International Farm Focus

UK production has traditionally always been supported in the autumn by a supply from Dutch and Belgian growers. A very loyal group of growers supplying Well Pict European for a number of years has been the Van der Werf brothers.

Ad van der Werf started growing strawberries under glass 22 years ago at an old nursery site. Since those early days the nursery has been developed into a relatively new glasshosue of 10,000 square metres. The site is used in the Spring soley for the production of strawberries and in the autumn for both production and the propagation of plants for use in the spring.

Ads brother, gerrit stopped his tomato production in 1992 and moved into strawberry production. Currently he owns three nurseries, about 3 ha in total and a small nursery site for plant propagation. Furthermore he is a part owner of A Plant, a company propagating strawberry plants for cusomters in germany, the Nethwelands and the UK. A Plant pride themselves in working with their customer to provide them with plants to suit their production methods. After a number of years supplying seasonal labour to local growers, the youngest brother Jan van de Werf saw the chance to acquire a local glasshosue in his  home village of Helenaveen. He started production in 2002. Although each of the brothers has his own company, they work together when they can, often makign use of each others labour forces and splitting tasks.
During the garvest season the work force is made up of local hosue wives and Polish temporary workers. The workers come for a period of two to three months and live on site.

In the spring the strawberries are destined for Germany, France and the Netherlands. As van der Werf is also supplying a number of bakeries with sliced strawberries. The strawberries are trimmed, halved and packed then delivered, twice daily fresh from the farm. In the autumn the main destination is the UK with a large percentage going to ASDA.

The brothers are keen to make developments to their production and propagating skills. They are carrying out further work on the use of CO2 to impove the quality and production of the plant material. Though no promising new notthern European varieties are in sight, their research could provide positive clies for future developments. A new everbearer could mean a revolution in strawberry production. Outdoor production could be replaced with indoor production, withi closed glasshouses utilising growing lights able to produce for a larger part of the year, withi yields up to 30kg per metre square per year.

As a group the brothers have abandoned the auction system because they believe that a quality product should be picked and packed specifically for a customer and not sold as a generic product on a daily fluctuating market. They also like focusing on the growing and packing of strawberries and leave the marketing to a specialist.

The Well-Pict European group are pleased to be working with this dedicated strawberry growing family and look forward to future joint developments.

Winter 2003