When a Hippie Decides to Farm

◉ Eating garlic scapes in a foreign land is a real joy. Photo: Jiang Xiechi

‘I got garlic scapes today!’ One early Saturday morning in early summer, a friend excitedly showed off her haul from the farmers’ market. Since moving to the UK last year, she and I have been meeting up to do our shop at the Growing Communities organic farmers’ market in north London, and we’d come to recognise most of the growers’ faces – yet we’d never heard of this particular one.

As it turned out, the farmer growing the garlic was Metske van der Laan, a Dutch grower who had been part of the market for nearly ten years but only traded during the summer and autumn. Before long, the market organised a farm visit for consumers on 21 June, the summer solstice, and I signed up straight away. There were about thirty of us in the group, driving southeast from north London for just over an hour until we reached Bore Place organic farm in Kent. Metske and his wife had been waiting there for us all along.

◉ Metske and his wife at the market. Image via Growing Communities market

An Open, Shared Organic Farm

The farm sits on the estate of Bore Place, spanning nearly 500 acres, where, reportedly, no shortage of Britain’s wealthy have bought holiday homes. British law places great store on private property rights, and signs reading “private road” are a common sight in both urban and rural areas, warning strangers to keep off. Bore Place, however, is run by a charitable trust and, in the spirit of public access, has opened its land to walkers and cyclists. Ten acres of the estate are shared between three organisations: besides Metske’s organic vegetable farm, there is an organic willow nursery and a campsite.

“You’d be hard-pressed to find a land-sharing model like this anywhere else,” Metske exclaimed to us.

◉ Market consumers strolling around the farm.

According to official statistics, the average farm size in the UK in 2025 was 144 acres. Compared to that figure, Metske’s six-acre vegetable farm is small but perfectly formed. Several polytunnels are used for raising seedlings and growing cucumbers and tomatoes. Outdoor crops include squash, beetroot, sweetcorn, French beans, Florence fennel and various salad leaves.

Lettuce is the farm’s star product. “I don’t just love growing lettuce – I love eating it too. Does anyone remember last year’s lettuce? The texture was simply divine!” Metske’s pride was unmistakable. The lettuce is harvested every three weeks, with a tighter transplanting rhythm to ensure a steady weekly supply.

◉ Courgettes, squash and lettuce under insect netting.

Soil conditions, too, demand that every planting decision be carefully weighed. The farm sits on heavy clay, which in truth is not particularly well suited to leafy greens. Fortunately, Metske has worked with clay all his life. Born into a farming family in the Netherlands, he grew up growing potatoes in the clay alongside his siblings. Clay and potatoes are a perfect match; vegetables, however, are a less happy pairing. Spring soil stays far too wet, summer brings poor moisture retention as temperatures climb, and only five to six months of the year are truly fit for cultivation – so both time and land must be used to the utmost.

Every February, Metske begins buying seeds and raising seedlings. Ninety per cent of the varieties he uses can be sourced as organic seed, so the farm does not save its own but purchases from approved suppliers. He also judiciously selects early-maturing varieties to get a head start on other growers – tomatoes that hit the market early are sure to attract customers. It is not until April or May that the farm begins outdoor planting.

The clay soil also makes mechanised cultivation difficult. Metske showed us the farm’s small seed drill. When sowing, plant spacing is kept as uniform as possible to make weeding and crop management easier. “Farming is exhausting work – there are practically no days off all year round. My last holiday must have been over a decade ago. So wherever a machine can replace manual labour, you should use it.”

When asked about her views on weeding robots, Metske sounded quite optimistic. She did not deny that they remained expensive to purchase at this stage, but she believed that in twenty years’ time, once the second-hand market matured, ordinary smallholders would be able to afford them.

◉ Tractor and sowing equipment.

Past the seed drill, we came upon a wildflower strip and a green manure field lying fallow. One of the wildflower strip’s main functions is to attract pollinating insects, so the crop most in need of pollination – squash – is planted right beside it. Metske also scattered clover seed in the squash field, which fixes nitrogen and suppresses weeds. The green manure plot is planned for two years’ fallow, mown regularly with the clippings left in place to build up humus in the soil.

“What do you do about pests and diseases?” a fellow consumer asked.

“Sometimes I have to find a solution myself, but other times nature comes up with the answer for me,” Metske said. Not long ago, aphids had become a real problem in the polytunnel, but ladybirds soon brought the infestation under control, as the wildflower strips provide habitat for pests’ natural predators, helping to regulate ecological balance. Beyond the deliberately planted wildflower strips, the farm has plenty of margins where flowers and grasses thrive, which serve a similar purpose.

◉ Wildflower strip and fallow field planted with green manure.

“Have you ever tried spraying chilli water?”

“I have tried spraying, but it wasn’t terribly effective. And really, you wouldn’t want to bite into a chilli-flavoured cucumber, would you?” Metske’s humorous reply drew a ripple of laughter. “But I’m going to make a spray from onion skins and apply it to the beans – hopefully it’ll keep the spider mites away.”

He also stressed that organic farming means accepting yield losses and adjusting your expectations. The vegetable plot opposite the fallow field, for example, sees deer regularly turn up to help themselves to the sweetcorn, so a fence went up. But the fence keeps the deer out while hares still get in – so you just have to let them have them.

Since 2021, the UK government has piloted the Sustainable Farming Incentive, providing cash payments for 102 field management practices of ecological value. In 2026, the qualifying practices were revised to 71, including organic cultivation, growing nitrogen-fixing crops, hedgerows and wildflower strips, among others. To take wildflower strips as an example, the government pays a subsidy of £739 per hectare per year, which works out to approximately RMB 442 per mu?

◉ Example of the UK’s Sustainable Farming Incentive. Image via the UK Government website.

In early 2026, the UK government pledged to invest £24 million (equivalent to approximately RMB 215 million) in the Sustainable Farming Incentive, of which a quarter of the funding is earmarked for small farms of under 50 hectares. But Metske has not applied for the subsidy – partly because the farm is too small, and partly because he is not the landowner. Even without public financial support, the connections and sales channels he has built up over more than twenty years in the trade are more than enough to keep the farm going.

From Hippie to Organic Farmer

The first time I spotted Metske at the market, I noticed the seven ear studs in his left ear and thought he must be an old hippie. This time, I finally got the chance to hear him tell the story of how he came to farm.

When he was young, Metske had taken part in the squatting movement in the Netherlands – a movement in which anarchists and hippies, among others, occupied empty buildings and “redistributed” them to those who needed housing and space. In the 1970s, vegetarianism was as much a part of the scene as squatting. And so Metske and his companions turned the building they had occupied into a vegetarian restaurant.

The vegetarian movement’s concern with food and the environment dovetailed naturally with the principles of organic growing, and it followed that Metske’s restaurant sourced its ingredients from small organic farms across the Netherlands. He later moved into organic food retail, and riding the wave of Europe’s growing appetite for organic produce, his business flourished. But as a retailer he was earning more than the farmers themselves, and the money came easier – something that sat very uneasily with Metske.

“I resolved to live an honest life – one with my feet planted firmly on the ground.” And so he set off to apprentice on an organic farm in the Netherlands. Those two years on the farm, Metske says, taught him far more than four years at university ever could, and only deepened his resolve to farm organically. He entrusted his organic retail business to a partner, crossed the North Sea, and set about finding a place to put down roots in England.

Through the early 2000s, Metske honed his growing skills through courses and farm internships and built up a wide network of contacts in Britain’s food and farming circles. “The most important thing was meeting the people behind the Growing Communities farmers’ market,” he stressed. With the skills and the connections in place, all that remained was to find land.

Finding a plot took Metske a long time. Just as he was losing hope, a phone call led him to a farm in Sussex, in the south of England. It was an instant fit: he took on a nearly six-acre holding, which he named Pannel Organic. That was 2005. The farm sat just two hours’ drive from London, yet fell outside the Growing Communities market’s catchment. So he turned his attention to customers in the coastal cities of Brighton and Lewes, running a vegetable delivery service and supplying organic greengrocers, until the lease ended in 2017.

◉ The farm still displays the Pannel Organic poster.

Fortunately, Metske soon received an invitation from Bore Place to take charge of organic cultivation on a few acres. In 2019, he began running the farm independently. Around the same time, he officially joined the Growing Communities organic farmers’ market, setting up a stall in London every Saturday during the growing season and supplying the market’s veg boxes and organic wholesale service.

It took Metske more than twenty years to grow from a novice into a seasoned organic grower. He also passes his hard-won experience on to the next generation. During the visit that day, a young grower was already seeking his advice, and Metske recommended the growing courses run by Organic Lea, an organic farm in north London. Beyond honing growing skills, sales channels and community resources that share one’s values are equally vital in keeping small organic growers afloat. Take the organisers of this farm visit, for example – the Growing Communities organic farmers’ market, based in north London.

Founded in 1996, this farmers’ market is dedicated to supporting environmentally friendly local smallholders, paying a fair price for seasonal organic produce. To date, twenty-three farms maintain a regular trading relationship with the market.

What counts as environmentally friendly? Market growers must hold organic or biodynamic certification. What counts as local? The farm must be no more than 70 miles (about 113 kilometres) from the market. For organic meat, eggs and dairy, the distance can be relaxed to 100 miles (about 161 kilometres). Traders selling prepared food must ensure that 70 per cent of their raw ingredients are sourced from market growers; failing that, all raw materials must be certified organic.

◉ A sign at the market explains to shoppers the social value of buying from the farmers’ market.

Why support local organic smallholders? The sign by the market entrance spells it out plainly: ‘If you buy your vegetables at the Growing Communities farmers’ market, the money goes straight to the growers. If you shop at a supermarket, the farmer receives less than 15 per cent of the retail price.’

Worse still, farmers sometimes cannot even recoup their costs. The UK charity Sustain once analysed in a report that a conventional carrot retailing at £0.59 per kg in a supermarket yields a gross margin of just £0.01. In reality, the farmer does not even earn that penny. Because carrots are a staple vegetable, retailers – keen to keep prices low and encourage consumption – routinely squeeze the farmgate price below the cost of production.

◉ Comparison of profit distribution in the conventional supply chain versus the alternative food system, illustrated with the humble carrot. Image via Unpicking Food Prices.

The retailers’ thin-margin, high-volume strategy not only squeezes farmers’ profit margins but also leaves the public purse to pick up the tab. As early as 2017, the UK Ministry of Agriculture estimated that, without subsidies from the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), more than forty per cent of farms would be unable to make ends meet. Since Brexit, direct payments have plummeted, and farmers’ prospects have grown bleaker with each passing year.

Ordinary people in Britain are struggling too. In the wake of the pandemic, inflation and rising energy and food prices combined to spark the cost of living crisis. Faced with a problem that seems to have no easy solution, I still believe in Metske and the alternative food system he represents. With greater public funding and resources, these small but beautiful practices could surely lever far more change.

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