Selling England By the Punnet

Once a fleeting summer treat, strawberries are now with us for half the year. The price we pay is an illusion of choice, industrial farming and an increasingly blighted landscape. But now one council is fighting back. By Andrew English

After last years heat wave, its business as usual for the Great British Summer. Last month was the wettest June on record. "June just rains and never stops" as Flanders and Swann put is. "Thirty days and spoils the crops". It's a familiar refrain for Britain's soft fruit farmers. "We can loose £200,000 of fruit in just s couple of nights of heavy rain" says one. "That's a financial disaster and it's why we use poly tunnels."

Spanish polytunnels (for Spain is where they were first introduced) are a great agricultural success story. Cheap, simply and portable, these 12ft high, polythene draped, steel hoops have driven an explosion in demand for Strawberries in Britain. The season used to be five weeks, but supermarket shevles now display home-grown Elsanta strawberries for up to six months. By protecting the fruit from rain and mould polytunnels have increased Britain's strawberry yields by 30 to 50 per cent - up to 10 tonnes an acre. The use of pesticides has been reduced and out of the rain, the pickers' lives are easier too.

"Remember when you bought a punnet of strawberries and a day later you would have a punnet of mould? Polytunnels have given us the quality and that is driving the demand."

Last year's British Soft Fruit market was worth £310 million; this year it will be worth nearly £350 million. Last year, we ate nearly £300 million worth of strawberries and raspberries of which £116 million was supplied by British farmers.

This is all very well, but what no one is addressing is why British consumers have been persuaded that they need strawberries for six months of the yeear, rather then six weeks, or whether they  mind that they are now being offered only two varieties of strawberry, or whether they are prepared to accept that the consequence of being able to eat out-of season fruit is the rise of the strawberry conglomerates that take advantage of cheap foreign labour, and planning-control exemptions to cover great swathes of the countryside in plastic.

But it looks as if things are going to change. As reported in The Daily Telegraph this week, the planning committe of Waverley Borough Council in Surrey took the unprecedented step of demanding the removal of 150 acres of polytunnels, windbreaks and 45 caravans for the 250 temporary workers at Tuesley Farm in Milford.

The farmk beings to Hall Hunter Partnership, one of Britain's leading suppliers of soft fruit and a supplier to Waitrose. I can see the farm through my front window. That view across a low beautiful valley is the reason I bought an over prices, ugly little road side semi. If Yorkshire is God's Own country, its because God can't afford a house in Surrey. On the cusp of the Weald of Sussex, peppered with listed Edwin Lutyens houses, this Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty is home ot pop stars' managers, London QC's and celebrities.
Damon Hill lives down the road, Chris Evans and Geoffrey Robinson close by.

Now that rolling field is sliced with squares filled with polytunnels in a sea of mud, tended alternately by an army of pickers (earning £4.50 an hour), chemical suited specialists and squadrons of tractors, sprayers and telescopic handlers.

With Waverley Council facing the possibility of a lengthy and expensive court battle to establish a legal precedent on polytunnels, it would be too easy to dismiss this dispute between NIMBY townies and berry barons. It is not as straightforward as that. Ppolytunnel cultivation is a metaphor for our easy acceptance of once seasonal foods all year round.

July 10th 2004