As we stand in the nerve centre of Peter Barfoot’s £340million business outside Bognor, I turn towards the window and look out on field after field of greens, disappearing away over the horizon.
“Owner of all you survey?” I joke.
He grins. “Pretty much, yes.”
“How does that feel?”
“Good,” he shrugs.
Good indeed. £70 million turnover’s worth of good. Largest corn producer in the EU good. Bases in 23 different countries, Grower Of The Year, personal-visits-from-David Miliband good. A feeling of some modest pleasure. It’s typical of his nature: self-effacing, but with a modesty that is as much a product of his restlessness. He’s a man driven: always looking for the next opportunity, never content to merely make-do.
“You have to have an inbuilt dedication,” he had explained earlier that day. “It’s not just ability that builds a business. It’s a kind of ruthlessness - that you’ll sacrifice anything to get there. I’m not saying that’s a good thing: it’ll bring you as much pain as joy, but if you want to grow, you need to be prepared to put in extremely long, uncomfortable hours.”
Thirty years ago, Barfoot could probably have hopscotched across all he owned. Scratch behind most rags to riches stories and you find far more riches than rags, a polite fairytale conspired to by media and subject alike, but Barfoot is a genuine exception. He’s a growing alchemist whose entire fortune has been won on the back of sweat and initiative.
In 1974, you would have found him literally grabbing bulls by the horns, as he wrangled cattle on a remote station in Northern Australia (‘they call it jackarooing’). It was his fourth year out in the arid wilderness he loved, a time he still regards as seminal in his life.
“I learnt a lot about life there,” he recalls, “It wasn’t easy to win over a bunch of Australians, especially in that era. But there was something about the simple life, the outdoors, that always appealled to me. I found it very calming.”
The decision to emigrate to Australia was one more symptom of a restless spirit. For the young Barfoot, the signs were not promising. He twitched his way through formal education, exiting at 16 with a clutch of mediocre results.
“I wasn’t very clever at school,” he explains. “I got bored very easily.”
At that time, farming couldn’t have been further from his thoughts. Art was his passion: he had wanted to go to college, but took advice from relatives against it.
Instead, at a loss, and as the son of a fifth-generation strawberry grower, he spent his first year post-education working on a farm. “Suddenly, I found I enjoyed the open air. I wasn’t so bored anymore. I ended up going to agricultural college, came out, spent a couple of years making some money through milking and fencing, then decided to emigrate.”
After four years as an Outback cowboy, he returned home for a short holiday, ended-up putting down a few too many roots, and stayed-on. He was 25.
But what to do? Already, Barfoot had realised he didn’t want to be part of the family strawberry business. He tried to get a good job in farm management, but failed, and thus decided to go it alone. With £5,000-worth of savings from his life on the range, he rented land near his familial home in Hampshire and put down 21 acres of courgettes. “They were called zucchinis then,” he reminisces. “Britons were just starting to go abroad, and experiment with food. At that point, they were still considered exotic!”
His alien veg flourished in the high-sunshine Hampshire micro-climate created by the Isle Of Wight splitting the incoming clouds. Season one was a hit, and gradually he began to extend his range, still focusing on the exotic, adding squashes, sweet potatoes, legumes, and most succesfully, sweetcorn, of which he remains the largest grower in the EU.
As his cash flow expanded, he began adding more and more rentals to his portfolio, and set about streamlining his distribution mechanisms, chasing ever-larger contracts with retailers. Business boomed. Soon, it seemed the enterprise would need to expand abroad if he was to guarantee his supply.
“By the late-eighties and early nineties, if you had a supermarket business, you needed to be selling twelve months a year,” Barfoot explains. “Or else by the time spring rolled round again, you’d wake up to find someone else had stolen your business.”
He began entering into overseas partnerships, first in Spain, then rolling out to 23 countries globally, as far afield as Chile. In the past three years, he’s moved his operation into Senegal, a scheme he’s particularly keen on.
“The land’s there,” he enthuses. “You’ve got a population with very little to do. You’ve got a climate that’s pretty much on the same latitude to the north as Chile is to the south. The rainy season is July and August, which is basically your UK peak season anyway.”
In spite of the food safety hurdles, growing in third world continues to make sense for his business.
“We use local farmers and give them all the administrative and technical assistance they need to succeed. There’s a cost involved in that administration, obviously, but the advantage of being a very large business is that you can have proper systems in place to deal with these things.”
As time has moved on, Barfoot feels that size has become the crucial factor for success. “Certainly, it would be very difficult to repeat what I did nowadays,” he muses. “The market has become very consolidated. Growing the product to perfection is the starting-line now. That’s taken for granted. Supplying it in the way that supermarkets demand, at the price they expect, is the new frontier. And to deal with the various paper trails modern growing throws up, you almost have to be a large business.”
He has little time for growers who complain that they are being railroaded out of business by supermarket avarice.
“I don’t see why agriculture, as an industry, should be exempt from the rules of markets generally. Everywhere you look, consolidation is happening. It’s happening in the car market, it’s happening in banking. In the modern era, you’ve either got to be big and lean, or small and niche. A friend of mine used to have 200 cows, and sold the milk on to big dairies. Now, he has 120, has learnt how to make cheese, and sells his micro-brand at a much higher price, tapping into ‘local sourcing’ initiatives. At the other end of the scale, there are dairy producers going out of business every day, but there isn’t less milk, is there? Their herds are being bought-up by producers who know how to be more efficient. It’s either-or.”
He’s philosophical about market pressure. “I’m not a political person,” he explains. “I believe that you have to change yourself, rather than changing the world. Rather than militating against the supermarkets, you need to work harder to be better. Serving a UK supermarket has always been a challenge, and we have to meet that challenge, whatever.”
But while he may be resigned about economics, his lust for the great outdoors has seldom been divorced from his business. Barfoot is chair of the LEAF initiative, and involved in a number of enviromental programmes (‘I do it because it’s something I enjoy’). He’s also a strong opponent of polytunnels (‘a blight on the landscape’).
As we tour the grounds of his Bognor site, he points out the field margins that punctuate the land. By his neighbour’s farmhouse, he points out a few saplings recently planted into a hedgerow along the side of the road. “He’s not the kind of guy you’d expect to do it - I guess it must be rubbing off.”
Recently, the farm hosted Environment Secretary David Miliband, who toured the massive new biogas generator they’re building.
“We’re very tuned-into these issues, so we were ahead of the curve on this one,” he points out. “This project has been two years in the planning.” It is hoped that, of the energy-from-waste it generates, one-third will be enough to power the entire operation, while the other two-thirds will be sold back into the national grid.
Barfoot sees his talent for remaining two steps ahead of the market as a natural consequence of his ability to delegate. “Getting talented brains ino the business” is what he lists when asked about his number one challenge.
“We do a lot of work with the MDS,” he continues. “I’m very passionate about getting talented young people into the business. On aggregate, the age of UK farmers is about my age. My company is much younger than that. It’s important to have hunger, young ideas, new perspectives. I’m happy to give key management posts to people in their twenties if I feel they’re ready for it. And I’m prepared to reward them properly, too. It’s vital that people feel they are invested personally. They need to know they have a future in your business.
“And by turns, you have to allow them to flourish. One of the biggest lessons you face as an entrepreneur is learning to let go. There are so many owners who invest in great managers, then won’t let them manage. You have to give people freedom to get on and do their thing, for better or worse. Having a blame culture is extremely harmful.”
With a trans-national empire, delegation has become vital - as chairman of Barfoot’s, his role has been refined to mainly ‘conceptualising’. He wakes at six, makes sandwiches for his only home-bound offspring, then hits the gym for an hour (“It gives me mental space - washes away the night’s anxieties”), then heads up to his Bognor site, for days of thinking, meeting and greeting, being the face of the brand to national buyers and international growers.
In the evenings, he switches off by slaving over a hot stove. “I’ll cook for anyone,” he says. “When my son’s friends come around, I’ll often make something. Until recently I used to cook a lot of meat-heavy dishes, but as I get older, I find my metabolism’s not what it was, and I tend to head more for fresh fruit and veg.”
On weekends, he plays polo (“Farmers’ polo - I’m not rich enough for the proper stuff!”), and on the day we meet, he’s still trying to get his gums around a new set of dentures, after an objectionable horse literally kicked his teeth in this January. While he’s never flinched from danger, he thinks he may have to retire from the game soon. “You need physical fitness, but you also need mental acuity, and I think as you approach sixty, you start to lose that split-second response time.”
Barfoot’s two elder children are both in the family business. His daughter runs the firm’s Spanish operation, while his son liases with supermarkets from the Bognor site. In spite of this, he sees the often-hereditary nature of horticultural succesion as one of the greatest blights in British industry.
“The best way to become a farmer is to be born into that envirnoment. You farm by ‘divine right’. That can’t be healthy, can it?” His scepticism about tradition may come from his passion for the role farmers can play in latter-day society.
“If there are to be subsidies, I’d like to see them going towards environmental stewardship, towards preserving the land,” he pines. “I come from an era when the farmer was a pillar of the community. The backbone of society was teachers, policemen, vicars and farmers. On my father’s gravestone, it says ‘market gardener’. I’d like to think that my legacy was doing something to restore a sense of the farmer as an important person in shaping society.”
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