Nature Notes

Tim Deane was born in Devon. He left and returned to the county several times during boyhood and as a young man. Following university and an undistinguished degree in archaeology and history he fell happily into casual work on a farm. This provided just enough experience to secure a permanent job on a mixed farm - beef, sheep and arable - in the Scottish Highlands. After two years he returned to Devon and spent a year at agricultural college, leading to a post as stockman/tractor driver on another mixed farm in Cornwall, where he spent six years.In 1984 Tim, wife Jan, and their two young children took on a small, abandoned farm in Devon. With no electricity or running water and a tumbled down farmhouse, they were homesteading while learning the business of organic vegetable growing. Somehow they stayed solvent selling their produce on the wholesale market but greater security came with the establishment of a vegetable box scheme in 1991. The first such scheme to market the entire output of an organic vegetable holding directly to individual households in this way, this was the immediate model for the subsequent expansion of direct marketing with the relative financial security that it provided.