Ploughing A New Furrow

When everything stopped, they didn’t. And British Food Fortnight, starting September 19, is the perfect time to support our farmers

- Lauren Allen

“Local people want local produce. They crave it.” Groobox’s David Fryer might just be right. In his own words, orders to his veg box farm (Groobarbs Wild Farm, in Knutsford) during lockdown “have gone ballistic”. All of a sudden, old customers were coming back and existing customers started to recommend the scheme on social media pages to friends, strangers and locals.

It was only seven years ago that David started the one-man business, putting together 10 veg boxes every Friday night in his garage.

“Farmers back in the ’80s and ’90s would take their produce on horse and cart to the local village and deliver it to homes,” David says. “I thought: that is exactly what I’m going to do on my farm. Next-door farmers were telling me I was crazy, but I thought it was crazy just to be doing the same old stuff. We needed something new.”

Now the 10-acre (soon to be 45-acre) veg business is booming, with lockdown having helped push it that one step further. Groobarbs has bumped its staff numbers from eight workers pre-lockdown to around 30 now, with most staff working 30 to 35 hours a week.

David says: “About a week before lockdown I noticed the mood was changing. From June 2019 to early February this year, I’d been attending local markets to sign people up to the veg box, but it was getting harder and harder because no-one seemed bothered about cooking.

“The message was, ‘we don’t cook anymore’. So things were difficult. But then in a weekend we had 30 old customers come back to us. That had never happened before.”