Jake and Leah Harris are members of the South Devon Organic Producers co-operative, founded by Riverford’s own Guy Singh-Watson. They left their jobs in London to live the good life on Jake’s family farm in the picturesque village of Newton Ferrers, on the mouth of the River Yealm. Amongst the steep green hills, Newton Downs Farm grows brilliant leeks, cabbages and kale, as well as raising organic livestock.
“We were never going to be able to do just one thing on this farm,” Leah says. “The topography just doesn’t suit it, for one. We’ve got lots of small fields, on uneven land, with lots of hedgerows and trees. As well as veg, we have a herd of suckler cows, sheep, and we took over a horse livery business that Jake’s father has built up over 30 years.”
This traditional mixed system (with both veg and livestock) doesn’t just allow Jake and Leah to make use of all their sloping odds and ends of land; it’s also beneficial to the soil, as the roaming livestock provide natural fertiliser.
Fertile soil is important to the Harrises – and a big part of their decision to farm organically. This finite natural resource, vital for growing food and sequestering carbon, has been seriously damaged by the demands of agriculture; one-third of the planet’s arable soil is now degraded. Organic farming protects soil, by rotating crops to build up fertility naturally, leaving fields to rest as part of the cycle, and never using artificial fertilisers or pesticides.
“On Sunday we took our daughter out into the fields, where she helped stack leeks in the boxes. We were pulling them up by hand and were really amazed by the amount of worms and life in the soil,” Leah says. “We believe it’s down to no spraying, and the diversity you create by putting different root structures into the soil.”
“People talk about tilling as the most damaging thing for soil, but we feel artificial chemicals are just as bad. The more you look into glyphosate [the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Round-up, the world’s most widely used herbicide], the more you understand how it works, and it’s hard not to feel that it’s going to completely throw off the balance of soil health.”
“There are nutrients in the soil that go into the vegetable that make it healthy. If you’ve got a lot of life and health in your soil, it makes sense that it produces a healthy vegetable. The more we do it, the more we feel that it’s the diversity of what you do on the farm that is key,” says Leah.
And their super-sustainable farm goes even further than the principles of organic farming.
“We also have a community-owned 4MW solar farm on the land, which generates renewable energy for the grid. How about that, grazing lambs underneath solar panels – surely that’s the most carbon positive lamb you can get?”
