‘Our food crisis is nearing a Lord Kitchener moment’

The creator of luxury brand Mulberry is now one of our leading grain producers. He tells India Sturgis why we must all make changes to secure the UK’S food supply

Bouncing along a dry dirt track in a rusted Second World War Willys Jeep, Roger Saul comes to an unexpected halt. His eyes light up as he points towards two empty fields. “These are the ones I was telling you about,” says the 72-year-old owner of Sharpham Park, a 300-acre farm near Glastonbury in Somerset.

I see acres of what looks like neglect: pink clover intermixed with rye grass, nettles and bindweed. “Clover is excellent at fixing nitrogen back into soil. We went organic pretty much straight away. If I was going to farm, I wanted to farm the right way, and understand what was really happening.”

A lot more is going on here beneath the surface than meets the eye. Saul, founder of luxury British fashion brand Mulberry, is now a dedicated organic and environmental player. The farm – run by Saul for almost 20 years, since being ousted from Mulberry in a coup led by Singaporean businesswoman Christina Ong – is the UK’S largest grower of spelt, an ancient wholegrain similar to wheat, with a slightly nuttier taste.

Sharpham produces around 75 tonnes of spelt annually and mills around 750 tonnes at its on-site mill – 90 per cent of which is bought from other farms. He is the UK’S biggest producer of spelt, making and selling grain, flour, bran, cereal, pasta and spelt milk. He grows walnuts and apples, and has a 130-strong herd of red deer alongside a couple of Jack Russells, an English pointer, and some alpacas – beloved of his wife Monty, a former Dior model, whom he met during the Mulberry heydays.

Relaxed, softly spoken and polished, with an orange cashmere jumper draped over his shoulders and navy combat trousers, on this parched August day Saul is regrouping from harvest. However he has a much more pressing issue on his mind: global food insecurity.

Since the war in Ukraine, experts have started to warn we could be just one global shock away from a food crisis. We have, they say, become too dependent on the rest of the world for some of our meat and a lot of our fruit and veg. Saul agrees wholeheartedly.

“We are near a Lord Kitchener moment, when the question of how do we address food security, and grow nutritionally good food in the UK, is massive,” he says. “It is coming.”

A report by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in December last year found that just under half of the actual food on our plates is produced in the UK. We import 46 per cent of fresh vegetables and 84 per cent of fresh fruit.

“We should be producing more like 80 per cent,” says Saul. “It’s a huge way to go under difficult circumstances – and unprepared. We should be able to do things much more quickly if the Government is focused on it.”

This sounds somewhat dramatic. Does he think we will see rationing next year, I ask, half-joking. “I really hope not.” He is deadly serious. “Now is a moment that the British people and the British Government could support farmers, because they know food security and food inflation is on us.”

Many agree he is right to be concerned. Living in a world of supreme interconnectedness, of course, means we’re vulnerable to what’s happening on the other side of it. The Ukraine war has most recently brought this into sharper focus.

The Russian blockade of Ukraine’s ports has meant up to 25million tonnes of grain has been left to rot in silos – an amount Volodymyr Zelensky has warned could balloon to 75million tonnes after this year’s harvest. Wheat prices are up 59 per cent on last year, sunflower oil is up 30 per cent, and maize 23 per cent, according to the World Trade Organization.

Alongside the cost of living crisis and fuel concerns, fertiliser prices have tripled in price already this year.

“The risk we have now is farmers won’t be able to afford fertiliser and we’ll end up with more feed for animals, which doesn’t require spraying to get the protein levels up required for bread, which will perpetuate our lack of food and inability to feed ourselves.

“We will come to spring and find there’s plenty of food for animals, but nothing has been directed towards human beings.” In May, the Bank of England’s governor warned of “apocalyptic” rises in the price of food. Food inflation is at almost 10 per cent.

Already the trickle-down effect is being felt keenly in our kitchens. Almost one in 20 British people said members of their household went a whole day without eating in the past month, because they couldn’t afford or get access to food, according to analysis by the Food Foundation. In April, 13.8 per cent of households experienced moderate or severe food insecurity, a five per cent increase on January.

That’s to say nothing of Covid and Brexit which had already disrupted the picture. Saul is not all doom and gloom, however, far from it.

“The good news is we have had a huge meat industry in this country, so we could take a proportion of that now and turn it back into plant-based. There has to be a step change,” says Saul, who does eat meat, usually venison, but rarely. “Meat will definitely remain but it is going to become more expensive and less of a part of our diets in every sense.”

“There’s no way I’m saying to beef and sheep farmers they shouldn’t be [farming]. What I’d be trying to do is encourage them to produce more crops or fruit or vegetables on their land.”

He is frustrated with a government poleaxed by political in-fighting, a leadership contest and distracted by energy concerns. He doesn’t profess a preference for Truss or Sunak, saying both would be “very capable in their own way but I want to hear more about food security – and I would have liked to hear more earlier”, and says that Defra’s George Eustice should be given more room to tackle these issues.

The way out, as Saul sees it, is better training and support for farmers to maintain soil health and go organic where possible, decent financial incentives to grow plantbased produce, reinstating capital grants and on-going grants to help farmers transition.

“[The Government] needs to move fast. We all sow our seeds for winter crops by October. They have got two months to get out of their traps and start telling farmers, ‘We are going to pay you to look after the soil and we are going to train you how to do this.’

“We have already shot ourselves in the foot. Anything where we have been pouring chemicals on is effectively denuding the soil. Once you have destroyed lots of those microbial values, they are not coming back in a hurry. You can’t just pour more fertiliser on to bring them back.

“The one good thing Putin has done is make it more expensive to buy fertiliser and sprays so farmers won’t use as much. That is massively good news.”

Saul was born barely 10 miles from where we’re standing, in Lottisham near Shepton Mallet. His upbringing was dominated by leather and farming: his father was production manager for a Clarks shoe factory, where 60,000 pairs of shoes were made weekly, and he would take Saul on Saturday mornings; his grandfather had an arable farm and kept pigs in Hemingstone in Suffolk, a spot he visited frequently with his two younger brothers and one older sister.

“As children we always wanted to muck out the pigs or go on a combine harvester. It was a close, warm family. I’ve always wanted to recreate that.”

Despite his father’s job, the family was “reasonably frugal”. Their house was rented and his parents could only afford to send Saul, the eldest son, to boarding school. “We were taught things had to be earned.”

He describes going to Kingswood in Bath as a 10-year-old as “quite traumatic” because of the closeness fostered between siblings. “To go off on my own, that was scary. It taught me the resilience and independence that I needed as I went on.”

He got a D and two Es in history, geography and economics but somehow landed a scholarship to Westminster College to do business studies, beating more than 200 applicants. He chalks this up to having already set up a stall on Portobello Road selling Victorian military uniforms which he found in Somerset and hitch-hiked across to London. “I was trading and already doing stuff. I think they thought, ‘this boy means business’.”

But he left Westminster within the first year to work for Carnaby Street guru, menswear designer John Michael Ingram, initially making coffee and reorganising cupboards before getting to work in the shops. Inspired by hippies coming into the store to sell belts that would then be sold for vast profit, Saul decided to try making a run of snakeskin leather chokers.

“My father told me to go to Bermondsey, where all the leather wholesalers were, and I bought a load of snakeskin in different colours. I stitched them together, put a bit of Velcro on the back and a cut-out butterfly on the front.”

At the age of 20 he was selling them to Biba and had relished the rush of retail. The following year, in 1971, he formed Mulberry with his mother, a sleeping partner, and a £500 cash injection from his parents that was a 21st birthday gift. His sister Rosemary designed the tree logo, inspired by mulberry trees that grew near his school and in honour of the Mulberry Harbour built for the D-day landings in 1944 – both his parents had been army officers during the war, and military uniform has long been a source of inspiration for him.

At first, he made leather buckled belts then moved into bags and womenswear. Has there been much crossover between the engineering side of fashion and farming?

“It is surprisingly similar,” he says. “For Mulberry, I was a manufacturer. I was building the machines to make the belts. I was challenging everything price-wise. If something didn’t work, I’d go to Italy to find a machine that could edge the belts in the way that we needed. Machines have never held fear for me.”

Pre-farming he was also used to weather impacting the bottom line. “We made swimming costumes and rain coats; a bad season of weather could blow either out of the water. It has far more impact on farming than on fashion but it is still pretty big.”

I ask him what he thinks of Mulberry now. The brand celebrated its 50th anniversary last year and Johnny Coca has been the creative head since 2015. He pauses. “I’m not sure it knows where it is going at the minute. What is it that says it is embracing giving back, while at the same time creating a product that shows it is ahead of the curve? Emma Hill and Georgia Fendley did a very good job of using the heritage that I had created. Whereas it had gone a bit Prada-esque a while back.”

“If you wanted me to design a handbag now…” he muses. “Firstly, I wouldn’t want to design a handbag as that is not the most important thing to be doing. Secondly, I’d be doing a different version of that [he points to my tired-looking rucksack] which I did years ago but out of materials that are eco-friendly.” Hemp perhaps, I hazard, with no real clue. “Could be.”

While at Sharpham Park, Saul shows me around the mill he built in 2007, where a scattering of employees are casting their eyes over spelt grain as it is pearled, milled and packaged, ready to be sent out to customers directly and to supermarkets, including Waitrose and Sainsbury’s. There is the dry, dusty smell of heat and metal, and the sharp sound of continuous processing. Saul is in his element, raising his voice over the machinery, explaining every process.

Just as when he was at the helm of Mulberry, he is insistent that having oversight of everything – growing, harvesting, milling, pricing, packaging, branding, selling – is a key element of being able to stay flexible and reactive. Spelt existed as a main crop in Britain in 2000BC and was a staple of the Roman army’s diet, known as their “marching bread”. Its proponents laud the health benefits: its

‘If I was going to farm, I wanted to farm the right way, and understand what was happening’

‘Jeremy Clarkson has done a fantastic job. He brings the subject of farming alive’

gluten structure makes it easier to digest than wheat and it’s a good source of iron, micronutrients and B vitamins. The only reason Saul heard about the strong, resilient crop was because his sister had been looking into nutrient-rich and easily digestible diets after being diagnosed in 2003 with bowel cancer and dealing with the invasive radiotherapy. It had fallen out of fashion in the 20th century when crops producing higher yields took over. Its detractors bemoan the husk, which is difficult to remove and makes its yield 40 per cent lower than that of wheat. Either way, Saul saw a gap and a rebranding opportunity.

In 2003 he sold his Mulberry shares, using the money to buy the failing dairy farm that was an extension of the old manor house that he and Monty have lived in since 1977 when they married.

“We were in the closing stage of the battle with Christina Ong when the farmer came round and said he was going to put it up for sale. We had made an offer on it 10 years previously so we’d always wondered about it.”

Their elegant manor house is built from local Blue Lias stone and surrounded by cultivated herbaceous borders and overflowing terracotta pots. It feels like a haven. The couple has three grown-up children in, or very near, their forties – Will, Cam and Freddy – and four grandchildren ranging in age from one to 10. Saul speaks particularly fondly of his eldest grandson. “He says, ‘When you die, Ra-ra, can I have your Jeep and farm?’ ”

He has created hidden swings for them and a summerhouse. His vegetable garden is superb and he built his own greenhouse, rightly believing he could make it better and cheaper himself.

As well as the farm and visits to London to see customers he does a lot of tai chi, including competitions. Then there’s tennis, his love of car racing and gardening. Once, he designed and planted a 100ft herbaceous border based entirely on leaf colour, stretching from lightest white-silver to reddy-black. How on earth do you find the time for all this? “When it’s a passion, you find time.”

He is a fan of Jeremy Clarkson. “He has done a fantastic job. In Top Gear, his car world, Jeremy was getting a bit precocious. He is precocious in this environment [Clarkson runs a 1,000-acre farm in the Cotswolds] but his complete vulnerability is marvellous. When you compare it [Clarkson’s Farm, the Amazon documentary] to Countryfile, which has become anodyne with information in comparison, Jeremy brings the subject alive.”

I’m glad there is cause for cheer because, from some angles, British agriculture looks a depressing field. “Yes, but I’m an optimist and the opportunity is enormous. As a country we are obstinate but forward- and free-thinking and that is a vital element of what needs to happen to make these changes.

“We are a bit like submarines, we have to take a deep breath and disappear underwater for long periods of time and before we come up for air.”