The Voice Black Business Guide 2020-21

Page 11

THE MIDLANDS

UK BLACK BUSINESS GUIDE 2020-21

The Black Farmer

Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones talks building his brand, success in the black community and taking on supermarket giants

W

ILFRED EMMANUEL-JONES isn’t just any black farmer, he is The Black Farmer. Born in Clarendon, Jamaica, Emmanuel-Jones came to the UK as part of the Windrush generation. While he’d spent the first few years of his life in rural Jamaica, Emmanuel-Jones’ first farming experience was hands on cultivating an allotment his father had in Small Heath in Birmingham, where his family settled once they arrived in England. It was this experience that first ignited Emmanuel-Jones’ desire to one day own his own farm. “Because we were quite poor, there were 11 of us in my family, my father had an allotment and it was my job as the oldest boy to look after this allotment.

“I loved it so much, it was then. When I was around the age of 11, that I decided that one day I would like to have my own farm,” he says. But it wouldn’t be until 35 years later that he was able to realise this dream. Something Emmanuel-Jones only managed because he managed to earn enough money to do so. And while his rags-to-riches success story is inspirational, he doesn’t want other black people to face the same barriers he did. He is calling on institutions that own land, such as the Church and universities to actively facilitate the process to enable more black and minority ethnic people to get access to farming land. “I’m saying to all of these in-

stitutions part of your social responsibility is to say to your land agents; a certain percentage – let’s say 10 per cent of the land you’re managing for us should be leased to rented out to people from diverse communities... it shouldn’t that you’ve got to be rich in order to actually get access to land,” he says. Raising the money to purchase land isn’t the only obstacle aspiring black farmer’s face in Britain. Operating in a sector dominated by white people, Emmanuel-Jones was confronted with concerns from his family members when they heard about his plans to plant roots in Devon, and he says locals suspected he was secretly growing cannabis. “The moment you operate outside a stereotype, it confuses people. They think there’s some sort of negative motive behind it and I’ve always been of the belief that the key thing in life is not to be distracted by other people’s prejudices or other people’s concerns,” he says. “If I ever stopped and thought about what people thought, I would still be in Small Heath in Birmingham.” Emmanuel-Jones doesn’t mince his words. It’s this ambitious attitude combined with his independence that saw him take on the major supermarkets, challenging them to stock his new range of sausages for Black History Month. The range or jerk pork and chicken sausages feature the faces of inspiring figures from British black history. One pack features nurse Mary Seacole, the others feature first world war veteran and civil

rights campaigner George Arthur Roberts and Lincoln Orville Lynch, a distinguished RAF air gunner who served in the Second World War. “This year I wrote to all of the big chief executives and all the big supermarkets and said this is the time that you lot need to do something to demonstrate that you are supporting the change. You have black customers shopping in your supermarkets, we want to demon-

“The moment you operate outside a stereotype, it confuses people” strate that actually you care about their pound as much as you care about somebody else’s,” he says. Sainsbury’s, Co-op Marks & Spencer, Tesco, Asda, Morrisons,  Aldi, Lidl, Waitrose, Budgen’s and Ocado all agreed to stock the special sausages. By nature of the product, the sausages have been placed in aisles where they are likely to be seen by a cross-section of supermarket shoppers, not just those interested in Caribbean produce. Emmanuel-Jones’ says he always intended to steer away from creating products that would be deemed “ethnic” from when he started Continued on page 24 u

11


Turn static files into dynamic content formats.

Create a flipbook
Issuu converts static files into: digital portfolios, online yearbooks, online catalogs, digital photo albums and more. Sign up and create your flipbook.