copyright © AnaRocha Photography
Interview with Neil Marshall of Growing with Grace
Growing With Grace’s Neil Marshall says being Stockfree Organic accredited by VON will give the box scheme grower a wider network and is the culmination of more than 20 years work.
Clapham, North Yorkshire-based Growing With Grace Co-operative has always been a stockfree organic grower since it began in 2000. Having a wider presence in vegan literature is another benefit. “We’ve been doing this all along really, but now we’ll be able to use the symbol.”
A Crowdfunder has been underway to help the business deal with a tripling of energy costs, which has stretched the model of delivering boxes to customers in the northwest of England. Lancaster has the most concentrated customer base.
The business was founded by Quakers, who were inspired by a Quaker workshop on what an ethical company should look like. Having a co-operative structure is a fundamental part of Growing With Grace’s ethics, alongside the Quaker principles. There is just 2.5 acres of glasshouse to produce its crops, which include salads, tomatoes and brassicas. The full list is tomatoes/peppers and aubergines (which reached 1.5kg in some cases in 2023), French beans and sugar snap peas, spinach, chard and kale, courgettes, cucumbers and squash, herbs, watercress (grown dry in autumn), salads and rocket and onions and garlic are also cultivated. Sweetcorn took off in 2023, “trying to climb out of the roof”. Protein crops such as edamame beans are being trialled.
copyright © AnaRocha Photography
The former bedding glasshouses are split into four rotations. There might be tomatoes, followed by onions, then brassicas, which are generally earlier and higher value crops such as Purple Sprouting Broccoli, as main season brassicas don’t really need to be under glass. Cut and come again perpetual spinach, chard and salad leaves are very successful crops. For two months in the winter, light levels and day length under 10 hours makes growing impossible. There is no heating and Marshall says it is nonsensical to heat greenhouses in the UK and it is better to buy in from Spain as there are no crops that are valuable enough to heat.
There is no outdoor growing space, as the area is not very suitable for growing veg outside. Organic North and Organic Pantry supply Growing With Grace with field crops and other products to make the range offered “as big as anybody’s”.
Growing With Grace use very low inputs and no control methods for pests. Growing under glass means the business is justified in using more compost than outdoor growers. The grower uses garden brown bin green waste mulch/compost to plant crops through. The compost provides beneficial organisms and suppresses weeds. Vegan seed compost is from Fertile Fibre.
Pests and diseases are accepted as something that might hit a crop every year. A predatory mite has been used on spider mites but whitefly and slugs are not treated.
Marshall’s background is as the son of a farm manager in Kenya. He studied agriculture at Harper Adams but “did not get on with” conventional farming and was helping Alan and Debra Schofield of Growing With Nature in Lancashire and his interest in organic box schemes took off from there. He felt the UK system had lost the directness of Africa, with even people working on farms eating frozen chips rather than what they produced. Acutely aware of this disconnect, and helped by Jenny Hall, he and other Quaker vegans set up Growing With Grace on organic and vegetarian principles, although the growing side has always been 100% vegan.
There is also a busy shop on site where the business provides a wide list of organic, vegetarian products beyond what it grows itself. There are 400 boxes distributed a week via seven van loads, plus another used part of the time. This is up from five van loads before lockdown, though not as high as nine during the peak of the pandemic, when orders doubled overnight. This has led to issues with upscaling and downscaling the business that are still ongoing. “What gives us heart is we have as many customers as ever, apart from at the peak of lockdown.” A training/teaching arm is planned to supplement the growing and retail side and balance the ups and downs of the business, which has used a VON grant to buy a yurt.
Helped by loyal shoppers, and the Crowdfunder, the future should be bright: “Being values-led helps us through the highs and lows of running a business because customers have stuck with us.”