Organic by Design: Vegeta­bles, Eggs, Energy

Axel Månsson runs one of Denmark’s largest organic vegetable farms in Brande, covering more than 1,900ha. The farm culti­vates 32 different types of vegetable, plus cereals and protein crops, and includes a wood­land area with hen houses that shelter nearly 250,000 organic chickens. It is also home to Denmark’s first organic biogas plant, which supplies green gas to the national gas grid.

The man behind it all wears many hats – gardener, hotel owner, CEO – but Axel mostly iden­ti­fies as a farmer. Growing up as the son of a baker in Brande in the 1960s, he dreamed more about running a farm than going to school.

Trying new things is exciting.

Axel Månsson

Today, his company, Axel Månsson A/S, is a multi­mil­lion-dollar busi­ness. It is one of the largest players in the Danish organic vegetable market, the largest single supplier of organic eggs to the Danes, and a minor export busi­ness to a few coun­tries in Europe.

This success is a far cry from where it all began almost 50 years ago, when a young Axel bought a 43ha farm with 16 cows, 40 pigs and 300 chickens from the local bank manager’s widow. And no – when he made his purchase, he did not have a fancy plan or an idea of how the farm should develop, he admits with a smile.

“It more or less happened through a combi­na­tion of coin­ci­dence and curiosity,” he says. “I like to make things happen, and trying new things is exciting.”

Success with organic vegeta­bles despite setbacks

Chinese cabbage was one happy coin­ci­dence that became a building block for Axel Månsson A/S.

The vegetable took Denmark by storm in the 1980s, and Axel believed it could be an oppor­tu­nity to diver­sify the farm’s potato produc­tion at the time. He compared the DKK20 (£2.26) that a Chinese cabbage cost in the shops at the time with the cost of seeds – and sowed a kilo of them, enough for several thou­sand plants.

The result was 230 heads of Chinese cabbage sold, gener­ating a small profit of less than DKK500 (£56.43) to cover the adven­ture. Axel brushed off his failure and gained the neces­sary knowl­edge about culti­vating Chinese cabbage, as well as compe­ti­tion and sales, and became a supplier to the COOP super­mar­kets.

He tells the story with a certain amount of self-depre­cating humour. While he no longer grows Chinese cabbage, the farm now grows the popular pointed cabbage and more modern cabbage types, like Bimi and bok choy.

Another coin­ci­dence was freshly sliced vegeta­bles, which Axel wanted to launch but which did not resonate with whole­salers and chain stores. Through the grapevine, he heard that the potato company, Flen­sted, had been asking about freshly sliced vegeta­bles. At that time, Flen­sted was a buyer of the farm’s pota­toes, so Axel worked his way through the entire chain of command of naysayers up to senior manage­ment.

“In the end, I got hold of Ole Flen­sted himself,” says Axel. “He rejected the idea at first, but if I could keep my mouth shut for the time being, he acknowl­edged that the company was consid­ering freshly cut vegeta­bles.”

Flen­sted sold freshly cut vegeta­bles until 2023, when it closed the depart­ment to concen­trate on pota­toes. But by then Axel had already moved on – and had become Denmark’s largest producer of iceberg lettuce.

But there was a stum­bling block when he went into receiver­ship, a situ­a­tion where banks and lawyers turned their backs on Axel without taking his driving force into account. The brood hens became part of the rescue package, as he entered into agree­ments with Hede­gaard- now Dava Foods- among others, to supply hatching eggs.

Circular farming for the market of the future

Although Axel didn’t initially have a clear vision or strategy, he has made up for this short­coming as the company has grown. Today, his focus is on the needs of the future market.

Produc­tion has to be sustain­able and aim towards circular organic farming. Animal welfare is an impor­tant part of the foun­da­tion of chicken farming, and soil health is main­tained through the use of catch crops and compost to contin­u­ally regen­erate the land.

The company is self-suffi­cient in nutri­ents, and the goal is to do the same in feed and energy.

“We are constantly testing prod­ucts that we find attrac­tive for the market of the future,” he says. “Our inten­tion is to find out what is required for each species to thrive here on our sandy soil. Only then will we start large-scale cultivation.”

The farm welcomes many visi­tors throughout the year – both private indi­vid­uals and commer­cial customers. Guided tours, lectures, specialist events and activ­i­ties bring produc­tion and customers closer together. Market trends are changing rapidly, and it is impor­tant to have a keen eye for devel­op­ments, like the increasing demand for conve­nience prod­ucts.

“Knowl­edge about organic farming and the way we produce vegeta­bles is also impor­tant at a time when the gap between town and country is growing,” empha­sises Axel.

Chicken forests

As a self-declared organic farmer, Axel would like all of Denmark to be culti­vated organ­i­cally. His goal is to make most of the company’s produc­tion organic. But Axel is also a realist; his produc­tion is organic with the excep­tion of five kinds of conven­tional vegeta­bles.

‘You have to crawl before you can walk,’ is one of his mottoes. Another is: ‘The most impor­tant thing in sustain­ability is healthy finances”.

“Without conven­tional produc­tion, we wouldn’t have had the finan­cial where­withal to develop step by step toward more organic farming and greater sustain­ability,” he admits. “For example, we still grow conven­tional iceberg lettuce, as there’s still a market for it in Denmark. And if we cannot supply it, others will.”

It’ll be a fantastic cycle if we can replace imported protein with micro-algae.

Axel Månsson

Admit­tedly, organic produc­tion is chal­lenged by diseases and pests, but as he points out, the balance between the two forms of cultivation will be affected by new oppor­tu­ni­ties and tech­niques in organic farming.

The company has invested in an Amer­ican laser weeder from Carbon­Ro­botics. Through arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence and laser beams, the robot is able to find and ‘shoot’ the weeds down itself. This means that the robot is an alter­na­tive to manual weeding, which is other­wise the only option for a main crop like organic onions. Since robots do not mix up the soil, new weed seeds do not come to the surface either.

All 72m eggs sold annu­ally by the company are organic. The 231,000 white Italian hens forage in wooded areas where they can peck and sunbathe, eat insects and herbs, and scratch in the grass to supple­ment their diet, safe from birds of prey.

Biogas, algae and the next cycle

The strategy of adopting the core organic prin­ciple of circular produc­tion devel­oped in a collab­o­ra­tion with Nature Energy, which estab­lished Denmark’s first organic biogas plant. The initia­tive was driven by a goal of becoming self-suffi­cient in organic fertilisers. Expanded in 2019, the plant processes biomass such as chicken manure and plant residues from Månsson’s own produc­tion, as well as from farmers in the area.

The resulting diges­tate is more concen­trated than manure, can be distrib­uted better, and is more easily absorbed by plants – and it has a reduced odour.

The next step is to become completely self-suffi­cient in feed for the chickens. For this reason, Axel is involved in a trial conducted by the Danish Tech­no­log­ical Insti­tute to grow micro-algae, which can replace imported protein in chicken feed. The algae are culti­vated in plastic hoses laid on the ground and fed with excess CO2 from the biogas plant.

“It’ll be a fantastic cycle if our expec­ta­tions are met, to grow protein for animal feed and perhaps food produc­tion in hoses on our own fields based on our own residual waste,” he says.

Since algae can produce up to 20 times more protein per hectare than soy, they offer a sustain­able way to conserve agri­cul­tural land. Vertical farming does the same, but Axel is neither involved with nor inter­ested in that. “That may all be great, but I’m an organic farmer, and vertical farming is miles away from my interest in natural cultivation.”