Kent’s biggest cauliflower grower, Robert Montgomery from the Isle of Thanet, is to cease production of the crop because the vegetable is no longer financially viable.
The news has shaken the diminishing band of growers who produce these speciality winter cauliflowers, harvested between January and May. At present, they can only be reliably grown in this part of Kent and Cornwall, because of the mild winters around them.
This now means that the 700 acres of cauliflower grown on the Montgomery family farm for the past 20 years will go, with an effective loss of jobs for 30 full time staff, though a decision on future labour requirements is yet to be made.
Demand for cauliflowers in volume terms had dropped 20 per cent in two years, and much more over the last decade. This was partly due to declining returns from supermarkets, but there are other factors as well.
One marketer said that cauliflowers were seen as less convenient for cooking in the home - a view hotly disputed by growers. Another factor was that the new express-type supermarkets in town often did not stock them, amid claims that cauliflowers are no longer a high priority consumer purchase.
Montgomery, who farms at Upper Hale, Birchington, near Margate, said that the cauliflower acreage had dropped 35 per cent in the Thanet area over the past six years, and nationally it was nearer 50 per cent, despite increased yields through improved varieties.
He added that cauliflower growers had to get a break-even return for these January to May winter harvested varieties of about 39-40p per (whole) head.
While Montgomery also gives other reasons than the supermarket influence for low prices over a number of years, others were not so generous.
One grower said the Thanet cauliflower acreage had declined from 6,000 acres in the l950s to just 1,500 today, with just four growers left, who had to do with the returns offered by supermarkets.
“There is a surplus of poor quality cauliflowers on sale, that are often stored too long by supermarkets, become wilted, show loss of colour, and become rubbery and stale,” said another Thanet grower, Geoffrey Philpott, a close friend of Robert Montgomery.
“I feel so angry about a situation where an efficient, quality orientated cauliflower grower for many years and well respected in the industry is now forced to give up growing because over a number of years, he cannot make them pay.”
A brighter prospect for the staff was a large glasshouse tomato and pepper growing project on the farm which started in September 2004 and was now at the planning stage.
But Montgomery explained that the future milder winters could see the winter harvested varieties being grown where they could not grow them now.
