Growing for Hodmedod

We're delighted that you're interested in growing crops for Hodmedod. Please do complete the form below to give us a bit of background about you and your farm. It shouldn't take more than a minute or two and is also a chance for us to tell you a little more about Hodmedod and what we're interested in. We know it's a bit of an impersonal start, but it helps us keep track of enquiries and ensures we have a proper record of contact details. We'll follow up with a much less impersonal phone call!

You'll find plenty more about Hodmedod elsewhere on our website and our various social media channels, but in a nutshell:

Hodmedod was created to achieve social and environmental objectives. Central to these are the health and wellbeing of those that work for the business, grow for it, and those who buy our foods; all of which should be framed by increasingly immediate ecological limits.

In short, we want to help create a fairer food system that operates within planetary boundaries.

The economic constraints that come with selling relatively low value-added and often unfamiliar ingredients present a very particular set of challenges. But we’ve made incredible progress over the last decade, building an award winning, strong and fast growing (but still small) enterprise that properly rewards farmers and along the way is changing public attitudes to British grown pulses, grains and seeds.

In coming years we'll further build Hodmedod, creating secure and rewarding rural livelihoods that make a positive contribution to our immediate neighbourhood and the wider world. An engaged community of farmers is central to achieving that aim and we work with our farmer group in what might initially seem quite an unconventional way - relational rather than purely transactional.

We work in this way because we want to see farmers adopting diversity as a broad strategy, and we can't do that by focussing on single crops in single years. Instead we'll encourage you to think about your whole rotation as well as other ways that you might add value, both economically and agroecologically (those things are, of course, inextricably linked), to your production system. Often this will happen outside of those crops you grow for us.

In practice this means that if you're growing for us we'll visit and call regularly, work with you to overcome challenges in the field and post harvest, invite you to be part of exchanges, visits and farmer network meetings, and arrive at achievable (often flexible) specifications supported by firm letters of intent (rather than contracts and inflexible penalty schedules).

I look forward to speaking with you,

Josiah Meldrum

(Director and co-founder, Hodmedod)