MARTIN ROWLAND runs Agri Evolve alongside his son and daughter Johnny and Beth. Agri Evolve works with coffee farmers in Uganda to help them grow high quality beans and export them around the world. Martin lives in the valley of Longsleddale, near Kendal, with wife Gill.

If we go back right to the very start, I had a job milking cows at the weekends when I was growing up in Lancashire. I enjoyed farming and so I went to study agriculture at the University of Reading and as part of that I studied tropical agriculture. I graduated, worked for a couple of years and then thought that maybe I should go and try to practise some tropical agriculture.

I applied to a development organisation who said they had a job in Uganda and it was really a case of take it or leave it. Gill and I had just had our first child, so we all went to Uganda for four years and I worked as an agriculturist, meeting the local farmers and helping them improve their agricultural production.

When I came back from Uganda I helped set up Mires Beck Nursery, a horticultural nursery in East Yorkshire, which is also a registered charity providing training for people with learning difficulties. I already had experience in this area because, when I left university, I had worked in a residential community for people with learning difficulties. I used my agricultural knowledge and skills to help grow vegetables and I really enjoyed it. I have always worked within businesses that provide a service to people. It’s not something I did consciously, it’s just happened that way, really.

Eventually, Johnny, who is now 31, also went to study agriculture at Reading. As a student he went out to volunteer on  the same project that I had worked on. He enjoyed it so much that he went out to do it again the next year and when he finished his degree he decided he wanted to set up an agricultural business and work with the farmers.

He went out there in August 2015 and began working with farmers and came across a group in the Kasese district, near the Rwenzori mountains in the west of the country, who said they were having a tough time finding a market for their coffee. He got talking to coffee buyers in the capital Kampala, who said there was a good market for coffee, but the quality of the coffee they were producing needed to improve. So Johnny became the contact, helping the farmers improve their processes and improve the quality so that the buyers in Kampala were happy to pay a better price.

In the last two years we’ve begun exporting the coffee independently in our own name as Agri Evolve. Back in 2017 we brought two tonnes of this coffee to the UK a year and now we’re bringing in about 40 tonnes a year. We’ve also built our own processing factory in the foothills of the Rwenzori mountains, with the help of investment from others. We supply coffee to customers in the United States, Far East and in the EU. We deal with about 40 roasters in the UK, including four in Cumbria.

Uganda is an amazing country. We met somebody before we went who had been working there and they said that it would be the best four years of our lives and they were right. We consider it a real privilege to have spent time there. We enjoy being able to go back to Uganda and visit and we still meet up with people that we knew when we first lived there and we’ve got very strong connections.

The country has a lot of potential and it’s still a privilege to be able to go and visit and work with the people, who are very humble, warm, welcoming and hard working. We’re just very pleased that we’re able to help in this small way.

Johnny lives out there permanently now and his twin sister, Beth, has also joined the company as a director and so it’s very much a family affair. We work alongside 70 Ugandan staff who work in everything from quality to accounts and production.

We moved over to Cumbria four years ago now and like lots of semi-retired people we came for the lovely sunshine and the warm weather, which we get here all the time, of course!

I’m semi-retired, but I could quite easily spend 40 hours a week or more working. Equally, on a nice day it’s good to be able to head off into the fells for a walk. I’m very grateful that I’ve got the flexibility to enjoy the Cumbrian fells, but also have some interesting work and to visit Uganda twice a year to see Johnny and Beth and see how things are going.

We’re not just interested in coffee. We’re interested in helping the farmer to grow more food crops. The farmers we’re working with are basically subsistence farmers. They’re on small plots of land, which is often just one or two acres, and they’re growing the food that they need, plus a few coffee plants for cash. The cash is almost always used to pay for school fees because people have to pay to send their kids to school in Uganda.

Within the next few years, we’ll be looking to expand the range of agriculture we engage with and maybe do some work helping farmers grow better bananas or better maize or other crops