Guy Singh-Watson, the man who started Riverford Organic Farmers is known for taking a punt. This is the man who ditched a career in the City to return to the family farm in Staverton, starting the veg box scheme from the back of his Citroen 2CV after the supermarkets reminded him that when they whistle, you say 'how high'.
Dismissing weekly calls from venture capitalists over many years, the businessman took , saying at the time that selling Riverford to maximise short-term returns for external investors would feel like 'selling one of my children into prostitution.'
Instead he handed over 74% of the business for less than half its market value and retained 26% of the business that had a pre-pandemic turnover of £70million.
The mechanism works via a Trust set up to hold the shares and the change is being funded with the help of a loan from Triodos, the Bristol-based, ethical bank.
Mr Singh-Watson releases his money over a number of years.
He could have made a lot more money, he could have bought a villa somewhere lovely. Instead he bought 150 acres of somewhere lovely right on his doorstep - Baddaford Farm that neighbours Riverford where he grew up.
Guy said: "There is nothing else I know better than farming. It's amazing the number of people in farming who spent their retirement growing vegetables or taking old tractors apart. It's just what they do."
Together with his wife Geetie Singh-Watson MBE, the organic pub pioneer who owns The Bull in Totnes, they have turned their land into a pioneering project - part rewilding, part farming and part permaculture.
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And making money from it, admits Guy, is yet to really play its part.
He said: "This is not commercial farming but it's also not a vanity project. We almost broke even last year," he said.
Bought in 2019, the Singh-Watsons are growing fruit and vegetables for Riverford and The Bull.
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A big success this year has been the strawberry crop grown on a south facing slope using compost from the leftover spoils from Riverford, including the home compostable salad bags that customers who cannot compost at home send back in their boxes.
He credits the compost for the bumper harvest of field-grown strawberries, the crop yielded 20,000 punnets bringing in around £30,000 for the farm.
Staff shortages have undoubtedly been an issue, he said. But the farm has been lucky to have a local labour force.
"In fact the strawberry pickers mostly came via my wife's pilates class," he said.
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The farm also provides space for two small horticultural open-pollinated heirloom seed businesses - Vital Seeds and heritage and perennial specialist Incredible Vegetables.
Guy doesn't charge rent on the land, just for the office space.
"I want to be able to support other people who run their own businesses and I learn a lot from them too."
But that doesn't mean that running an ethical business cannot be profitable. In fact, it has to be.
Pre-pandemic, Riverford enjoyed record sales of more than £70million in 2019 - after its first year of employee ownership.
It exceeded its target of £70million turnover by 2020 and profit before tax and co-owner profit share was expected to be a record £3.7million.
The company went on to see record sales during the first 2020 Covid-19 lockdown as demand for home delivery surged. Many of those new customers have stayed and the firm now sends out around 80,000 veg and recipe boxes every week.
In return, the business has been working on its long standing pledge to reduce plastic in its boxes. It launched a plastic free box and its home compostable packaging this year which is mostly made from wood pulp, sugars and corn starch.
It is the result of a long standing research and development project to find a way of ditching plastic wrapping for vegetables that would otherwise wilt and spoil if left unprotected.
The new home compostable option is costing Riverford £300,000 a year but the cost is not being passed on to customers.
And the tech behind it is not patented so other firms can replicate it if they want to.
Any packaging that is returned to Riverford ends up at Baddaford's giant compost heap and breaks down to carbon dioxide and water within 12 weeks.
But it's not perfect, admits Guy - it still has a small amount of oil-based components in it.
He said: "The research and development was pretty expensive but we all thought that we have got to find a way. It still has a small amount of oil in it because you simply cannot get the properties that you need without any oil at all.
"What we have is a compromise, it will home compost and it will not just breakdown into nasty micro particles. Of course the best packaging is what you get when you go to the end of the garden and pick it yourself but that is not the way it works for most people."
Guy said that increasingly, he is concerned about the damage done to the soil with annual food crops and believes that perennial crops, have a bigger part to play in 海角视频 food production.
He is in the process of creating a vast scale nuttery of walnut trees and hazelnuts. The hope is to establish a viable commercial crop in the 海角视频 with the environmental benefits of tree planting via carbon sequestration.
He explained how he had recently hosted a visit from Charlie Burrell, owner of the Knepp Estate that is successfully creating a rewilding project on the once intensively farmed 3,500 acre estate just south of Horsham, West Sussex.
Guy said: "Charlie said to me: 'why are your trees in rows, Guy? Just scatter them.' But I explained I have to be able to harvest mechanically.
"It's got to work economically, you've got to be able to make a living out of it but the problem is that you are competing with low wage economies like Turkey."
Costing around £1,000 an acre to plant, it is a cost he has taken on himself without any subsidies currently available to convert pasture land to a more sustainable use like this.
And his ambitions go further with discussions about introducing beaver to the land - but at £100,000 to secure a license and the prospect of fencing off areas, Guy is unsure of the implications.
"You can rewild small areas successfully but is it really rewilding if whatever you do on that scale has to be managed to maintain it. To support the top line predators you are going to need thousands of thousands of acres."
For now, he is busy establishing hundreds of walnut trees that should mature in around 10 years.
It's a long term project with no quick fixes or short term returns. Things take their own time to yield results, something that Guy would argue that the moneymen should be more mindful of.
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