After a year of inconsistent weather, the last quarter of the year has been plagued by flooding and low light levels, making harvests hard for many growers.
In Lancashire, growers have been fighting off heavy rain since August and cauliflower and cabbage crops have come under fire. As much as 25 per cent of cauliflower yields were lost through September to November in this area of the country and, once again, prices did not make up for the shortfall caused in growers’ pockets.
Quality has been good but now growers are fearful of frost finishing off cauliflower crops, with temperatures dropping to -2°C in some areas of the UK this week. “We used to grow cauliflower for longer, but we were always caught out by frosts and then the cauliflowers go rotten,” explains one grower. “French cauliflowers come on line now and we let Cornish product take over. It is the luck of the draw and we cannot afford to lose 100 hectares of cauliflowers.”
January King cabbage is set for harvest in January and, despite yields also being low due to flooding in the North, the crop is looking good. However, lack of sunlight has caused both January King and Savoy cabbage to reduce in head size this season.
The UK carrot crop has been plagued with disease this quarter, due to a humid and wet growing season. There has been pressure on product price across the industry in varying degrees and the sector has been working hard not to pass the price increase onto consumers.
“It has been a pretty hard job for carrot growers,” reveals one insider. “October is the busiest month of the year, where the industry is harvesting and assessing the crop to see if it will withstand storage.
“Carrots are grown on light soils that cannot take a lot of water and growers in Nottingham have found it hard to apply wet straw to already damp land and have lost yields.”
In autumn, the sugar content in carrots was generally low, due to lack of sunlight in the summer, but stock seems to be back on track and has a nice eating quality. However, to make sure carrots reach supermarket shelves in good condition, there has been more grading out than usual. “Yields are higher than last year but last year they were at an all-time low,” says one carrot grower. “If there is a seasonal weather pattern in the next two to three months, and we get some nice frosty activity, there will be a big impact on our yields.
“But it has been a devil of a season for carrot growers and 2008 will go down in history as one of the dullest years on record for the weather.”
At the other end of the spectrum, there is an oversupply of onions on the UK market, with UK, Dutch and German product all struggling to compete against each other. The UK onion industry is finding it hard to beat the low prices offered by imports, and the poor quality of home-grown alliums is not helping the situation. “We are still unsure of how good or bad the quality is of stored onions in the UK,” admits one insider. “The product could suffer from white rot and breakdown, but we will not find out properly until February. Demand is steady, but we have a lot of competition on the market and it is keeping the product price low.”
The UK leek crop has not done as well as expected this quarter, with most crops below maximum yield by October. But, according to one grower, the last three to four weeks have seen good temperatures and later crops have started to grow further. “The leeks are starting to gain weight now and so it is looking like we will achieve average yields this year,” he says. “Leeks need the temperature to be above 6°C to continue to grow, so we want some mild weather.”
Although demand has been generally high for vegetables, it took a slight downturn last week and the category entered what some industry insiders refer to as the “November doldrums”.
“It has been slow this past week,” says one grower. “We are now in the November doldrums and people have started buying Christmas presents and not prioritising fresh vegetables when they go to the supermarket.”
The light on the horizon, however, is consumers’ new-found interest in going back to basics and cooking from scratch. This emerging trend is giving staple vegetable lines a boost in sales and high demand is expected at Christmas.
“People are going back to cooking from basic ingredients, which is really good for us,” says one carrot grower. “And the odds are that there is a 50:50 chance of having a white Christmas in the UK, so consumers will want traditional Christmas vegetables. Carrots are a base for many a seasonal meal and it is our season.”
Price pressure from the supermarkets’ price war against the discounters, coupled with rising costs of labour, fertiliser and fuel, have made for a tough final quarter for vegetable growers in the UK.
“The supermarket price wars are very frightening,” says one grower. “We are at the bottom price in the first place and there is no way we could cut prices further.
“We are just pawns in a big international game. Fertiliser is expensive and costs have gone up 200 per cent in the last year. I fear that the price will go up more next year. We are in the hands of the big boys: the supermarkets and the big chemical companies. We just have to do our best and keep our heads down.”
Waiting for the Christmas push
We have everything down ready for the winter trade and have just planted some broad beans for the spring, says Chris Carr of family business
J Carr & Son, which grows vegetables for wholesale and its own farm shop at Brooklynne Farm in Clacton-on-Sea, Essex. Now we are just ticking over and getting ready for Christmas.
We have started to harvest our Brussels sprouts, which we will continue to do until January, due to the fact that we grow seven different varieties that peak at different times. We grow four acres of sprouts, mainly to sell in our farm shop. We do sell the vegetable loose, but it is very popular on the stalk, so that is mainly how we sell it. It is easier for us to sell it that way anyway, as it means a quicker harvest and the sprouts have a longer shelf life.
At the beginning of the summer we had a lot of rain, and the Brussels sprouts did not grow for the first couple of months and it took a lot of extra work to get them going. We had to use a tractor hoe to separate the land as heavy rain made the soil as thick as concrete and the roots could not get through.
But we are back on track and the Brussels sprouts have caught up well. We had a fairly good September and started to harvest the vegetable two weeks ago.
However, our cauliflower has not been so lucky and is three weeks behind schedule due to the rain. The wet conditions in summer did not bode well for cauliflower and we have just started cutting for Christmas. We have around eight acres of the crop and our main customers are farmers’ markets and New Spitalfields Market in London.
We have seen tremendous demand for Romanesque and the purple cabbage variety called Graffiti from wholesalers in London. We have grown both products for five years now, but two months ago demand really increased and the price has been good.
We grow cabbage year round and the winter crop has been of good quality so far, but prices have been poor. There is just not the demand for cabbage that there used to be. People would much rather go for broccoli or curly kale. But that is fine, as we have just started to harvest purple sprouting broccoli, which looks good to last until June, and we have been growing curly kale for 20 years.
The wet weather has also brought a slug problem on our land but, on the bright side, we have been spraying less as there are fewer aphids and caterpillars around. We try hard to keep spraying to a minimum and only spray when we really have to. We are as green and environment-friendly as possible.
However, the vegetable industry is gearing up for a hit as the chemicals we are allowed to use become fewer and fewer. We have to spray pesticides to produce the yields we do and lately we seem to be losing the use of the ones we use the most. What are we supposed to do when a chemical is taken off the shelf? We are advised to use a weaker, less effective one, but eventually even those will be taken away. We do not like spraying the crops but when you have a disease that could wipe the whole lot out, you have to act.
We have tried to farm organically, but it did not work for us and we just did not get the customers through the door. The price you sell the vegetables at has to go up because of the cost of the extra labour and some money has to go to the Soil Association and, at the end of the day, customers were not prepared to pay more for a holey cabbage.
I think that people are more concerned nowadays about where their vegetables have come from and who grew them, and our farm shop is doing very well. Money is tighter and people are trying to source veg for less money and straight from the farmer. But we are now having to compete with Tesco online for some of our public sector customers, as its website is offering caterers at schools and retirement homes a discount. We have lost a lot of school contracts to Tesco and we believe that they are now going after the wholesale business.
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