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Axel Månsson was born in 1956 and grew up in the town of Brande itself. Axel’s father was a house painter with his own business. For as long as Axel can remember, he always knew he wanted to become a farmer. All the children thought it was great fun when Henrik the milkman came by with his milk wagon and the horses Musse and Klaus. The others usually jumped off after a short ride, but Axel stayed on and rode the entire route around to all the local farmers.

Already at the age of 10, young Axel was helping the husband of the local schoolteacher, who was a farmer. He fed the calves and loaded cleaned sugar beets onto the trailer behind the old grey Ferguson tractor. He spent all his free time and most weekends out in the countryside. It wasn’t the money that drove him—although he earned a small amount now and then—but rather a boundless fascination with animals and farming. At 12 he began working with potatoes and earning a bit more for his efforts.

A livestock manager at 17

“I finished 9th grade and wasn’t much good at reading, but I was good at mathemathics. Back then you could more or less choose which classes you felt like attending—at least around here,” Axel explains.

“So it didn’t turn into many Danish or religion lessons for me, and it quickly became clear that I should go to agricultural school. After that you had to spend two years working, so I went to Southern Jutland. And believe it or not, even though I was only 17, I became livestock manager—twice—on two different farms. I was given enormous responsibility at a very young age. The trust people showed me back then has followed me throughout my life,” Axel says with a certain humility.

That trust helped build his confidence and self-worth, and today he is convinced it has been crucial to how far he has come.

“At 20 I bought livestock and machinery and rented land from the widow of the local savings bank director. And yes, it was a different time. She had 16 dairy cows, 40 fattening pigs and 300 hens, and employed two farmhands and a maid. But when I took over, she dismissed the staff, and I handled all the work myself while also holding a job on the side—so she probably hadn’t been running things very efficiently,” he laughs.

Chinese cabbage – from failure to success

From there things moved quickly. Axel bought and leased more land and more farms. One of the crops he eventually succeeded with was Chinese cabbage—but not without challenges:

“Oh yes, I’ve told this story many times,” he laughs. “One day—this must have been in the early 1980s—my then wife came home with a head of Chinese cabbage and a little bag of seeds. I tasted it and thought it was really good. The cabbage had cost 20 kroner and the seeds almost nothing. So of course I sat down and did some calculations and realised I could plant 60,000 cabbages per hectare and practically become a millionaire. So I bought and sowed a whole kilo of seed and thought my fortune was made. But in the end I only managed to sell 230 cabbages at 1.80 kroner each,” he laughs loudly, shaking his head at his own naivety.

Wiser now, he contacted a crop consultant and started again from scratch. The production of Chinese cabbage became a great success, and before long Axel Månsson was delivering to COOP.

Hardship along the way

But Axel has also faced adversity—so serious that many would have given up:

“In 1987–88 we went into suspension of payments and had our debt restructured. But I always believed we would get through it. Even though lawyers and accountants had given up, I still managed to make agreements—among others with Hedegaard—that allowed me to move forward,” he explains.

Constantly expanding assortment

Today Chinese cabbage is no longer the driving force of the business. It is not as popular as it once was, though Axel is—along with one other producer—the last to cultivate this almost legendary vegetable. Instead, iceberg lettuce is the cornerstone of the company today. In addition, many other varieties of lettuce, numerous types of cabbage and vegetables, fennel, celery, and a wide range of onions are grown.

Each year many new species and varieties are tested—both to assess whether they can be grown organically on sandy soil in Brande, and to evaluate whether they should become part of the future assortment. The trial fields are shown to customers, supermarket buyers, wholesalers, consumers, chefs and kitchen/canteen staff. Their feedback is used when planning new crops. Samples of new varieties are sent out, and the remainder is sold in the Farm Shop.

Organic farming is here to stay

Organics truly entered the business through the hens.

“I began organic egg production back in 1999. We had produced hatching eggs since 1981, then switched to barn eggs, and later to free-range eggs during the 1990s. So it wasn’t a huge leap to take the next step into organic,” Axel explains.

Today (2025), Axel Månsson has 231,000 organic laying hens, making it one of the largest organic egg producers in Denmark. The eggs are delivered, as always, to Hedegaard/DAVA Foods. The hens are white Leghorns, which visitors can see roaming outdoors upon arriving at the farm.

“I’ve always liked seeing my animals outside, so organic production appealed to me there as well,” says Axel.

“But it’s also the professional challenge of organic production that drives me. When I started out, weed control was mechanical—harrowing and so on. Then came herbicides, which at the time were considered a huge leap forward,” he says.

Today, however, the picture has changed. Axel was one of the first to swim against the tide in the 1980s by switching to the controversial IP-production system, later replaced by EuroGAP and now GlobalG.A.P. To be certified, producers must meet strict environmental and quality standards and document how their products are grown.

The company has also achieved GRASP certification, ensuring proper working conditions and social responsibility for employees.

Technological and agronomic developments within organic farming have advanced rapidly, and new knowledge and techniques have made it increasingly realistic to expand organic production, Axel acknowledges.

A vision of 100% organic

“Farming is also a mental journey. That applies to organics too. We’ve become wiser, and today we can do things we couldn’t do a few years ago. That’s what makes farming so exciting—the ability to use your experience to shape the future.

“My long-term vision is to become 100% organic, and we’re well on our way. Yes, I would love to see all of Denmark be organic. It would be fantastic if the world saw us as an organic nation. But only when it becomes realistically possible. You have to crawl before you can walk. For our business to survive, we must do what we can today and develop step by step. If I hadn’t had the conventional production, I wouldn’t be sitting here today. We wouldn’t have been able to invest or grow—not even in organics. But today, it’s clear that organic production forms the backbone of our existence,” Axel says.

Beyond Brande, Axel has participated in the Baltic Berries partnership in Latvia, operating 150 hectares of organic blackcurrants and redcurrants. He has also been part of a B2B Danida project in Egypt, producing 50 hectares of organic onions. The project is now completed and resulted, among other things, in a healthcare program for employees and knowledge transfer to the local producer.