It’s been a tough couple of weeks. Life has a habit of testing us, there is no question about that, they say you are never dealt more than you can handle, who I wonder decides that?
After 20 years in business, issues still have ways of jumping out at you in ways you could never foresee. Do you know those testing moments where all you want to do is drop everything and run away? They seem to happen at times when you least expect them and at least in my case make me want to run for the fields.
So, we have had some challenging times over the last few weeks and as result you may have had a missed delivery or a delivery that came late or had your day changed, or some produce that should never have been sent out, for all of this I am sorry, we are working hard on resolving the situation and we hope we are in much better standing going into next week.
Funny though when we have stress or crises in our life nature has a way of easing the burden, we all feel better out in a forest or near the ocean or in a field of veg even. And yet it seems if we don’t do something soon, there will be very little nature left to enjoy.
During the week I had an interesting conversation with one of the people working here. We were talking about pumpkins. We have some carving pumpkins at our farm shop, grown by Millhouse organic farm. We are only selling them in the shop as they are too big for delivery for €8 or €9 euro. Anyway, the point was that Tesco have pumpkins and they are all discounted now to entice customers in and when you look at the cost of ours versus those in Tesco (which I believe are imported from the UK) you just can’t win.
This I think is reflective of the challenge a small grower and an independent retailer face. It is a difficult path, generally it’s impossible to compete with the large supermarket pricing, no chance. The supermarkets already control over 93% of the food sold in Ireland, they have all the power, and the pumpkins offer a remarkable reflection on below cost selling, if we pay €5 for a pumpkin to Millhouse how can we compete with retail price in Tesco of €3.49? The answer is we can’t.
So that is why we ask for you to support us, because that is our best way of keeping what we do alive, and I feel that what we do is important and in a world that is consistently and relentlessly diminished by greed and power, it may be a small act of defiance but I’ll take any act over sitting idly by and watching our beautiful planet going down the gully hole.
Your support makes a difference to us, to our farm, our business and all the other Irish farmers we buy from and partner with. So, thank you, it is indeed a small but significant act of revolution and into the bargain you get to feed yourself some of the most amazing chemical free food you can get anywhere.
So, as we are facing into the mid-term break, when and rightly so most are looking forward to a break, for us it is a time when orders drop and yet we have a staff of 50 people to keep going, and harvest to get in. I hope that you can keep us in mind next week when you are planning your food.
Kenneth