Opinion: High energy costs are killing our veg-growing sector

We have the most expensive commercial electricity in the world, with unit costs on the near Continent typically half or less of what businesses on this side of the Channel pay.

Our power might be “greener”, but theirs comes from nuclear and the same North Sea gas that we as a country have so vehemently turned our back on. 

See also: Opinion – don’t expect your sprayer to provide post-BPS answers

About the author

Mike Neaverson

News opinion writer

Mike Neaverson is a potato grower and independent agronomist from South Lincolnshire. After a spell in farm management, he set up his own business in 2017 and is also heavily involved with his family’s 300ha arable farm.

Read more articles by Mike Neaverson

Let’s say that you are on the board of a multinational frozen food manufacturer.

You know that volume prospects are good and that most consumers buy on price alone and couldn’t care less about the embedded carbon emissions in their oven chips.

Where, then, would you build your fancy new power-supping factory?

In a country where energy is cheap and plentiful?

Or just over the Channel, where the government blasts anyone who dares to use significant amounts of energy as the devil incarnate with crippling levels of green net-zero taxes?

Energy isn’t the only driver here, but it is a very considerable one. Take frozen potato products as just one example.

Frozen potato imports

Fifteen years ago, about half a million tonnes were imported into the country each year. Now, a decade and a half of green policy later, we are on track to import twice that amount.  

It gets worse – that volume is frozen yield too, so allowing for peeling and processing losses we have now offshored to the near Continent somewhere in the region of 1.25m tonnes of our 5m tonne potato sector.

Putting aside the issue of food security, that’s a quarter of our sector gone, with no sign of that trend relenting.

I would have much sympathy with these figures if imported volume fluctuated with domestic potato availability and prices, as it used to do.

But over the past seven years, the increase in imported volume has been consistent and sustained, regardless of whether British potato prices are cheap or expensive.

Worryingly for both the potato grower and our economy, this suggests a structural change. 

The same applies for many other frozen vegetables.

Talking to a few of my vegetable-growing friends, the story is often the same from customers: “Why would we pay you more when we can produce it cheaper on subsidised farms and with much cheaper energy in Europe?”.

About now, if I may, I’d like to whip out my fag packet calculator.

My little potato operation averages about one labour unit to grow about 2,000t of potatoes.

Job losses

On this basis, an increase of circa 0.7m tonnes of production gifted to the northern Continent is costing the UK 350 on-farm jobs, to say nothing of those employed in the rest of the long supply chain.

We must be well into the thousands of good, well-paid jobs lost just in one little bit of our one little sector. 

And what is happening to all of those surplus British vegetables?

Well, many of them are being dumped, at enormous loss to the grower, into anaerobic digestion plants, while those heavily subsidised plants produce expensive energy which diminishes our industrial output still further. 

So I’d like to ask energy secretary Ed Miliband and Defra secretary Emma Reynolds some very simple questions.

Exactly how much of our processed domestic food sector do they intend to export? Is it 40%? Or 50%? Or even 60%?

And exactly how much prosperity are they prepared to sacrifice on the altar of net zero along the way?