Next Stop, Antarctica by Jonathan Owen

From Market Matters March 09

So you think business is tough? - try running a market garden on an island where the climate is nine months of winter and three months of bad weather and you’re 8,000 miles away from your export market. Port Stanley in the Falklands, for instance. To anyone who’s not Welsh or brought up in middle of the South Atlantic it’s pretty depressing but after a certain amount of unpleasantness with the Argentineans, Tim and Jan Miller decided to get out of sheep farming and develop Stanley Growers, F.I. (population 2,000’ish, plus a few hundred thousand penguins). The Falklands are not the easiest of places to visit but if you like wildlife, fishing and zero pollution it’s well worth the effort. Watch out for the ozone hole though – your nose might drop off.

A market garden in the Falklands? - not a business plan that can be sold easily to the bank manager you may think. Quite so – there’s only one bank on the Islands and no cashpoints. But after 1982 HM Government got it right and set up the Falkland Islands Development Company to sell off big chunks of the local economy to entrepreneurs and break the stranglehold of the sheep-farming Falkland Islands Company.

After ’82 the Falklands found itself all of a sudden hosting a garrison of 1,000 Bootnecks (Marines), Squaddies (Army) and Crabs (RAF) and the brightest Bennies (Islanders) saw some possibilities. Stanley Growers was originally an FIDC idea but Tim decided to chuck in his sheep farm and his own, small market garden to ‘give it a go’ as they say in Oz. He took over

running the Company in 1988 and in 1992 his wife, Jan opened a shop on the site that now includes a cafe, pet centre, gift shop and fresh cut flower service. Not quite Wyevale admittedly, but pretty close. In 1996 they took another plunge and bought the company from the FIDC and invested heavily in polytunnels, hydroponics and a plant nursery.

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