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    Re: The view from a UK organic veg farm Archived Message

    Posted by Ian M on October 11, 2020, 10:14 am, in reply to "Re: The view from a UK organic veg farm"

    Thanks for that Ken, yes it sounds familiar though I wouldn't have put it as ... bluntly/poetically as you

    There are various govt subsidies coming in for some of the land here and various tree-planting schemes planned for the future but I don't think the veg growing side of things has been getting any of that kind of support. I feel more that it's a vanity project or hobby farming, with the landowner, an ageing hippie type genuinely wanting to create something worthwhile with his inherited land and associated wealth. It's a weird bubble clustered around the old farm buildings and supported by a plant nursery (also inherited, but which he turned around a few decades back), several fields of arable that get contracted out, quite a bit of land that got sold to housing developers, and a few small businesses run from the 'artisan village' - a kind of hippie industrial estate on site. There's also a plan for a kind of ecovillage housing project with a buy-in of min. £200,000 for self-builds or other 'alternative' housing, likely for wealthy retirees.

    We're caught up in an odd schizophrenia between the landowner's business brain and his almost childish idealism, where you can serve up any idea using the right kind of flowery language and he'll soon be singing about it from the rooftops and redesigning his 'dreaming' around whatever vague understanding he has of it. So one minute the farm has to be run like a corporation with quarterly projections, rigorous costings, a business plan for expanded production to justify wage increases etc. and the next you find out he's bought a rusted out vintage seed-drill from a farm auction, got a volunteer to fix it up and paint it a nice colour, paid for some expensive heritage wheat and got a contractor to sow it in a muddy field, with no apparent plan as to what we're going to do with it if/when it ripens and can be harvested. I think he just heard the words 'land race' (see: https://theecologist.org/2016/nov/10/farming-grain-john-letts-and-his-evolutionary-made-organic-heritage-seeds ) as was like 'wow, how cool, let's do that!'

    As you might expect there's rather a fast turnover of staff on the farm team - people generally manage a year or two and then leave.

    cheers,
    I

    PS: here's the govt page on accommodation offsets:

    https://www.gov.uk/national-minimum-wage-accommodation

    Accommodation rates

    Accommodation provided by an employer can be taken into account when calculating the National Minimum Wage or National Living Wage.

    No other kind of company benefit (such as food, a car, childcare vouchers) counts towards the minimum wage.

    Accommodation offset rates

    The accommodation rates are set in April each year.

    Year: April 2020 (current rate)
    Daily accommodation offset rate: £8.20
    Weekly accommodation offset rate: £57.40

    [...]

    Using the offset rate to work out the minimum wage

    If an employer charges more than the offset rate, the difference is taken off the worker’s pay which counts for the National Minimum Wage or National Living Wage.

    This means the higher the accommodation charge, the lower a worker’s pay when calculating the minimum wage.

    If the accommodation charge is at or below the offset rate, it does not have an effect on the worker’s pay.

    If the accommodation is free, the offset rate is added to the worker’s pay.

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