A Greedy Man in a Hungry World

by Jay Rayner

  And some of it is. Trying to argue that massive global agricultural combines have only the happiness and well-being of consumers at heart and aren’t focused on profit is a bit like trying to claim that the rain doesn’t really want to get you wet.

  Except that the more I investigate, the more I look at other examples of farming and consider the growing demands of the planet’s appetite, the more I find myself concluding that it doesn’t have to be this way. Or, to put it in the language that one of the tutors who taught me philosophical logic at university would applaud, just because some companies practising large-scale agriculture do not do so with either the environment’s or consumer’s best interests at heart, it does not immediately follow that all large-scale agriculture is bad.

  The reality is that, given the challenges we face, large-scale agriculture makes an awful lot of sense. It just needs to be pursued by enlightened people. It needs to be practised by people who aren’t looking to suck the landscape dry of what Schumacher called the planet’s ‘capital’, who don’t just mouth the words ‘sustainable intensification’ but know what it means.

  And that’s the language people use when they talk about Mansfield’s.

  Paul Mansfield’s big, they say, but he’s sustainable.

  ‘You have to go and have a look,’ says Adrian Barlow, who heads up the growers’ organization English Apples and Pears. ‘He’s doing some very interesting things.’ Companies like Mansfield’s are necessary because, Barlow says, the English apple business has been in serious trouble and is only now fighting its way out of that trouble. In 2003 we grew only 23.9 per cent of all the apples we ate in Britain. The rest were imported. That had risen to just over 30 per cent by 2006 and 36.8 per cent by 2011. ‘And I expect to continue seeing increases.’ If a country like Britain needs to continue getting more self-sufficient in food to help protect consumers from food price shocks from abroad, if we really need to get growing much more of the stuff we eat, then the apple business is providing an important example.

  Plus I like apples.

  I ask Adrian Barlow if he will make an introduction, which he agrees to do. There is an exchange of emails. From the Mansfield’s end the responses are all from Paul’s wife, who, for those with an affection for old movies, is called Jane. Apparently Paul doesn’t do email. It’s not part of his skill set.

  But a plan is made. They are going off on holiday to the home they own in Portugal and they’ll see me the day after they get back. I take the high-speed train to Canterbury. I take a taxi to Nickle Farm, out on the A28. I am dropped by huge sheds, the size of aircraft hangars, fashioned from pale-cream corrugated metal. There are manicured lawns and well-kept car parks. I ring the buzzer and announce myself. There is a brief pause before the woman on the intercom says, ‘Oh, well. I suppose you’d better … you know … come in.’

  I make my way upstairs to a set of huge, echoing office suites clearly too big for the desks in them, and I’m met by a woman, who is squinting at me over her glasses.

  ‘I thought it was you,’ she says. She had been looking at me through the video intercom but had somehow still recognized me from some of the television work I do. ‘What are you doing here?’

  I am not expected. They have completely forgotten. Paul Mansfield isn’t even on site. He’s gone off for lunch with a bunch of other growers. Jane Mansfield, Chris Lynch and their colleagues gabble their apologies and run off to ‘make arrangements’. I take the time to look around the offices, which are located on a raised floor of the new sheds that were only built a year or so before at a cost of £8.6 million. There are wood-laminate floors and sofas in apple green leatherette (or perhaps it really is leather; after all, there must be serious cash in apples). There are trophies declaring Mansfield’s to be grower of the year, and a certificate for being runner-up in the BBC’s Food and Farming Awards. There is a glossy brochure printed on thick card full of photographs of grading lines and packing lines and refrigeration units.

  Most impressive of all is the aerial view of both the building I am standing in and the land around it. The stuff about the thirty-three new cold stores and their capacity to hold 20,000 bins of fruit at any one time – a ton of apples fills three bins – is interesting. It’s good to know it has six loading bays with a pneumatic bag system even though I haven’t a clue what one of those is. Apparently there are sixteen speed baggers that can pack eight bags of fruit a minute, and a water filtration process that uses a carbon-based system to extend the usability of the water from two days to six months, thus saving three million litres of water each year. All of that is fascinating. But there’s something even better to look at.

  It’s the bloody great hole they’ve dug behind it. It’s a reservoir, capable of holding 22.5 million litres of water, all of it to be collected from the one-hectare roof of the building I’m standing in. I look up at the ceiling as if expecting to see water dripping through. It seems such an obvious thing to do and yet not everybody is doing it.

  Suddenly Jane is back with Chris. He’ll take me on a tour of the site and then drive me the twenty miles or so across Kent to meet Paul, who will be in a pub somewhere. Briskly, I am asked to remove any jewellery – ring, bracelet, watch – and put my ludicrous hair away inside a hat. We put on insulated yellow hazard jackets and scrub up before entering the facility. While we are getting changed I ask about the reservoir.

  ‘I think it was Paul’s idea,’ Chris says. ‘There had been some flooding and so it seemed like a solution.’

  When it’s fully up and running he says they should be able to trickle-irrigate all of the trees without drawing water from elsewhere. I like the sound of trickle irrigation. It sounds careful and precise. They are also planting a nature reserve around it, and replanting hedgerows with native trees. ‘Paul has a thing about native trees, silver birches and the like.’

  It is May and the last of the Braeburns are being picked now, heralding the start of the great British apple gap, which will last until August or September, when some of the less popular native varieties like Worcester will come onstream. The Cox apples finished in February and won’t be back until October. But there is still activity. Teams of workers are unpacking boxes of Jazz apples imported from New Zealand and rebagging them for the supermarkets.

  ‘Until three or four years ago we only packed and graded our own fruit but now in the downtime we handle fruit from abroad,’ Chris tells me. Doesn’t it irritate you to be doing that? Aren’t you encouraging imports? ‘It’s not like that. It’s complementary to what we do. It maintains consumer interest.’ There may be a British apple gap but there’s no Jazz apple gap, because they come in from abroad. All that said, he admits the company’s strategy is to keep increasing yield. Four years ago it was around 40,000 bins. By 2012 it had risen to 60,000 bins. By 2015 it should be around 100,000 bins, or well over 30,000 tons of apples.

  Is that by using more land?

  He shakes his head. ‘Not entirely. It’s by increasing yield per acre.’ There are new ways of planting trees. If the branches can’t spread outwards because they’re packed too close together, they can at least go upwards. There is unlimited space going upwards, so they train the trees to use it. They are farming into the sky.

  The air in the brightly lit shed is cold. It catches at the back of my throat and makes my knuckles pink. ‘We believe in a chill chain throughout the business,’ Chris says. ‘Apples come in and are rapidly chilled before being put into storage.’

  Doesn’t that hoover up energy? No, he says, they are using the new generation of saline-based coolants, which are 60 per cent more energy efficient than those that went before. And what went before was a long way beyond the infamous and now banned CFCs, which were punching holes in the ozone layer. All that is ancient history. ‘It is massively in our interests to reduce energy costs. We have regular energy audits.’

  Chris takes me to see the lines of apple storage rooms. We have been storing apples in Britain since Roman times, the fruit
piled into a space that’s as airtight as possible so that the ripening fruit uses up the available oxygen until it’s all gone, ripening stops, and the fruit falls into a form of suspended animation. The methods used now are a little more sophisticated, though the principle is the same. The apples are placed inside, the doors locked and the oxygen drawn out. Chris pushes open one of the heavy doors and we are immediately hit by a smell of apples of an intensity you would normally find in a sweet shop.

  ‘Each of these stores holds 200 tons and can do that for between six and eight months,’ he announces, looking up at the boxes stacked tidily on top of each other. That, he says, is the point. When weighing up energy usage it’s worth considering the alternatives. If these apples weren’t able to come out of store across the year, then even more would have to be imported from as far away as New Zealand, China or South Africa. The carbon footprint of importation would be far greater than that of low-energy storage.

  THE CAMPAIGN FOR REAL ARGUMENTS

  There is, of course, an alternative. It’s the one the self-appointed food Taliban are shouting at this page right now: we stop eating apples altogether when the season ends. Just do it. Seasonality rules. When the last apples are picked and eaten in May, that’s it. Fini. We could stew a few of them and package the result for long storage. We could make pies out of a load of them and chuck those in the freezer (though obviously that would leave its own huge carbon footprint). But essentially for five months of the year we’d go without fresh apples.

  It’s an idea. It’s a really stupid idea.

  Arguing for a food policy based on the kind of principles that would make the Amish look like a bunch of happy-go-lucky, profligate sybarites may make a certain sort of gimlet-eyed, self-regarding food warrior feel smug and self-righteous. It may make them glow with an inner purity.

  Feel my deep well of virtue.

  Stroke my inner goodness.

  And so on.

  But it will not provide a solution. We’ve been eating apples out of season in Britain for millennia. We have a reasonable expectation of being able to do so, because there are ways of making it happen. There is also a market designed to supply that need. Short of introducing laws banning the sale of something as basic as apples outside of specific, officially designated periods – shades of a Soviet-style command-and-control system there, and wasn’t that a success – it would be impossible to stop a demand.

  Back comes the argument: so, Rayner, all this seasonality stuff is rubbish, is it? We can just eat out-of-season strawberries from Morocco and out-of-season asparagus from Peru as much as we like because we can’t frame laws against it? Is that your point?

  I really must stop talking to myself.

  But no, that’s not my point. Food politics in the developed world has long been hidebound by clumsy, polarized arguments; by polemical warriors arguing that if you don’t entirely buy into all of the demands of the organics movement, then you clearly support the massive, unfettered use of chemicals and won’t eat anything unless it’s been for a long bath in a swimming pool full of chlorine; that if you suggest for a moment that there is a place for large-scale farming you are clearly an enemy of Planet Earth who wants to see all badgers culled, all human life chased off the land into city-centre NCP car parks, and the very soil violated by the sort of big machinery that gets Jeremy Clarkson horny, until even Kent is a dustbowl; that if you make the slightest case for any form of biotechnology you obviously want to see your own children gene-spliced with a mackerel so they cry tears of pure fish oil when you beat them.

  Well, no. And no. And no. The demands and challenges of food security in the twenty-first century are so big and chewy and complex that childish ya-boo politics is futile and, frankly, dangerous. Not only will the debate polarize but so will the participants, so that it becomes a shouting match between the hardcore knit-your-own-yoghurt foodinistas on the one side and the worst kind of grubby-handed climate-change-denying big business on the other. In the middle will be a whole bunch of people, the overwhelming majority, who will refuse to engage in a debate staged on those terms or, even more worryingly, simply feel excluded from it. It’s too important for that to happen. We need joined-up thinking, a more sophisticated, inclusive approach to deal with the issues, sometimes on a case-by-case basis. And now I sound like a New Labour special adviser.

  So no, getting asparagus flown in from Peru so we can eat Jamie Oliver’s char-grilled pork leg with asparagus recipe out of season is not necessarily OK. It’s a stupid waste of fuel for something that frankly we may like but we do not need. But eating apples out of season is entirely fine. What matters is that we do as much as we possibly can to reduce the shipping of apples halfway across the world from New Zealand and China. The new, shiny low-energy apple stores at Mansfield’s are one of those things.

  I watch Jazz apples trundling down conveyors on the way to being bagged for one of the supermarkets. Mansfield’s supplies all of the major retailers here. Do the buyers demand the chucking out of lots of fruit because it isn’t perfect?

  ‘Very little these days. It’s rarely more than 5 per cent and the vast majority of that can go to the juice industry,’ Chris says. ‘The supermarkets have recognized that there is an appetite among consumers for budget packs of apples that aren’t all perfect.’ He takes me for a tour of the huge orchards, where they grow Bramley, Jazz and Braeburn. We stop off at Buddy’s grave and then head off to meet Paul. Along the way we take a wrong turning off the motorway and end up covering the same ten-mile stretch of road three times instead of just once.

  My mission to meet the biggest apple supplier in Britain is beginning to feel doomed.

  When I do finally get to meet the Mr Big of British apples it is not in a James Bond baddie’s lair. He is not stooped over a map of the world, shifting model apples about from one bit of territory to the next, as he plans juicy world domination. He does not have a white cat. He’s in the depths of a gloomy village pub not far from Sittingbourne and he has a plate of roast pork belly. He’s with a couple of other fruit farmers, Robert Hinge and Lance Morrish, who are members with Mansfield of a growers’ group called Fruition. They are also involved in a marketing organization called World Wide Fruit, which, with their sister organization in New Zealand, Enza, has the sole licence to grow Jazz apples in the UK. It is clear, however, that Mansfield’s is the senior partner here. Paul is the biggest grower by a very long way.

  He’s also imposing: stocky, with a barrel chest and skin the colour of a conker from the Portuguese holiday just gone. He has big, solid hands, with fingers like bunches of baby bananas, and on one little finger he wears a signet ring heavy with diamonds, the one outward sign of his success. But he’s disarmingly self-effacing. He tells the story of how his old dad got started in the fruit-growing business; that he was just a greengrocer from a line of them, that his grandmother Emma used to sell fruit and veg from what would have been the front room of a two-up-two-down in the East End back in the twenties.

  ‘My dad slept upstairs in a bed with his five brothers. Six to a bed. Emma, my grandmother, she went off to Covent Garden every day, though these were the days when it was horse and cart.’

  Buddy eventually struck out alone, and went from running a single shop to one of the biggest in the area, alongside stalls in local markets. He needed so much fruit that he started going direct to the growers down in Kent.

  ‘Then he needed somewhere to store all his boxes, and this farm was available, so he bought it. This was in 1967.’

  And that’s how Mansfield’s began?

  ‘Yeah, but we were terrible apple growers. We had poor root stock. We had poor soil. We didn’t know what we were doing. But the thing is, Buddy liked it. He liked growing apples.’

  Bit by bit they learned what they were doing. And bit by bit they bought new farms. They expanded and grew. In the late eighties Paul took over from Buddy, though with his dad constantly at his side for advice and support. I ask him whether buying up farms
was part of a plan.

  ‘Scale struck me as the way to go. You know what, we are being paid today the same as we were being paid twenty years ago for apples. But our costs have gone up massively. The cardboard boxes, the tractors. Our actual costs have doubled. And the only way we can keep moving and investing and be sustainable is by being more efficient.’ Efficiency means scale.

  Robert Hinge agrees. ‘You need a greater area of orchards to make a living now,’ he says. ‘Pretty farming doesn’t pay.’ He admits, however, that his family, which has been farming for five generations, hasn’t expanded in the way Mansfield’s has.

  Why is that?

  ‘I think it’s because Paul’s an outsider. He could see things in the way we couldn’t. And he wasn’t held back by all these family traditions and competing family opinions. He could just get on with it.’

  Has anything been lost because of apple farming moving into scale?

  Robert shrugs. ‘The Weald of Kent isn’t as pretty as it used to be.’

  What about the emphasis on sustainability: the imperative to manage the soil, to keep the hedgerows in check, to find new means of supplying water? Where did that come from? ‘At first I think that came from the supermarkets,’ Robert says.

  ‘Yeah,’ says Paul. ‘But we picked it up and made it work.’

  Is that why he put in the reservoir?

  ‘It made business sense to do that.’

  I ask the three apple farmers if they think the British consumer understands how farming works. They all laugh.

  ‘The good thing is that they want British now,’ Lance Morrish says. ‘British is a brand. It’s a selling point.’

  ‘But they don’t actually know how the food is produced,’ says Robert. ‘A while back I dropped off a box of apples at my local village shop and one of the customers grabbed some and said you can’t get fresher than that.’

  I could immediately see what his point was. I said, ‘So how long had these apples of yours been in store?’