Grower turns back on sprouts
Grower turns back on sprouts
ONE of the biggest growers of Brussels sprouts in the country has pulled out after 30 years of growing the crop, switching the 80ha (200 acres) slot in the rotation into barley and borage instead.
Ever-tightening quality controls and high labour and machinery costs had squeezed margins, forcing farm managing director, Tony Hall, to look for alternatives.
"The sprouts provided part of a two-year break before cereals for seed, but it is too easy to keep going and hope things will get better." Supermarkets had imposed higher and higher standards on a product with little shelf life, he says.
"The plant breeders have made tremendous strides away from the bitter-tasting varieties of the past, but I do not think there has been enough marketing to back it up. About 40% of all sprouts are sold at Christmas – that says something about their taste and how people view them."
Mr Hall, a former ADAS adviser, runs Humberside Farmers for owner, Roger Bramhill. The company is based near Market Weighton, East Yorks, with 1200ha (3000 acres) of arable land. Cropping is oilseed rape, potatoes, vining peas, borage, winter wheat, spring barley and winter barley. The farm has a strict policy to market all crops before drilling.
Spring barley for both seed and malting were already part of the cropping pattern and increasing the area could have put pressure on storage facilities. To get round that, Mr Hall has arranged for outside contractors to handle drying and storage. A similar contract has been set up for the borage.
But the borage market is also depressed, Mr Hall says. "That is because of world over-production on a speculative basis. So far I have no contract for borage and I am not sure whether to leave it in the rotation, it may go the same way as the sprouts.
"If that happens, I will plant more spring barley, it is the lesser of the evils. But there will be a lot more barley on the market, because so many people could not drill their winter wheat. I do not expect the premium for malting barley to be there this season." *
Tony Hall