The town of El Ejido is one of the central points of the infamous Mar de Plastico (Sea of Plastic), in the Almería province of Andalusia, where a mass of local growers operate under 26,000 hectares of plastic sheeting. The Escobar family is one of the key names in the town’s recent history; José Manuel Escobar Sr was a leading figure in the establishment of the first horticultural co-operative in the area, Ejidomar, in 1975.
Since venturing out on his own, for a dozen years until last Christmas, he had produced salads and vegetables on 12ha close to the heart of the town.
For some time though, Escobar had believed that there could be more to the industry than being part of the madding crowd. In the early co-op days, he had bought grapes from the then thriving local growers in the hills around Berja, and had long thought that the climate and natural protection offered to the area by the surrounding hills would make an ideal environment for his own business. Years of planning, negotiation and €30 million (£23.6m) of investment later, his vision has become reality.
Augro Fresh will soon be 100 per cent located at a new site, which is thought to represent the largest private investment ever made in Almerían horticulture. It is run by José Manuel Sr’s son, the company’s managing director Pedro. The site will be completely surrounded by a national park, which cannot therefore be built on. The mountains at its rear provide the production area with robust protection from the buffeting winds coming off the Sierra Nevada, while the hills between Augro Fresh’s land and El Ejido provide natural protection from the pests that have built up in the coastal area over the last 30 years of intense commercial production.
Pedro Escobar says: “As years and years of intensive production have taken their toll on the soils of Almería, most growers have moved to hydroponic production to escape the residual chemicals that have inevitably built up in the soil. Here, we have started from scratch; we are isolated from the rest of the region’s producers, and therefore protected, and we have rich red soils, so we also have to apply for far fewer pesticides.”
When the Escobars moved in, envisioning a mostly flat production area would have been difficult. The remnants of a once-thriving seeded grape industry, combined with olive trees planted since its demise, was a large shelved expanse with a variety of soils, of variable quality. “The whole area had to be levelled, which was the longest part of the job,” says Pedro Escobar. “The soil in the top half was poor, and the bottom half was good, so we had to build a mountain of soil in the middle, and then level it. We moved in total 1.2m cubic metres of soil, over a three-degree drop.”
The work took place in stages, and an initial block of 7ha will have become 100ha of production by August, with 80 per cent of that under courgettes, 10 per cent aubergines and 10 per cent Ramiro peppers. A 50m-litre reservoir has been constructed to catch the water that flows from the mountain range and supplement water from three boreholes owned by Augro Fresh, as well the monthly allowance communal boreholes.
Eventually, spend will rise to around €33m. The area was legally earmarked for agricultural use, and once the commercial site is complete, Augro Fresh will set about rejuvenating its surroundings. “We will be planting 25,000 olive trees around the site; we didn’t take any out, the only thing that went was some very old grape production,” says Pedro Escobar. “We will also be planting thousands of indigenous trees around the site. Everything that is grey at the moment will be green. We’ll be spending €500,000 on planting of trees alone.”
Once all of the work is finished, the site will be carbon positive, taking more carbon out of the atmosphere than it puts in. “This is a unique environment,” he says. “It is something you really need to come and see to do it justice. Because of our methods, we have just two small coldstores, three tractors and two lorries. We are not moving product 40-50 miles to be packed. And our product will be almost residue free - there would not be much difference if we converted to organic.”
A relatively small on-site packhouse is operational already, but a brand-new office is in the final stages of construction, and the entire management, sales and administration function will move the 14 miles into the hills this month. Proximity to the product will be a major advantage, says Pedro Escobar. “All product will be within one kilometre of the office, and more importantly the packhouse and coldstorage facilities. Our objective is that the maximum time from picking to the coldstore is one hour, as opposed to the smaller growers in the region, who would typically pack all day before taking a lorry to their central coldstore.
“The vast majority of the product is picked directly into the final box, so there is no re-selection process. The product is only touched once. Once you have ensured that the crop is the right quality, it’s what you do with it that makes the difference - if you send it to an importer, you lose control.”
“If there is one word that sums up our philosophy, it is control,” says Jez Spikings, who moved back to his roots in Spalding to take the UK commercial director’s role with Augro Fresh two years ago. “The average size of a grower in Almería is about 1.8ha, so to have this type of area, generally you would be dealing with up to 50 growers. Because we are the only grower, we can control our 100ha as we wish.”
For customers, this has advantages too. “One of our clients asked for a grower list from a different company, and they couldn’t provide it, because firstly there were so many growers, and secondly they were transient. We are the grower, so we know. There is one name on the list and one set of reports,” he adds.
Pedro Escobar continues: “I don’t believe in the co-operative system. One man with 2ha cannot possibly do the same job as a grower with 50ha. We would not do all this and send the product to an importer or a co-operative. We want to have control right through to the final customer.
“The key is to have as much security as possible, and when you grow, pack, transport and market your own product, you do not need to rely on any third parties. You need to a) believe in what you’re doing; b) control what you’re doing; and c) have no fear of the hard work and realise that no one in this world gives you anything for nothing.”
Spikings says there is a tight-knit unity across the group. “This should be the next 30 years of our lives, and everybody in the group feels the same. We all have the same end-game and we are one team,” he says.
“Nobody will follow us in Almería,” adds Pedro Escobar. “If you believe in something, you should go ahead and do it, and, that is something that historically Almerian horticulture has not been very good at. There is too much talking to each other and a lack of real action, and if you want to succeed in today’s market, you need to react to opportunities quickly.
“The joy of having your own land is that, if a customer asks you to do something, you can do it if it makes sense for the company. We haven’t planted Ramiro peppers before, but various customers have asked about the variety, and we know we have the right soil for it, so we are doing that this year. We do not want to grow 50 different lines; rather, we will pick and choose those that best suit our system of working. We will concentrate on what we know we can do well, and our principles are to pack in the field. That is our point of difference, and we believe the process enhances quality, so we will not jeopardise that.”
Having said all that, short-term expansion is exponential. The last two months have seen huge structural change, as greenhouses are constructed to play host to massive plantings in July and August, and then harvesting beginning on a grand scale from early September onwards. The company produced roughly a million kilos of product from its 12ha last year, but will produce almost 50 times that volume in the next 12 months.
The fields are largely manned by Moroccans, many of whom have been making the short trip across the ocean to southern Spain to work for the Escobar family for a number of years. Augro Fresh recruits in Morocco and employs on a nine-month contract basis each year. At peak picking time, there will be 300 Moroccan workers in the fields and packhouse. After five years, the Moroccan workers are eligible to apply for Spanish citizenship. “The retention of knowledge in picking staff is extremely important to us,” says commercial director Rafael Roldan Machado. “As we pick and pack delicate products in the field, they have to know exactly what they are doing. As there is no agency involved, we have no issues. We pay them, and provide them with housing and all the facilities. We provide extensive training, but another reason why you want people to come back is that this means less time in the training room year on year.”
Pedro Escobar adds: “With the products we specialise in, we also need to pick twice every day, and it is difficult to recruit local labour on Sundays or bank holidays. With products like baby courgettes, picking time is crucial - if you look at baby courgettes on the shelves, often they are just courgette pieces that have been cut because the picking regime was not rigid enough. Because we have total control over the process, we can pick at the optimum time, and also be in the market 48 hours earlier than our competition.”
“With courgettes,” says Roldan Machado, “it is not the growing that is the difficult part, although no crop is easy to grow. The harvest and the handling is where the difference comes, and you need plenty of labour. We have four people per hectare, when the norm is two, and we pick straight into a supermarket tray, then into a field box. For smaller growers, it is impossible to pick in the field efficiently; it’s a logistical nightmare.”
Augro Fresh was the first company in Spain to achieve GlobalGAP certification, and has a plethora of different accreditations to its name, as befits a leading fresh produce company with a UK focus. “We also have a technical team that is in the field every day. The typical Almerían technologist must control many growers, while ours only control one farm; our people are there all the time, and if anything were to go wrong, it is to them that we would turn immediately,” says Pedro Escobar.
Picking efficiency takes strain from the rest of the operation, adds Spikings. “The packhouse is small because we do not need a big facility. Most of the work we do there is flow-wrapping or netting of product, although we do have a loose line as a contingency against bad weather. Everything that comes in goes out on the same day.”
The line leaders in the packhouse have the benefit of being able to communicate directly with the field in a matter of minutes, as the product is just a short walk away. “There is a big difference between people who talk about packing in the field and those that actually do it,” Spikings says. “Our packhouse has been built to be functional, and is not meant to be an all-singing-all-dancing facility. We don’t feel that this is where you can add value or quality to our products; that is done in the field.”
Augro Fresh has focused its attentions on the UK, with a dedicated office in this country for seven years, but also has customers across Scandinavia, and in Switzerland. “The UK is at the forefront of everything the company does,” says Spikings. “We are not here to take seven per cent out of the business, we are part of the whole process. We have a small commercial team in Spalding - we are where the customers are, and the technical expertise is where the product is.”
On home soil, Augro Fresh has a gourmet business, which sells the foodservice industry champagnes, wines, chocolates and other luxury products, as well as baby and round courgettes, courgette flowers and aubergines, from offices in Almería and Madrid (a third will open in Barcelona before Christmas 2008). And a 2,000sqm fresh-cut facility is next in line for the new site, with the aim for it to be opened and supplying the domestic market with fresh-cut salads and vegetables by the end of the year.
The business can also count boxing and transport amongst its facets and, since the expansion began, it has also added portable toilets to its armoury. “I needed 30 toilets, and when I saw the margins involved, I thought ‘I’ll do that myself’,” says Pedro Escobar. So he set up a business hiring and selling portacabins, toilets and showers, which he supplies to horticultural counterparts and a growing range of other businesses. “Everything we do must complement everything else,” he says. “We are of course looking to spread the risks of the business too; everybody knows about the cost and price pressures in the market at the moment and we are not immune to that.
“We cannot work with everybody, but we want to work with the customers who themselves want to work with the best. What we want our customers to recognise is that there is a huge cost to what we have done. Business is for everybody, not just one link in the chain, and every business needs to be self-sufficient and profitable.”
All bases are covered, he says, and the amount of planning that has gone into the project to date reflects two lifetimes of consideration - those of father and son. “This is a dream for anyone in the Almerían industry,” says Pedro Escobar. “If you believe in moving forward, you were born with this dream in your head. Sometimes, you’ll die and this is still a dream, but we are proving that dreams can be realised. Opening the company in the UK seven years ago gave us the platform and the momentum to do what we have done.”
José Manuel is responsible for production and Pedro takes control of the commercial part of the business, but both have been totally hands-on in the design and construction process. “My father is 66, I am 38, and a lot of people said we were crazy to consider doing this,” says Pedro Escobar. “But he is like a boy with new shoes. He has been growing in El Ejido all his life, and now he has a totally different atmosphere and environment to live and work in. He told me that if we expanded, we had to keep all of the production together [rather than have multiple sites], and that is what we have done.
“We are at least a step ahead of everyone else. Not only would it be impossible for anyone to replicate what we have done but, if they could, I’m not sure anyone would have the courage. People have the money, but not the control.
“We know we cannot fall asleep, and we also know that we don’t have any neighbours here, so we cannot blame anyone else. If we keep our own house clean, no one can make a mess of it for us.
“My wife works with me and we have two young daughters. This is the future for our family and the people who work for us. We are completely convinced.”
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