I’m currently in the Pacific Northwest, an area which comprises Washington and Oregon in the USA, with a rich and varied, thriving agricultural community. I flew into Seattle, and the first part of my trip was to drive up to the Skagit Valley, a hugely productive area for fruit and veg production, known for its production of blueberries and cut flowers, with something like 50 million stems of seasonal flowers a year as well as a huge amount of seeds.
It’s an area surrounded by mountains and the sea, with rich soil and good weather including really long summers. My first stop was at two farms, Boldly Grown Farm and First Cut Farm. They’re both very successful, dialled-in, organic operations, both growing high-quality crops at a really big scale - each with around 50 acres, selling predominantly to wholesale. At the same time, Boldly Grown also do a lot of niche, specialist crops. They’re incredibly advanced compared to Flourish and any other farms I’ve seen in the UK in terms of their equipment, their machinery and their business models.
First Cut specialise in potatoes, which we don’t grow, but also onions, shallots, beans, peas and bok choy at scale so they will be an amazing resource to help us with those crops. Boldly Grown do a large range of different things but their main focus is radicchio and winter squash as well as onions, and they are really amazing at their root vegetable production - things like beetroots and Korean daikon.
It's been hugely inspirational, and I feel lucky to have met Jacob from Boldly Grown and Sam from First Cut and to have them now on hand as mentors. It’s given me so many fresh ideas and inspiration into ways we can deal with some of the challenges we've had and things we can do differently for 2025.
After being in the Skagit Valley (where I also did some hiking and ate loads of crab and shrimp) I drove back down to Portland, which has been my base for a couple of days. Portland seems like the east London of the US(!) in that it's a very progressive city with a thriving food scene.
My main event in Portland was the Sagra del Radicchio, a radicchio festival put on by the Culinary Breeding Network. I met so many cool people - amazing farmers, chefs, people in the industry, and seed breeders… it was big, very pink, and so incredible to meet people and see how much shift has happened in terms of the local food scene here and how much is going on and how much support there is for growers. It's very different from England, and it was great to soak it all up and meet so many new people.
While in Portland I’ve been to some pretty amazing places to eat. I’ve been checking out the ways that people are using radicchio and puntarelle in their cooking, and it’s really interesting to see how much more support for farmers is apparent when dining out. There’s a really strong direct link, with heaps of different farms listed on the menus - in comparison to Flourish sometimes being mentioned on the menu in England, and maybe a couple of meat suppliers.
Seeing both sides of it has been really interesting - going to the restaurant as a diner and getting the perspective on how restaurants are promoting their suppliers, how much local food there is… and then visiting the farms and getting the farmer's side. It’s made it really obvious to me how much further we have to go in the UK and has got my juices flowing about other things we need to be doing at Flourish including education and outreach.
After a stop in Portland, I visited Stone Boat Farm, another farm about an hour outside the city that’s quite different from the other two farms I’ve been to so far. It operates as a CSA and does a little wholesale (mainly hot peppers for a hot sauce company). Aaron is such an interesting guy - he shares the land on his farm with his brother; they run separate operations but share a little bit of the infrastructure. He’s doing a fantastic community programme that gives people of colour the chance to access land and learn land-based skills. The other thing that makes them stand out is that they are really progressive in their use of green manures and cover crops and are using them in a similar way to us, which I've not seen anywhere else.
Aaron started with draft horses and is now tractor-operated, with eight employees and 15 acres of produce. He’s just really interesting. Flourish shares several similarities and differences with each of the farms I’ve visited so far, but this was super inspiring. I learned a lot about the ways he's been making his business work and juggling it with other areas of his life, like being a parent.
Tomorrow, I drive south to Corvallis. I’ve got back-to-back visits to a load of farms down there, which I’ll write more about next week. Then, I’ll be heading up to the east of Washington to visit my friend Chandler at Hayshaker Farm. Then I go back up to Washington, near Seattle, to see a couple more farms.
My biggest takeaway so far is that the scene here is way ahead of what we have back home. I feel like farmers are producing really successful, interesting businesses, and there’s a lot more support in terms of government funding and public support, which is making these businesses work. People are definitely struggling similarly to the UK with finding good people to work with who have enough experience. In the Skagit Valley, it doesn’t seem to be as much of an issue because there’s a really strong Mexican workforce, but we’ll see how that plays out during the rest of the trip.
Farmers are also looking at water usage, climate change, and ways to build more resilience into their farms. For a lot of them, it’s about scaling and investing predominantly in machinery and storage - lots of indoor storage, walk-in storage, lots of flexibility in lifting the crop and being able to store it nicely before sale. I came out here wanting to learn about post-harvest procedures and systems, but I think it's shown me how much more potential we have at Flourish and what we need to focus on for next spring.
