BOSSES at leading top fruit marketing groups have questioned the credibility of a grower who slammed them for poor performance during last year's dreadful UK season.

Kent grower Nicolas Swatland attacked Worldwide Fruit and OrchardWorld for 'an absolute cock-up,' which saw many producers lose money over the last campaign.

He says he was forced to sell his 60-acre orchard, because he lost so much money on last season's Queen Cox crop.

'I feel the two big sales organisations in this country - Worldwide Fruits and OrchardWorld - just weren't up to speed,' he told South East Farmer magazine.

He added that as long as growers continue to work with the organisations, they would retain an influence on the industry's future.

'I could have done a better job than these two,' he was reported as saying. 'I can sell Cox to the supermarkets in the middle of March for 22p a pound because that's what they did. I don't think anyone has had an apology for their absolute cock-up. I would advise growers to leave them.' Swatland argued that by the time the organisations had realised the Cox crop was huge it was already too late to remedy the crisis.

Swatland is a grower for OrchardWorld. But boss Mark Culley questioned Swatland's right to blame the marketing group for what has been a dreadful season.

Culley said: 'We marketed his fruit this year. I think he lacks credible information, but I'm not going to argue with him in the press.

'To be honest the year we have had has been very disappointing. No single year in fruit production ever puts people out of business and poorly managed growers' suffer the most in years like this. We can look and see what's happened in the past five months - Cox has lost a lot of market share. One has to diversify - conference pears could have saved a few people. Every grower has to reduce their dependence on Cox.' Meanwhile Worldwide Fruit chief Alasdair Robertson said he had never even heard of Swatland, and was dismayed to be drawn into the row.

He said: 'I use electricity in my house and if I rang a magazine about an electricity company I did not use and did not work with I had no idea about, people would think I was a nutcase.

'Who is this idiot? We don't sell his fruit. We don't have any contact with this person at all. I don't know who he is. I think it's a bloody cheek, personally.'

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