Cucumber growers up and down the country are in the process of rethinking their energy strategy, with many moving on from gas and oil to biomass energy.

A combination of higher energy prices and lower retail prices has forced the industry to review the options. “Unfortunately the supermarkets have no sympathy at all, so while energy prices go up, supermarket prices go down,” explains the Cucumber Growers’ Association’s Derek Hargreaves.

“If this continues we will get a situation like with the beef burgers that were found to contain horse meat, except in our case it will be substandard pesticides.”

Hargreaves doesn’t hold back in his criticism of the major retailers. “Most growers can’t tell supermarkets to sod off, so they get pressured into increasingly lower prices,” he says. “Growers in countries outside the UK use other types of pesticides; cheap ones that aren’t what they’re supposed to be. The situation is that the supermarkets have a stranglehold on the growers.”

Some supermarkets are better than others, he admits, although it goes in phases and varies from one year to another. “In fairness to the supermarkets, in 2011 when we had the E. coli situation and nobody wanted European cucumbers or salad products in general, the supermarkets were good in terms that they maintained sales. Then prices went down again last year.”

The average price the grower gets, across the season, is about 28p for a cucumber. “Last year I think prices were pushed too far, so it might go up a little bit this year,” he says hopefully.

Hargreaves is well aware that he and his fellow growers can’t afford to do without the supermarkets since the decline of the wholesale markets. Instead the industry is pinning its hope on the growing demand for UK-grown product. “The supermarkets are demanding more UK product because that’s what their customers are demanding,” he explains. “Where I am up in Yorkshire there is one company that normally does 20 acres of production, but this year is taking on three new nurseries, in total another 12 acres of production.”

The question, he says, is whether the UK cucumber industry continues with pesticide and biological control use or look for an alternative. According to Hargreaves, the UK is currently leading the way in terms of biological control. “The hassle we have to go through to get new types of pesticides approved is unbelievable.”

UK growers have always had a smaller available list of materials for pest and disease control compared to growers in Holland and, to an even larger extent, Spain. This is partly because of the relative size of the cucumber production in those countries and also because of the degree of difficulty in obtaining approvals for pesticides in the respective countries, explains Hargreaves. “The UK authorities have always adopted the most severe strategy when selecting chemical approvals – whereas the authorities in Spain and Holland have in the past been more relaxed about approvals,” he says.

“The annoying thing about this is that products not cleared for use on cucumbers in the UK can be used without issue in the other EU states and product so treated can be sold here. The UK authorities have little sympathy for the industry – seeing their role as protecting the public – but as products are used elsewhere and then imported to the UK you do wonder how this strategy is supposed to work.” —