Thinking Outside the Box I

 Thinking outside the box I 

First of all, thank you for the opportunity to speak again at Cirencester.

I am forever indebted to these conferences for the inspiration that led to the formation of Aarstiderne, the box scheme that I coordinate. More about that later.

And I have to say that it’s great to be back in chilly but dry Cirencester after the torrential rains in that terrible conference centre in Harrogate last year.

THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX

The title is meant to prepare you for an unusual approach to fair and ethical trade.

To me  -  fair and ethical trade is about people.  People people people  -   it is about cooperation rather than competition. It is about trust. It is about honesty. So I will be speaking about people  -  and showing you people. People working on the farm  -  people at organic events organized by the box-scheme -  people on farm walks  -   fellow citizens in their chosen environment

But I will start this talk inside the box –

Giving you an update on what has happened on the farm since I was here last.

Are box-schemes really a force to be reckoned with  - to create a more fair trading platform ? - or are they merely a romantic notion that never make it past 700 members  -  with few notable exceptions such as Riverford and Abel and Cole?

And can the idealism and ethics of the founders survive the transition into a larger entity ?

Aarstiderne, which came to life in 1997 in its embryonic form, is a living proof that the answer is indeed a YES.

2 years ago I told the story of our first 4 years – 1997, 1998, 1999 and 2000. At the end of that year we served 10.000 customers  -  quintupling from 2000 to 10.000 in only 12 months.

So what happened after that and why?

The short version is this:

We took ourselves past 20.000 customers in 2001 and past 30.000 in 2002. We broadened the offerings and we went through major changes in every sense of the word.

And once again a huge network of people have helped us immensely.

The partnership has changed  -  the shareholding structure has changed  -  our ability to organize ourselves has changed enormously.

You may recall that our CREDO was this:

And they are indeed household words for 110 co-workers at Aarstiderne and a total of 200 of us during the summer, when growing is at its height.

There is a true sense of community.

It is also hard work, so you also have to add a couple of 4-letter words to all the nice ones up there -   by the way   -  sweet talk and harmony is regularly interrupted.

So at certain moments in time my colleagues would say that we haven’t overemphasized the empathy  - 

But we have made the shift from experiment to established reality.

Our vantage point is now one of considerable strength.

Aarstiderne now is responsible for around 7 percent of total organic turnover in Denmark.

To put this in perspective:

If you put the UK organic spending at 1 billion pounds this would put an equivalent UK box scheme at 70 mio pounds in turnover.  That’s a lot of boxes.

We did 1,1 million this year.

Denmark has the highest per capita spending on organic produce  - something like 5 % of food spending was organic in 2000. Only Austria and Sweden come near that figure in the western hemisphere. You’re at less than half of it in the UK.

That of course is fantastic in its own right - but the reality of it is that it has not grown for the last 2 years  -  so organic spending is stagnating in Denmark.

Except for Aarstiderne’s box scheme.

We just closed 2002 as our first profitable year  - based on a turnover of  12 mio £.

In Denmark the VAT  - tragically enough  -  is at 25 %. This means that our customers spent 16 mio £ with us.

And we’re still growing.

Major events in our everyday life were these:

In March of 2001 the first ever joint organic and FSC certification of a forest was performed by Soil Association Woodmark to the estates’s forests. And they have gone on to create a timber equivalent of Aarstiderne called TreeDimensions  - a forest 2 citizen supply network.

In May, the farms signed a partnership deal with Seeds of Change  - enabling us to test their entire seed catalogue under Danish conditions and work on a long term strategy to bring the diversity of the Seeds of Change Seed Library to its full potential.