The Organic Pantry: Yorkshire farming family celebrating 25 years of selling vegetable boxes

“We started with a veg box scheme with my 40 closest friends taking a box a week, sourcing from elsewhere. After the first year we started thinking about growing stuff the boxed scheme wanted, as it takes two years to turn organic.

“We’d had a mixed enterprise of cereals, sugar beet, potatoes and pigs on our farm that runs to just under 300 acres. Our family has been here since 1884. I took it over from my father Christopher. Freddie is now the fifth generation and taking us forward with some great ideas.

“We’d started specialising in pigs in 1985 and had got up to just over 1,000 sows and finishing threequarters of our pigs. We had them on sites throughout Yorkshire.”

Jonnie says their first years as being an organic farm, at the time when going organic was on a high, saw them grow quickly as a business.

“We had started by converting the first 40 acres to organic and then we did the whole farm.

"We were doubling in the amount we sold each year in the first 6-7 years, having also gone into wholesale as well as the veg boxes but when the financial crisis happened in 2008 it proved a reality check and we had to think about how straight was our line of ducks.

"It was 2014 until we got back to where we had been. Since then it has been a gradual expansion.”

Today, Jonny still runs the farm with three other farmers and there is a huge variety of vegetables at St Helen’s Farm.

“Our field crops that go into our veg boxes are potatoes, of which we are pretty much self-sufficient for what we need at present, and brassicas. We grow around 30 acres of each.

"The rest of our cropping includes clover for fertility building, two white crops of barley and oats across 120 acres and 30 acres of vining peas for Hartley’s, plus permanent grass down by the river. It’s a 6-year rotation.

“We also grow salad produce in polytunnels. We’ve got tomatoes, cucumbers, salad leaf, spinach, radishes, French beans, and others we grow outside are broad beans, chards, different coloured beetroot, lettuce, summer and winter cabbages, cauliflowers in autumn, orange, green and purple, we have a sizeable purple sprouting programme for early spring next year, and we grow squashes and sweetcorn.

"We also have a micro greens supplier who grows in a shed in Leeds. What we are looking to provide are interesting and colourful items in the veg box all year.

“Our oats are also for health too, going to Glebe Farm in Huntingdon, for their PureOaty gluten free products.

“We produce about 15-20 per cent of the overall organic produce we sell here on the farm and source the rest from farms elsewhere in the UK and in Europe.”

Freddie says there’s a good feeling about organic and eating healthily right now and that he sees The Organic Pantry growing more locally and expanding on how his dad started, with an increase to the veg box business.

“Organic is not a fashion purchase now. It’s about people wanting to invest in their local economy, being aware of their carbon footprint and caring for the environment, understanding what’s on their plate and how it has been grown, and a lot of people now make sacrifices elsewhere to eat organic.

"It’s a value-based decision, a lifestyle purchase, not a luxury item.

“Many people are increasingly seeing it as the right thing to do. We still lose the odd customer when things get tight but because of that greater commitment the organic market is less volatile than it used to be.

“At present about 50 per cent of our business is wholesale to businesses such as shops, delis, cafés, other retailers. We supply Booth’s supermarket with their organic range, but we feel our biggest potential market is our veg boxes and that is where we see our growth in the next few years, direct to people’s houses.

“We already do about 700 home deliveries a week which varies seasonally and we’ve been building a new website that we should have up and running in September dovetailing nicely in with our 25th birthday celebrations on September 1.

“We know there’s a big market for veg boxes, especially where we are between York, Leeds and Harrogate and this new website and much improved online presence will give us the tools to grow and market the business. It is often frustrating speak to someone in Boston Spa, who says I didn’t even know you were around the corner.

“We’d really like to be a household name in this area and we feel that with better marketing we could increase our number of veg boxes delivered in our local area.”

Freddie has also developed new organic products that have proved successful.

“We developed an organic peeled potato product. There wasn’t anything like it on the market. We found a niche in producing pre-prepped potatoes for primary schools that is organic and it has proved really popular. We’ve supplied a number of schools and we won an award for it a couple of years ago.

“It’s a good way for schools to get into organic because they want something that is uniform in shape and healthy.

"We now work with a number of city and county councils. Tough sell at the moment – you mention organic and people say they can’t afford before you’ve even told them the price.

"We deliver them ourselves so we can be pretty competitive. We’ve now just got an NHS tender. Our peeled potatoes now makes up around 10 per cent of the business.

“Two years ago we started cold pressing juices under a separate banner called SOWN for the health convenience market, people who just want healthy foods, a green juice in a morning to start their day off, some people use it for cleansing.

"We sell a lot to coffee shops and delis. That now makes up another 10 per cent of the business.

“But in future, with the growth we’d like to see in our veg box business I can see our retail making up the larger proportion.

Freddie, who is married to Amanda and already has the sixth generation under way with 20-month old Finn, sees the start of that getting under way on September 1 when St Helen’s Farm and The Organic Pantry holds its 25th celebrations with an open day for all.

“Dad will be the star of the show doing farm tours with his tractor and trailer. We’ll have food vendors, music, a bar, bouncy castle, petting zoo, farm animals, it’s all taking place between 10am-6pm. We are also sponsoring Martin House Children’s Hospice in Boston Spa.