The Turning of the Tide

For as long as I can remember, Higher Farm has been out at sea, pulling against a storm that refuses to ease. The wind clawing at our sails, rain driving across our deck, and the horizon sitting beneath the waves. Every stroke forward has been met with a stronger pull in the opposite direction, whereby holding our ground has been enough to knock the the life out of us.

(William Turner’s Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth, 1842)

Over the past six weeks, though, something has begun to shift. The storm hasn’t disappeared — we’re still in it — but a path is opening up before us. There are stretches now where a stroke holds, where the wind catches our sails, where effort actually turns into distance: it feels like the tide is beginning to turn.

So what’s been happening?

To start with, after failing to find the right manufacturing partner, we’ve decided to keep production in-house and scale ketchup production on the farm ourselves. The operational and capital demands of that decision were daunting at first, but now that our course has been set, it feels right. We keep full control over our supply chain and product quality, and we are building a long-term moat around our business through our soil-to-bottle credentials; a big step for our business!

Second, after saying goodbye to a number of key people a couple of months ago, we’ve managed to rebuild our team: rallying the remaining crew, redeploying existing talent, and bring in new hands to bolster our force of seafaring pirates. Higher Farm’s Black Pearl is back with a vengeance!

Furthermore, new routes to market have been steadily opening up to us. In the next couple of weeks we’ll onboard our first distributors — Mahalo and La Chasse — and be launching in London. Better still, shops have started coming to us. Soon we’ll have our manufacturing, operations, and logistics dialled in enough to service stockists nationwide — so if you know a shop or pub that wants to stock the ketchup, let me know!

Finally, beneath all this, the real shift has been that Matteo and I are growing in confidence that we’re heading in the right direction. For the first time in a long while, we’ve caught sight of light breaking on the horizon — proof that the promised shores we are searching for are out there. There is hope now, hope that our journey could lead us to salvation.

(Matteo and I at Groundswell, the regenerative farming festival, July 2026)

As I reflect on these past few months there is a slight paradox at play: despite all these developments occurring, it doesn’t feel like we have actually done anything. Every one of the sequence of events - from dealing with our supply chain challanges; our operational and personel difficulties; growing our routes to market - at the time, felt less like a choice we engineered and more like the correct next step once we stopped fighting for control and let the the natural unfolding of the storm reveal itself.

A perspective I am left with is that as our company continues to develop into a living orginism, it seems to follow a natural predetermined course shaped by certain forces and laws outside our control, however much we’d like to believe otherwise.

It makes me think of what in Chinese philosophy is called the Tao — literally “the Way”: the natural, spontaneous order underlying the universe that can never be fully understood or captured in words, only experienced and lived.

(The Tao Te Ching, where Taoism orginates, written by Lau Tzu, c. 6th-4th Century BCE)

And it is under these laws that we have often been operating: ebbing and flowing with the tide, being pulled this way and that by the storm, testing different routes, going through various ups and downs, until, finally, the universe has presented us with a an opportunity - a path to follow.

Abiding by these laws runs contrary to everything in our human nature — our instinct to grip, to control, to bend circumstances to our will — but can often be the wiser course of action. In short, one of the best business lessons I have learnt (that I would never impart to anyone else) is that in some situations, rather than continously trying to fight the storm, the best course of action is to surrender control, roll with the flow, and see where the tide takes you.

It doesn't mean you stop captaining the ship. You're still at the helm, piloting the boat, manning the guns, keeping a watchful eye from the crow's nest, and studying the charts. But you also accept that beyond the confines of your vessel, there's a deep ocean with a greater power of its own — one that no amount of skill or will can command. All you can do is stay flexible, be receptive, and remain steadfast in your purpose to adventure, trusting that the ocean’s spirit will show you the way.

As the Tao Te Ching states: ‘When nothing is done, nothing is left undone.’

(Captain Jack Sparrow on the Black Pearl, keeping a weather eye on the horizon)