SUCCESSFUL ORGANIC
GROWING IN WORCESTERSHIRE

Rolls Hill, Suckley

During our first winter, we started planning for a good-sized shed (there were none on the farm), and for our house (we brought a large mobile home to the farm and lived temporarily in that). We also spent a lot of time thinking of the redevelopment of Rolls Hill be-cause all of its soft fruit was well beyond its peak and heavily infested with couch and docks. We planned a drainage scheme for which we obtained a grant, being a registered horticultural holding, and we envisaged a step by step programme of removing the old soft fruit, drainage, a crop of potatoes (preceded by a heavy application of farmyard manure), possibly a crop of vegetables which would further assist in cleaning the ground, and finally a return to soft fruit. We would try to maintain production of soft fruit as best we could so as not to lose our connection with our Soil Association free-zer. There was no question that the soil and aspect of Rolls Hill favoured soft fruit and our experience of our first summer showed that there was little problem from the aphids and raspberry beetle.

Our second year saw us getting ahead with this programme. We found that our friend could not take as much soft fruit as we would have liked to send him because he was having some difficulty in selling it, so we sent a larger proportion to the cannery, where, of course, its organic nature was lost in the many more tons of fruit supplied from other sources. But the manager did tell me he was content to let our fruit stand overnight because it kept its condition much better than anyone else's. Besides the soft fruit, we grew about four acres of potatoes - Pentland Crown - and two acres of summer and winter vegetables. We sold these to health shops, a greengrocer in Malvern who was pleased to handle organic produce and whose support to us across the years was a great help, and to wholesalers. We also found a small farm gate trade which was later to increase considerably. We encouraged these customers to buy in bulk. They had started coming in response to advertis-ing.

Towards the end of the second year, we learned from our friend that he was not able to continue selling soft fruit; the Birmingham health food shops had changed hands and his London wholesaler was also in difficulties. Thus we found our original marketing arrange-ment had fallen apart without any further buyers coming forward. However, we decided to expand our vegetable growing, having had a ' fairly successful trial year, and our area under soft fruit was in any event being shrunk further as the drainage and redevelop-ment proceeded. But we immediately started searching for another fruit outlet which would give preference to our produce as organic.

Quite soon, and many weeks before the next season began, we found a large importing businessman, willing to include all our produce in his deliveries to health food shops and delicatessens in Southern England; but he demanded the usual pre-packing arrange-ments which; for our part, were costly in material and time. We were impressed at the marketing forethought he had given to wholesaling organic produce and we still had hopes that health food shops were going to be filled up by customers for organic fruit and vegetables.

Our third season imposed therefore different arrangements for selling that were more costly and open to the changes in market prices. In the event our newly-found wholesaler at Pershore only took a small quantity of strawberries (they were picked from the new strawberries which we had planted ourselves), lettuce and courgettes. The cannery took nearly all the rest of our fruit; and another one-man cannery (one man did all the work) took four hundredweight of our blackberries to sell as organic produce. As for the vegetables, we were selling greater quantities than ever to the wholesalers, sometimes at the auction market at Worcester, and to our gate customers; we also had postal customers from all over England who bought our potatoes, roots and Bramley apples, by the half hundredweight. It was these latter two sorts of customers who gave us the greatest hope for the future, for we could ask them those prices which reflected the labour time that had been spent hoeing.

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