The 23rd August marks three years since The Garlic Farm became a certified B Corp.

We officially certified in August 2023, but our B Corp journey began much earlier, when we first started the assessment process in 2019. Looking back now, one of the most valuable things B Corp has given us is the reason – and the framework – to stop and look back, in order to move forward in the right direction.

Because when you are busy running a business, it can be surprisingly difficult to see progress.

Since beginning the process in 2019, we have become much better at measuring our environmental and social impact. We now track everything from water and electricity use to renewable energy generation, waste and recycling, food waste composting, carbon sequestration, organic sales, educational visits, community engagement and team wellbeing.

Without measuring, we can't really know whether the changes we are making are working – or where we most need to improve.

Over the years, we have achieved many of the targets we set ourselves, including reducing resource use from our original baseline. But as the business has grown, we have realised that the next stage isn't simply about using less, but understanding how efficiently we are using our resources. How much energy are we using in relation to what we produce? How much waste as the business grows? How much food waste per restaurant cover? Measuring impact alongside activity should give us a much more meaningful picture of whether we are becoming more sustainable over time.

And some of our latest figures give us plenty to feel encouraged by.

This year our solar panels generated 140,730 kWh of renewable electricity – more electricity than we bought from the grid. At our Langbridge site, electricity consumption has fallen to 51,600 kWh, compared with our baseline of 104,984 kWh – a reduction of more than 50%.

Water remains a major focus. Across the business we used 11,560 m³ this year. At Mersley, our two ancient wells are used to their maximum capacity to help irrigate the market garden, while all wastewater from the site continues to be processed through our WETland system. But there is much more we can do. We are constantly working on the puzzle of roof-water runoff, storage and direction – where water comes from, where it goes and how we can keep more of it on the farm. Over the coming year, we hope to increase storage and investigate possibilities including reinstating old ponds.

Waste is changing too. We are increasingly asking not simply how much waste we send away and what it costs us, but what can we keep on site and turn back into a resource?

Our composting systems allow us to take raw vegetable waste from our restaurant and return it to the soil as nutrient- and microbe-rich compost. Alongside our worm farms, this is helping us build fertility in the Garlic Lovers' Garden – a small but very satisfying example of the circular systems we want to create more of.

And people are very much part of the picture too. Since launching the Garlic Lovers' Garden in March, we have welcomed more than 1,063 adults and children through educational visits, volunteering opportunities and community events, while producing more than 500kg of organic vegetables for our restaurant. Across the wider business, 6.8% of our sales now come from organic products, another step towards our longer-term ambition to increase the proportion of what we grow, make and sell organically.

But we are very much still learning.

We still produce plenty of waste. We still use mains electricity and water. We are still trying to understand our carbon impact and sequestration more accurately. Some things are frustratingly difficult to measure and, often, the more we investigate an issue, the more complicated it becomes.

Perhaps that is one of the biggest things we have learnt since 2019: sustainability and impact measurement aren't projects you finish. They are an ongoing process of measuring, questioning, experimenting, getting things wrong, learning and trying again.

And now B Corp is asking us to do more.

In January, we will begin our recertification process under B Lab's new standards – and there is a lot of work involved. The new standards raise the bar considerably, but starting to work through them has also been surprisingly reinvigorating.

It has taken us back to the conversations we were having in 2019. What kind of business do we want to be? How do we look after the people who work here? How do we reduce our impact on natural resources? What role should a farm and rural business play in its community? And, crucially, how do we know whether what we are doing is actually making a difference?

Those questions were why B Corp appealed to us in the first place.

Seven years later, we certainly don't have all the answers. But we have considerably more information with which to answer them. We can celebrate what has worked, recognise what hasn't and see much more clearly where we still need to improve.

So, as we celebrate three years as a B Corp, we're also preparing for the next stage. There will undoubtedly be plenty of spreadsheets, evidence gathering and moments when we wonder why on earth we signed ourselves up for it.

But there will also be new ideas, new discoveries and, hopefully, another few years of measurable progress.