Win-a-farm competition where everyone is a loser: Soup firm faces fury after 260,000 enter – but no one gets £500,000 prize
Another week passes and there’s no shortage of people wanting to sign up for country living and subscribing to the myth that is the rural idyll. However, for some – as this article recounts – any prospect of living the rural dream is over. More than 260,000 people took part in a competition, part of a £2.5million marketing campaign by the New Covent Soup company and its sister brand, Farmhouse Fare. The winner was supposed to collect a cheque for £500,000 – enough to buy a small farm on which to turn their rural dream into reality. Each carton of soup had a unique code number printed on it which customers had to enter on the ‘win a farm’ website. But it would appear that whoever had the winning number threw the packaging away before ever checking the site. With no winner, the ‘competition’ has resulted in claims of corporate greed, a scam and calls for Trading Standards to investigate. RSN Members may recall a previous story in Hinterland about ‘MyFarm’, an online experiment in farming giving up to 10,000 members of the public a say in the running of a real working farm owned by the National Trust While the competition and MyFarm are not necessarily bad ideas, I cannot help but wonder if farming is best left to the experts?