Data-driven allotment: GRI 13.21 - Living income and living wage

Introduction

This is one of a series of posts about one of my favourite topics - my allotment! And more importantly, how green it really is, using a selection of topics from GRI Standard 13: Agriculture, Aquaculture and Fishing Sectors.

I am a big believer in learning by doing, so when the Global Reporting Initiative released its standard for the agriculture, aquaculture and fishing sectors in 2022, I thought the best way of getting to grips with it was to try to apply it to my allotment. As I’m sure you can imagine if you’ve ever reported under the GRI standards, this was a challenging task. Firstly, quite a few of the topics simply aren’t applicable (or ‘not material’ as the Standard itself puts it), For example, I don’t keep livestock on the allotment so I don’t have anything to say about 13.11 - Animal health and welfare. Others I can address, but only indirectly, so whilst I don’t use pesticides, I can think about 13.6 - Pesticides use through the lens of ‘organic’ alternatives to conventional pesticides. You can find a complete list of the standard’s topics and which ones I have decided are immaterial or of limited applicability here.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given my interest in horticulture and food systems, I am also interested in the ‘business’ side of the allotment - i.e. doing a very basic cost/benefit analysis. As I worked through the topics, it also became clear that this information was relevant to topics like 13.3 - Food security and 13.21 - Living income and living wage. Ultimately, I’ve ended up recording both environmental and financial data, some gathered myself and some from reliable sources like the Met Office and the Soil Association. The different types and sources of data are summarised here.

Whilst I have made every effort to be as thorough as I can be about this process, it’s important to remember that this is just an intellectual exercise for me, and I make no claim to the sort of scientific rigour that large food-producing businesses have to put into their reporting.

On to the interesting bit…

This month’s focus is GRI 13.21 - Living income and living wage. At first glance, this may seem like a slightly counterintuitive standard to apply to my allotment - after all, I have no employees, no one technically receives any ‘income’ from the allotment, except friends and family, who receive vegetables to eat (‘payment in kind’ you might say). Apart from Disclosure 3-3 Management of material topics, there are only two additional disclosures included in the GRI, both of which relate to employees and workers, which obviously don’t directly apply.

But there are still some interesting questions here: If my allotment were a business, would it be economically viable? Would kind of income would it generate for the amount of resources and hours put in based on selling the produce at retail price? And from a GRI perspective, could it afford to cover paying the ‘workers’ (i.e. me) a living wage for the hours worked?

There are two reasons these questions are important - firstly, because it is often claimed that growing your own food is cheaper than buying it, and that’s an interesting claim to test. And secondly, because consuming locally grown food is often claimed to be one of the best ways of cutting your carbon footprint. According to the UK Food Security Report 2021, the UK imports around 46% of its food supply, which, according to a report by Centre for Research into Energy Demand Solutions, adds around 20 MtCO2e to the UK’s carbon footprint. The most logical alternative would seem to be eating more locally grown food, but that turns out to be surprisingly difficult.

For one thing, most food grown in the UK is distributed through supermarkets, and for all their claims about working with farmers to put British food on British tables, it’s rarely possible to trace a specific product back to a particular farm or particular area. And supermarkets can quite justifiably argue that the the level of data capture required to achieve that level of granularity is just not cost-effective, especially since not many consumers have expressed a particular interest in it. The fact that so much of the UK’s food is sold through supermarkets also means they have enormous bargaining power when it comes to setting prices and terms with producers (see for example Riverford’s recent petition to “Reform the Grocery Supply Code of Practice to better protect farmers”). All of this creates more challenging economic conditions for local, small-scale farmers, so it’s really quite surprising that small-scale veg box schemes are apparently in huge demand. This may have been spurred on by the pandemic, during which going to supermarkets became a source of risk, but it’s still striking that according to a report from the Food Foundation, 82% of box schemes had waiting lists or were closed for new orders during that period.

So what do the numbers look like for my allotment?

The figures

First of all, a quick note on how I work out the theoretical prices I would get for my produce. Wherever possible, I use the retail prices published fortnightly by the Soil Association (average retail/farm shop price). These do cover most of what I grow, but there are a few exceptions, like mooli (also known as a daikon, a type of radish mainly grown in Eastern Asia, but increasingly popular in the UK). For these, I take an average of the prices available online from the following supermarkets: Sainsbury, Tesco, Asda, Morrisons, Ocado and Waitrose at the point of recording. This system is not perfect. For one thing, Soil Association data is self-reported, so will likely skew towards their members, who are committed to organic produce, which is generally more expensive that supermarket non-organic ranges. This is probably more reflective of the way I grow my produce than non-organic supermarket produce, but it does mean that I am working with two different sources of price data, which is not ideal. It’s worth remembering here that these blog posts are only an intellectual exercise for me and not necessarily as rigorous as GRI reporting normally needs to be.

All of that said, here are some stats:

Crops produced

34.4 kg of produce sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? According to one online calculator, this all adds up to about 15,000 calories of energy (if eaten raw), or about 6 days’ worth based on the recommended daily intake for men (2500 calories). So I’m not quite ready to replace my weekly shopping purely with my allotment produce. (And to be honest, if I tried to eat 800 g of rhubarb a day for six days, I think I would have other problems to worry about…)

Of course, replacing my entire food intake was never the point, and there are all sorts of things that I can’t grow but that would still be compliant with an all-vegetable diet (notably grains and oils). But the point is, I am always astounded by the ability of veg-box providers and community supported agriculture (CSA) schemes to provide so much of their client’s diet, and to do so at a reasonable price. There are economies of scale built in here, of course, and such schemes can increase their yields by putting in many more hours of labour than I am able to, but it’s fascinating, and inspriring, all the same.

So how does it add up?

Based on the (imperfect) method described above, my crops would have a theoretical average retail value of £216.52. So have I saved that much on my shopping bill? Not exactly - for one thing, my records indicate that I spent £151.50 on seeds, though this is a bit misleading as it does include a few oddities like the field beans mentioned in the previous post and some herb seeds that are currently growing but aren’t anywhere near ready to harvest yet. I also spent £37.00 on compost (peat-free, of course!), £9.99 on some nettle twine and £35.00 on ready-to-plant herbs and fruit bushes, which I have also not harvested from yet (though this may be counteracted by the rhubarb, blackberry and asparagus plants already on the site, which I didn’t pay for). There was also quite a significant outlay of £187.05 on equipment, including things like staging for the polytunnel and some new tools. In a proper accruals-based accounting system, these would be depreciated over their useful life, but for the sake of simplicity, I have used the cash method here, and they will obviously not repeat in future years. I also paid my local council to rent the plot, in the princely sum of £30.40.

By far and away, however, the largest theoretical cost is the amount of time I put in. I racked up a total of 113.5 hours of work over the year. At the Living Wage Foundation’s non-London real living wage rate of £12.00/hour, that would equate to £1362.00 in ‘wage’ costs for the year. An important caveat here – a significant proportion (perhaps even up to a third) of that 113.5 hours went on preparing the beds, setting up the polytunnel and generally reclaiming the plot from the 5-foot-tall grass that had overtaken it. That will (hopefully!) never need to be repeated. Even so, you don’t need to be a maths genius to work out that my ‘income’ from my crops would barely tough the sides of that sum.

So in short, no, my little allotment would decidedly not be viable as a CSA.

For the sake of completeness, here’s how it would work out:

Profit/loss (theoretical income - expenses): £-1609.38 [1]
Profit/loss, excluding ‘fixed assets’ (fixtures, equipment, permanent plants): £-1387.33 [1]
Profit/loss, excluding ‘fixed assets’ and ‘wage costs’: £-25.33

[1] A quick reminder that I haven’t actually spent this amount on the allotment because I never really paid myself the wage costs.

Purely theoretically, the amount of food produced would come it at around £46.75/kilogram, which really doesn’t sound good. Of course, you could put a more positive spin on it and say I produced around 645 g of high-quality, fresh, low-CO2 food per week, at a rate of about 300 g/hour of work. And even better, if you only take the pure ‘consumables’ (seeds, compost, etc.) into account, it only cost £0.74 more per kilogram than buying the same products would have cost, and presumably with almost zero GHG emissions (more on this point in a later post).

Of course, none of this is why I got into growing my own vegetables, and these figures in no way decrease my motivation to carry on with my allotment. I have been wondering if there is room to improve though, and I have a few thoughts.

Seed-saving/freebies

I have always been a fan of seed-saving, and there is significant potential here to save money. Almost 45% of my seed costs went on seed potatoes and onion/shallot sets. This year, my need to buy seed potatoes should hopefully be dramatically reduced by the fact that I saved some of last year’s crop as seed potatoes. There is always a certain amount of controversy around this practice because of the risk of transferring blight and other diseases from one year to the next, but I have never had any problems with this. I do err on the side of caution, however. One of the reasons I had to buy an entirely new set of seed potatoes this year was that my site did experience some patches of blight the year before. I was lucky enough not to see any signs of blight on my plot or crop, but I decided from an abundance of caution not to save any potatoes from that year.

Other seeds I have saved from last year include tomatoes and beans (some from Heritage Seed Library non-commercial varieties - more on that in a later post), and I am also blessed with an abundance of half-packets of seed left over from last year that need to be sown by this year. This has the dual benefit of costing nothing and also avoiding wasting seeds. Plus it reduces the number of decisions I have to make about what varieties to grow this year!

I have also decided to attempt growing onions and shallots from seed this year, rather than from sets. This is considerably cheaper than buying sets, but also supposedly more challenging. I have had two sets of onion seedlings overwintering in the polytunnel for the past two months, and they seem healthy enough - until this week, it’s been a very mild winter. In fact, I recently moved them from the middle shelf (where they get a little less light, which I hoped would slow their growth somewhat) to the top shelf, as they were clearly searching for the light. I also have some non-overwintering onion seeds ready to sow as soon as it warms up a little. I have read online that onions grown from seeds are less prone to bolting if they are raised where they are due to crop as well. It will be interesting to see if they grow to full size in this season, or if I have to lift them as sets and start planning these as a biennial crop.

One other element to mention is taking advantage of freebie plants. I invested in entire day a few weeks ago in planting quite a large part of the plot up with some strawberry runners from plants in my main plot. Whilst these plants obviously cost me something to buy originally, and some of the runners went towards replacing old plants there, these new runners effectively cost me nothing, and should hopefully produce quite a crop of strawberries. Strawberry plants tend to have their heaviest crop in their second year, so I may have to wait for 2025, but I’m curious to see how they do. This was part of a plan to make better use of the ground under the walnut tree that was too established to remove when I took over the plot. So far, I have not had much success with this site - whether it’s because of the light being blocked out by the tree or because of any juglone that might be coming out of it, the only thing this patch has really produced is grass and nettles. Hopefully that will change this year.

Producing instead of buying-in consumables

Not that the nettle plants are entirely unwelcome. In fact, I have mostly left the nettles around the composting area at the top of the site to do their own thing. Firstly because nettles, though irritating in some ways, are good for biodiversity, supporting all sorts of insects and other wildlife. I have witnessed first-hand how popular they are with ladybirds for example. Secondly, because they’re useful. They grow rapidly, and the leaves make a good short-term mulch if applied thickly enough. They break down very quickly so are great for covering the ground for short periods between crops. The stems also contain a fibre that can, with a certain amount of patience and effort, be spun into twine. One thing you may not know about me is that I have been learning to spin, and though I’ve mainly used wool so far, I am a member of my local weavers’, spinners’ and dyers’ guild, and the guild has resources and expertise that I’m sure they will be willing to share.

And why buy nettle twine if it’s so expensive?. Partly because of the reduced environmental impact. Plastic-based twine tends to fray when it’s in use, releasing little microplastics onto my plot, and undoubtedly into my crops. It also can’t be recycled or composted, so ends up in the black bin. I’ve also found they can’t be reused and don’t store particularly well in my shed - I’ve had some for more than a year, and it has basically become unusable because it’s so frayed now. Another major factor is the convenience. Using a biodegradable means you don’t have to separate out the twine before putting spent plants in the compost bin - this saves huge amounts of time when it comes to clearly beans and peas, for example. Other compostable twines are also available, like jute and hemp, of course.

Another major input was compost for seed-sowing. I admit, I am not as much of an expert on compost as I would like, but maybe this is the year to change that! I also did a quick stocktake last week, and I have quite a significant amount of homemade compost that seems ready to use, with a bit of sieving. I also have a fair amount of leaf-mould. The Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) claims that leafmould can be used by itself for seed-sowing or mixed with garden compost for potting compost. I haven’t tried this before, but I’m excited to experiment! I produce quite a lot of garden compost over the course of a growing year, and I make enough leafmould for pretty much all of my seed-sowing needs, so this would be a greater cost-save, if it works!

Working smarter

This will be an inevitable consequence of my plan to change my watering patterns, mentioned last month, but it’s worth mentioning here as well. As with the watering, little and often will probably be more effective than spending one whole day per week (not least because my energy levels and working speed decreases over the course of a whole day!). One thing I really do want to keep on top of this year is the weeding. I may even introduce some sort of bed-weeding rota to nip any problems in the bud, if you’ll pardon the pun.

How will I measure the impact?

At a very basic level, I will see whether there is any improvement in the profit/loss figures mentioned above compared to this year. But other metrics might also be telling. For example, it will be interesting to see if the hours required per kilo of produce decreases, though it would be hard to disentangle how much of that is because the site is already prepared this year, how much because of improved soil fertility following the green manure applied over the winter, etc. but it should make for an interesting review this time next year!