourselves. Obviously.
I thought biodynamic farming was a lot of hokum until I went to Laverstoke. I came away thinking it is the only model that will work.
Much as with organic farming, biodynamics starts with nurturing the soil, but biodynamics takes things a stage further. It embraces diversity and growing things as slowly as possible. The current business model for agriculture is fast growth and monoculture, which is totally and utterly wrong when you think about it. But, fear not, the cavalry is here. Here is an absolutely brilliant man taking a huge risk, investing tens of millions, apparently for altruistic, Bono-type reasons. ‘Well, what else am I going to do, sit on a yacht?’ he says.
There is a small farm shop on site. I popped in on my way out and bought absolutely everything. There was no one else in there. All at Tesco, I guess. How can that be? Jody Scheckter is the only one singing in tune. Way, way ahead of the rest. Difficult? He was utterly charming. Difficult is just a loser’s word for brilliant. q
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