The King Who Chose Organic
In 1985, a British prince converted his farm to organic. People called him a complete idiot. Forty years later, he's the King — and the farm is still going.
There's a detail from 2015 that I keep coming back to. When Prince Charles attended the Royal Opera at Covent Garden, he didn't eat the food there. He brought his own — prepared by staff at Clarence House from organic meat and vegetables grown on his farm in Gloucestershire. The Opera House noted that the Queen, when she visited, ordered from the menu. Charles brought a packed dinner.
It would be easy to read this as eccentricity. It's probably worth reading as something else.
King Charles III has been farming organically since 1985. That's four decades — predating the mainstream organic movement, predating most consumers caring about any of this, and predating the wave of supermarkets that would eventually stock organic lines because the market demanded it. When he converted his Highgrove estate in Gloucestershire to organic methods, he was deemed a "complete idiot" for wanting to do it. Organic farming was fringe. The industrial model — synthetic fertilisers, pesticides, maximum yield — was settled science as far as most of agriculture was concerned.
He did it anyway.
The Home Farm estate covers around 900 acres and received full organic status in 1994. Coming up the driveway, visitors are greeted by a sign: "Warning: You are now entering a GMO free zone." Over the years, new hedges have been laid across 16 kilometres — some woven by hand, several by Charles himself. This is not a symbolic farm. It's a working one.
In 1990, he founded Duchy Originals to market produce from his farm. The first product was a biscuit made from oats grown at Highgrove. The recipe took 18 months to perfect and has never been changed. It was also the first organic product the Scottish manufacturer Walkers had ever made. From that single biscuit, the range eventually grew to 300 products with annual sales reaching £200 million — making it the largest organic food brand in the United Kingdom. The man called a complete idiot in 1985 had built the country's biggest organic business within a generation.
So the question I find interesting isn't whether he eats organic. It's why.
He's been fairly direct about this over the years. In a 2021 Country Life piece, he said he had wanted, since the early 1980s, to focus on "an approach to food production that avoids the impact of the predominant, conventional system of industrialised agriculture, which, it is increasingly clear to see, is having a disastrous effect on soil fertility, biodiversity and animal and human health."
That's the King saying industrialised agriculture is having a disastrous effect on human health. Not a fringe activist. Not a food blogger. The monarch.
What I notice is that his reasoning isn't primarily about personal health — the "clean food for me" logic that often drives individual organic choices. It's structural. He's describing a farming system that he believes is degrading the conditions on which food production itself depends. Soil fertility. Biodiversity. The capacity of the land to keep producing. In 1970, at just 21 years old, he used his first public speech to express concerns about pollution and conservation. He has been saying versions of the same thing for fifty years.
There's a fair critique that Duchy Originals — now sold exclusively through Waitrose under the name Waitrose Duchy Organic — is premium-priced organic for people who shop at Waitrose. That's not nothing as a limitation. But one detail cuts against the vanity project reading. Charles has never personally profited from Duchy Originals. All royalties collected from Waitrose have been donated to charitable causes. Since the Waitrose partnership began, over £50 million has been raised for the King Charles III Charitable Fund. Every pound of it from organic biscuits, salmon, and sausages. None of it to him personally.
He reportedly ships produce from Highgrove 600 miles to Scotland rather than eat food grown elsewhere. That's the behaviour of someone who has thought carefully about what they eat and arrived at a view they actually hold — not a PR position.
I don't think the King eating organic proves anything about organic food. But the arc of it — the ridicule in 1985, the farm that kept going anyway, the movement that eventually caught up — is worth sitting with. He was called an idiot for a position that is now mainstream enough to fill an entire supermarket aisle.
It's worth asking what we're currently calling idiotic that turns out to be right.
