Organic Farm Foods (OFF) managing director Adam Wakeley has promised to begin a UK-grown organic apple revolution.
Wakeley revealed his organic plan to Observer Food Monthly: supermarkets and consumers, he said, are desperate for organic, UK fruit, and he intends to provide them with it. “Tesco had just three days' worth of English organic apples on their shelves last year, because that's all they could get,” he is quoted as saying. “Through our investors we are going to buy large chunks of the right land - normally this means Hereford and Kent and plant with the right varieties. It takes three years to grow the apples, which coincidentally is the time it takes for organic conversion. At the end you not only have home-grown apples but more land in organic conversion. And the beauty of the idea is that I know the size of my markets, because I'm already supplying them with imported fruit. In a nutshell, I will take my imported off and put English on.”
The Sunday supplement said Wakeley's scheme is under way on acreage bought by his first investor, but he won't be growing 'classic' English varieties, labeling Cox “the junkie of apples”. He added: “[Cox] wouldn't last a day without chemicals. Take away its fertilisers and pesticides and it will wilt. So we need to go right back and find the varieties which are disease-resistant and have good taste. This is what we have done.” OFF, he claimed, is focusing on strains from the 13th and 14th century.
Although the Soil Association insists that 66 per cent of organic produce is homegrown, Wakeley believes UK growers do not understand the organic movement. “Granted, they are up to their eyes in debt, mortgaged to the hilt and on their knees, but English farmers don't understand why you've got to have ponds, hedgerows, compost. They see it as a fad, and as six per cent of the retail market, which means to them 94 per cent of the market isn't interested,” he said.
“We’ve got a team of specialists who know more about organic apple farming than anybody in the world, including Bob Barr, the world's foremost compost expert because it's all about the soil. At the end of the day, my future is not challenging guidelines set up by the Soil Association or the supermarkets. That's not my job.
“My job is to reinvent English farming and bring local, organic food into the marketplace.”
