BITTERHARVESTTHAT GIVESPLEASURE
24 September 1999
BITTERHARVESTTHAT GIVESPLEASURE
Harvest home at Pomona
Farm is something to drink
to, for the crops grown go
to produce beer and cider.
Tessa Gates reports
A WONDERFUL aromatic, almost antiseptic smell fills the yard at Pomona Farm, Bartestree, Hereford, for the hop harvest is in full swing.
Its a smell Julian Cotton knows well. He has been a hop farmer in his own right for the past seven years but was born just five miles away, the son of a hop farmer and has also worked on hop farms in Kent.
"A lot of people are reducing the acreage or going out of hops. We are stuck into hops and love them," says Julian who farms 62ha (153 acres) with 31ha (77 acres) of hops and 14ha (35 acres) of orchards producing cider apples.
Oversupply of alpha hops on the world market, a fall in demand for cask ales and the scourge of verticillium wilt all conspire to the decline in the number of hop growers and Great Britain is but a small player in the world market
"We do sell forward but the price of alpha hops has been low for three years now and not many forward contracts are being made. I have sold half of next years crop and I am quite pleased with that. The price is firming but is still not a price you would want to sell them all at."
* Bittering flavour
Alpha hops are the varieties, such as Target, which are grown for their bittering content. Aroma varieties – such as Goldings – are suffering from a flat market because of low sales of keg beer. Julian grows Target and Goldings, plus 3.23ha (8 acres) of Challenger, a dual purpose hop, and less than 1ha (2 acres) of Pheonix. Brewers Bass were rumoured to be looking to buy Phoenix but in the event, they didnt.
Julian sells his hops through Western Quality Hops, along with seven other growers. The crop is dried and pressed into bales on the farm.
"We average 1t of dried hops to the acre in a good year," he says.
Hops are perennials and the plants were already in the ground when Julian bought Pomona Farm. "They will last 30 years or more if they remain healthy and some of the Goldings here must be 35," he says.
During the growing season they are checked weekly for wilt, and individual bines are taken down and burned before the spores can spread. Nowadays this is done by a man with a quad bike and trailer who spends about a day a week on it. Julian can remember when it was the full time occupation of two women to walk the rows and rows of bines in his fathers hop yards checking for wilt.
Hops are labour-intensive everywhere and we employ two full-time men, plus about 30 casuals at harvest time and others when we need them. We have two picking machines and two bine loaders. It costs us £2/minute if we have a breakdown," he says. "We have to men machines as necessary because you cant afford to buy a new hop-picking machine in this country any more. Ours was here when we came and we bought the farm lock, stock and barrel. It had everything but the drying set up, which we installed.
Four weeks of hop picking is followed by the start of the apple harvest at the beginning of October. Depending on the variety, the apples will be picked right up until December. "Cider apples tend to be biennial and we had a very good year last year," says Julian. "We expect to get 150t off this year."
The apples are all contracted to Bulmers for the next 30 years. "Some orchards are 10 years into the contract and others are just 2-3 years in," he says. "We have planted some new orchards that wont come into production for five years ."
Other farmers in the area have also planted new orchards lately so the future looks rosy for cider production. "I do my bit by drinking cider and beer," Julian jokes, "but what we hop growers need is for people to drink more cask ales."
So make it "one for the hop farmers" next time you are choosing a pint and then it will be cheers all round.