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From soil to plate and everything in between. Peas in a Podcast digs into our local food system, hearing from the people who grow, bake, keep, and share it, and exploring what we can all do to make good food healthy, sustainable, and accessible for everyone.
Peas in a Podcast brings together the farmers, bakers, beekeepers, and food makers at the heart of our local food community to talk honestly about what's working, what's hard, and what we can all do to make good food healthy, sustainable, and accessible for everyone.
Hello, everybody. My name is Joey Clarkson, and we are here to film the first episode of Peas in a Podcast with Bridport Food Matters. This podcast is all about speaking with local food producers, suppliers, and experts about what difficulties they have, how we can help them, and what they love most about what they do. And today, we are joined by Lucinda Ackland of Modbury Farm Shop and Lensomy . Hi, guys.
Lucinda:Hello, everybody. I just want to say it's really funny. On the Bridport Food Matters social post, it said Modbury Farm Show, which I thought was about right. That sums up our business.
Joey:That's amazing. I love that. Well, you you do put on shows as well, don't you?
Lucinda:We do all sorts. Yeah. Yeah. The Alfrescos are very popular.
Joey:Amazing. Let's get a warm up question here. You already have a coffee in your hand. I do. I know you serve coffee and you also sell coffee beans, local coffee beans at your farm shop.
Joey:Can we jump in with what you're drinking and what you love about coffee?
Lucinda:Right. Well, today is a bit different because I came looking for a nice coffee and I wanted a local coffee. I was chatting to a really lovely lady whose son is doing fossil coffee, which I think you know. And I think that's really key with the importance of social media because I found him through what you were doing. Oh, no way.
Lucinda:So he's gonna come to the shop, and we're gonna chat about our local coffee and see if we can get him on board. So that was always our kind of thing when we started to shop was to really encourage young people doing what they love doing, which links into the Lenzomai. Lenzomai is an old Sanskrit word, which means unconditional love. And it's to do what you need to do. Life's really difficult as it is, but if you're working at what you love, it doesn't feel like work every day.
Lucinda:You feel like you're passionate and you have the energy to do what you're doing. So rather than just living for the weekends, you're living every day. You get up every morning with purpose. So that's the whole Lensomy ethos, if you like, and it's just kind of filtered through everything we do.
Joey:I love that Lensomy. That's such a great name. How did sorry. How did you find that name?
Lucinda:When I did my Reiki training back in the day, so I was like, of God, thirty years ago, I'm 60 this year, we learned all sorts of different things. And it was one of the symbols that kind of resonated with me. So when I was teaching Reiki, it ended up being more that symbol than anything else. And that's what I got from it. So I just thought that that's the energy that I, as a child, always felt that if I was doing things that I love doing, I could do them easily.
Lucinda:If I was sent to school and had to learn things I didn't like to do, maths, was I really rubbish. But it's because I actually didn't enjoy it. I didn't switch on and want to learn. Yeah. I wanted to be outside in nature.
Lucinda:So the whole connection with unconditional love and nature to me was the same thing. It's like going home.
Joey:It's such a lovely mentality to have. And I I always say that to people about things like social media and things about running marketing for your own business. If you put on a hat where you've automatically like, you've already decided you've hated the activity you're going to do, There's no room to love what you're going to do. There's no room to enjoy it or learn and grow. So have I love that.
Joey:Yeah.
Lucinda:Something good to leave behind. Yes. We were at a funeral yesterday. The lady was Tim's auntie who was 99. And she, I think, would have carried on to a 100 she's in a hundredth year, but she had to give up ballroom dancing.
Lucinda:Oh. And everything just went downhill, and that was her passion. Yeah. And I think if we do what we love, we just live life. And it's worth getting up for and we keep moving.
Lucinda:But as soon as we stop, then we get things back up. We get illness and things go wrong. And that's why you get a lot of people walking around the world with not very happy.
Joey:I agree. I agree wholeheartedly. I wanna kind of tie this back into local growers, local makers, and local producers because as you just mentioned, you just stopped by the fossil coffee stand who you saw through social media sharing and you got some of their beans and now they're going to be stocked in your farm shop, Modbury Farm Shop. And I would love to know a bit more about Modbury Farm Shop, where you're located, what kind of things you serve, and maybe we can get a bit deeper in that conversation after we talk about why you love it and how you got into it. Okay.
Lucinda:Well, Modbury Farm Shop is right next where we live in the magical Bride Valley. We didn't plan living there. We didn't even know about Bridport, which is absolutely bizarre because I lived in Taunton, and we used to go to Chalmers. We used go to Lyme Regis as children, but never went beyond. So it was a whole new thing.
Lucinda:And we watched Broadchurch and still didn't realize it was in Bridport. So it was a real surprise when we ended up here. We came from a pub. We had a pub in Taunton. Before that, we had a tea room.
Lucinda:So we've always had independent businesses. Lockdown changed a lot for everybody. And it was that through lockdown that I think Tim and I sort of had a sit down and a head scratch moment and realized that where we were was not our environment. We used to be in our environment, and it's all about environments. If your inner environment's good, your outer environment's good, but if they're not balanced, then it doesn't work.
Lucinda:So we started looking, and we were actually looking for a house because he had a job at Cricket St. Thomas Golf Course, believe it or not. Nothing to do with farm shops. And we were looking for a house, and our home popped up. I just loved it and started saying yes.
Lucinda:Yes. Yes. And we ended up living there. And it was very soon that we moved in. Never heard of Modbury Farm Shop.
Lucinda:We drove past it to the house, and then we started I took a year when I just did my healing because I was needing it after the life we'd had at the pub. Very anxious. My nervous system was shot to pieces because it wasn't my normal environment living over a pub next to a busy road. I'm very much earthy. And it all came around that one thing led after another.
Lucinda:I was doing my therapy at home, which the lens of my school of joy, which I set up, and I was working online globally. And I was sending students from my house to Modbury to buy good produce. So the whole thing when we were in lock lockdown, we've made this pact that whatever we were going to do next, we were going to save soil because it was really important. Yeah. And with everyone being so ill and the whole world being very ill, if we didn't have good soil, then the future would not be able to eat.
Lucinda:They'd be eating food, but it wouldn't have no nutrition whatsoever. Yeah. And you could already see children who were being born with ailments. We have cancer in our family with babies, which is absolutely shocking.
Joey:That's horrible.
Lucinda:So there's an ongoing demise, I think. So we'd already made this pact together that we would whatever we did next would be to save soil. We didn't know which format. Yeah. However, Sadhguru, this lovely Indian man going around his motorbike from India, was telling the world about saving soil, and I just was fascinated by him.
Lucinda:I was just fascinated by him because he he talked normal, like black and white, common sense. It wasn't nothing highbrow. It was in communication that we could all understand. And to me, that's how we should talk to people about everything in their own language. So that's what happened, really.
Lucinda:It all kind of rolled. We ended up in the house and then Modbury farm shop where I was going and I was buying ghee because I asked Tim and Julie if they could get ghee in because I was teaching people to eat with ghee and things and raw milk was there and all those things that just were just amazing. We were so lucky to have it next door to us. And then she said one day that she was giving it up, and they were just going to be farming. And my heart broke.
Lucinda:I actually physically felt that kind of pain. And then I was told it had already been given to a business and it wasn't going be a farm shop and I was pretty devastated. So I thought, that's that. Was the November. And then come spring, because we've been there three years now, the end of May, we did our third birthday.
Lucinda:It came around that a student came to the house for her lesson, and she said that Modbury Farm Shop was still available. So I messaged the estate agent and wrote a lovely long email of why we must need to keep it. I had no idea how. I have no money. I rent my house.
Lucinda:We're not rich people. And so I don't know how this is gonna happen, but sent the email and then we got a call saying, Judy would like to speak to us. So we went down and she said to me, what would you do with it? And I said, just love it. Just keep loving it.
Lucinda:So the next day, she rang me and said, it's yours. My word. So that's how we've had Modbury. It was not planned.
Joey:There's so many things about that story that I love and find fascinating because I think a lot of people think that you have to be in a position where you have all the answers before you start chasing after the thing that you know is your purpose. But it kind of sounds like you you took the opportunities that were in front of you and you started walking before you had a clear idea of exactly how you were gonna get to that destination and just trusted the process.
Lucinda:Was just trust, trust. Yes. Yes. And just throw love at it. That was it.
Lucinda:And say, we think when you think back to a normal way of getting a business, you need usually, we have a house, you have a mortgage, you go to the bank. Mhmm. We had none of that because we had no money. Mhmm. And I I don't mind saying that.
Lucinda:We we were not financially rich Mhmm. But we were rich in other ways because we live where we live, and we're in every morning we wake up to this beautiful place. Yeah. And what it it's
Joey:just incredible. It absolutely is. And now you've taken it even further because Modbury Farm Shop has had some serious improvements. It's always been wonderful, but it has come so far since you've taken over ownership. And you've started not only involving more local producers and makers, but you've also started running events and having local businesses come in and offer demonstrations of what they do.
Joey:And I think that's wonderful. So can you tell me a bit about your local events that you are running on those Sundays?
Lucinda:Yeah. I think when we took over the shop, it was a trust thing. You went in and you paid for your goods, and they trusted that you did it. And we did that initially for the first six months or something, and we kept a book. And we asked people to write in there, you know, what they preferred.
Lucinda:And what came up is a lot of people said they go to Modbury for chat and catch up because the when you're living in the country, especially in the winter, it can be really isolating. Mhmm. So a lot of the older people used to come in. They pick up their veg, their milk, mainly eggs. We sell lots of eggs.
Lucinda:I think it was like 2,000 a week or something ridiculous when we started doing eggs. So you got an eggman, our eggman, who's on next. He'll tell you the same story. That kept coming up that people wanted to chat and wanted to meet. And a lot of people also struggled doing the weighing of the veg, etcetera.
Lucinda:And that's what I felt when I went there. I felt trusted. And I think in this world, we're not trusted enough. And when you trust people, even those people that are untrustworthy quite often change differently because they feel they they like being trusted. So it's it's a wonderful thing to nurture.
Lucinda:Yes. So to have that at in through of our written notes in the book, it's like, right. Okay. This is a place where people come together. When you look at the history of Modbury, it used to be a place where people used to come with the old village that was there.
Lucinda:So the energy there is all coming to the center. And I think you also if you I did a map. When you drop the heart of the Bride Valley, it's at Modbury. Mhmm. So people do come there.
Lucinda:So it's a natural exchange. So to make that a bigger thing and having our al frescoes, which is the last Sunday of every month, and bring in the producers who are in the shop to show off. And we have our cheese and wine now. We've got a license since Christmas. Amazing.
Lucinda:Do tastings. We're not an off license. We're all of our wines and our Dorset cider that are out there are all paired with our food. So it's encouraged people to try food with local wines and ciders and beer and to enjoy it in the yard. That's
Joey:incredible. So
Lucinda:that's kind of become a thing. So we started last year, and now it's real kinda every last Sunday of the month, we're having alfresco in the yard.
Joey:I think it's brilliant.
Lucinda:That's for you to come and sing.
Joey:I know. I have to. We have to get out. It's been a mad year for us, but we we will be there. And if anybody wants to join, Modbury Farm Shop keeps a very active social media profile.
Joey:They always shout out their events. Follow them on socials. You'll see those things pop up. I do have something I did wanna touch on before we open it up to maybe one question or two questions if there are any from the audience. I think a lot of people want to shop locally and to buy local food.
Joey:And one of the problems we're facing here that Bridport Food Matters is also trying to address is the fact that it's not that it's too expensive to shop locally. It's that it's not convenient enough to shop locally. So the convenience of it is kind of a hurdle for people sometimes because you're short on time. How are you supposed to go out and get all the things if you have to them? But I know that's something that you tackle at the farm shop.
Lucinda:So Yeah. We've made basically ideal social media, the websites, and I've had to learn a lot because it's only Tim and I. So we do everything. So it's twenty four seven. We work seven days a week and probably too much.
Lucinda:However, it has to be done. And the one thing that I worked out over the second year, I think, was it wasn't the fact that people didn't have money. It was they didn't know where we were. So we kind of got over that hurdle with intense social media, which I work a lot at. And it's not just about what we've got at Modbury.
Lucinda:It's what's happening in the world, what's happening in the environment. Because the one thing that I've always been passionate about is eating from your home turf. Yes. And how seasonal food is healing food. Yes.
Lucinda:And we just overcomplicate stuff with having to have avocados and bananas all year round, etc, etc. When there's such wonderful stuff on our doorstep. Yeah. But if the soil is not up to it, then the food's not up to it. So working with that in the back and looking at the convenience of how we get that to happen, it had to be an online thing.
Lucinda:Mhmm. So the the shop the online shop. People coming from London in the summer, which is wonderful. We do really well. But in the winter, it goes very, very quiet.
Lucinda:We have lots of people that come in the summer that bring in their elderly parents. They said they haven't been shot for years, but they used to, but now they can't come. So we started looking at home delivery, local delivery. We started just very, very small for those people who couldn't get
Joey:to the shop Amazing.
Lucinda:That we would do that. Then we realized that, actually, we've got more of a pool from Portland and Lyme Regis than we actually have on our doorstep because we are very lucky here. We've got lots of local people who grow in our gardens. Yeah. So then we got the the poof nuts.
Lucinda:So we had to widen our space.
Joey:That's incredible.
Lucinda:So we're now Portland to Lyme Regis and Beamister, and I think we go inland a wee bit. So it's local delivery, but we've done it the old school way, where you can do a shopping list and just say, want this, this, this, this, this. And we'll communicate like real people and go, we got this, we got that, or we can get that in for you. That way, we can preorder so we don't have lots of stuff just rotting and waiting on the shelf, going So to I think working together to get over inconvenience is the way forward for everybody. We've got local growers that we're supporting, our Bride Valley growers, which actually just like three ladies who are sort of getting more.
Lucinda:Pat from our organic has been gone obviously since she was 43, she's 73, I think, this year or 74. I think she's 74 this year. She's been amazing. And there's other younger women that are taking up and doing more. So we wanna be a place where these people can bring their products wherever they grow, and we can
Joey:sell it. It's incredible.
Lucinda:That has to be done more. And I think online, we can talk about it, and local people can get on board by looking at the website and go, right. Okay. It's it's not inconvenience Mhmm. Because we'll come to you.
Lucinda:And actually, it works out cheaper than supermarkets because we've done the price checks with meat. And I think on mints, Tim will tell you the ins and outs of it. But on our Modbury meat, I think we're about a pound cheaper than Sainsbury's. Incredible. And ours comes from one animal.
Lucinda:If you eat meat, you know, I don't say you should eat a lot of meat. But if you eat meat, know where it's coming from. I know that mints from an animal from a farm is from one animal. If you go to supermarkets from lots of animals, you don't know what you're eating. Yeah.
Lucinda:So there's that as well. It's information. It's educating and to make it easy for people.
Joey:I do I love it. I love everything that you do because everything you do is it's all based around community. And you've built that in person on your in person events, you've also built it online through your online sales, but also online through your social media. I've always admired how you've tried to build something to uplift others. I And think it's incredible.
Joey:So I did say we're gonna have time for questions, but we're on a tight podcast schedule and we did run a bit over. But I'm sure Lucinda will stick around and answer questions for you if you do have anything. Thank you so much, Lucinda, for coming to join us for our first ever episode of Peas in a Podcast. We have lots coming up for the rest of the day, but we've got enough time for you to run out, grab yourself a nice little bite to eat, come back for the next one, which is with Al McNabb. So hopefully, we'll see you there.
Joey:And thank you so much again, Lucinda.
Lucinda:Thank you, Joey. Thank you. Back to when I was in in lockdown, I came up with the idea of the soil thing, and I decided that if we all took back the power of the pound and we all paid a pound for the whole world and shoved it in one little pot for the soil, wow. We'd have a lot of money, and we'd be able to do wonderful things. So what I've done on my website so have two websites, Modbury Farm Shop.
Lucinda:There's leaflets around. The lens of my website, they all kinda talk to each other. On there, I've opened up a global circle for £1. So you pay a pound a month, access to the group, which is just for those people who have paid a pound. I put all my stuff there, all my my bits that I teach.
Lucinda:There's all sorts of fun stuff. There's moon stuff. There's seasonal foods and what to do. There's water, h two o group for people like swimming or just the importance of water. So I'm putting my stuff there, my energy, and giving it for a pound.
Lucinda:And then when we have enough money, we're gonna start putting it into people that are making a difference with soil. So things like Bridport, Food Matters, places like that, any surplus will start giving and contributing. And I think we can take back the power of the pound because cash is king. Everyone says they don't have a lot of it, but there's a lot going to waste that we could use. And one pound a month, that's 12 pound a a year.
Lucinda:Okay? So please spread the word and tell everybody that make it can be good. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Lucinda:You. You're amazing.
Joey:Peas in a Podcast is brought to you by Bridport Food Matters and Jurassic Coast Media. This limited eight part series was recorded live at the twenty twenty six Bridport Food Festival. If you're interested in helping us fund future conversations, check out the show details for how you can get involved. Thanks for listening.