Farm Of The Week: Fungi and games down on the farm

Growing mushrooms is a fairly simple job in farming terms, it turns out. But Greyfriars of Wath has kept its lawyers busy, one way and another.

John Smith, the man behind the story, sits at a desk in a shed a mile from Wath village, between Ripon and Thirsk. As the locals would want to point out, about 15 trucks a day go in and out of the site. Otherwise it is peaceful and smells sweet.

Mr Smith, 62, grew up on a mixed farm at East Witton; got a degree in Agriculture and a Master’s in Marketing; emigrated to Rhodesia; worked for big manufacturing businesses; and bought some land.

He came back, having lost most of his assets when Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, and got a call from an old mate who was running pigs at Boroughbridge and diversifying into mushrooms to give himself a market for muck. It was 1988 and the business was “just about washing its face”, trying to use muck which was better simply spread on fields. You might think mushrooms will grow anywhere. But not like in the picture they won’t. Mushroom compost is a precise mix.

Getting scientific about growing was one job. Getting serious about marketing was another. The business picked up orders from the Co-op, Tesco, Netto, Aldi and eventually, and most importantly, Morrisons and Asda. Turnover was up from £300,000 to £4.5m when the pig business went into administration in 1999. Mr Smith and a partner bought what became Greyfriars UK – and then the Greyfriars Group, lately turning over £14m from interests including sweetcorn, squashes, organic cabbage and a garlic farm in Bulgaria.

Mr Smith owned 85 per cent but transferred his shares, in January, to QV Foods of Lincolnshire, a potatoes-based business which also supplies Morrisons and Asda. He remains at Wath as general manager.

He has property and racehorses to keep him busy when he retires – along with a third daughter, still only eight, to add to two grown-ups he already had.

The sweetcorn, garlic and organic veg businesses grew out of the experience with mushrooms.

Greyfriars could fix it even if they did not grow it. And they would learn to grow it as required. Most of the sweetcorn business is in dealing and packing, using supplies from Spain, Morocco, Senegal and USA. But in the interests of local-as-possible, Greyfriars has become probably the most northerly commercial maize grower in England, by planting under fleece in North Yorkshire.

Garlic is awkward because the smell means it needs its own packing house. When Greyfriars added one to its North Yorkshire complex, Spain was the obvious source for garlic. But Spain was up to seven euros an hour for picking and Bulgarians would do it for 1.7.

The heart of the business remains the site near Wath and its 10 insulated polytunnels, producing 20,000 lbs of mushrooms a week. That is still a drop in the ocean of demand. The Irish supply most of it, thanks to state investment in smallholders, and Holland and Poland are big players.

But fuel costs, exchange rates, and the fashion for home sourcing, mean the British industry is poised for a comeback, according to Mr Smith. Including distribution for other suppliers, Greyfriars is involved in three per cent of the market and is preparing to multiply that.

The growing mats come as a ready-made sandwich from Tunneltech of Doncaster. It takes three weeks at 23C to get them sprouting, then the conditions are changed to simulate autumn and you get three weeks of cropping until the compost is spent. Cropping is the complicated bit. Shoppers want mushrooms clean enough to cook whole and more or less the same size, although mixed packs – take it from the experts – are much better value.

Skilled pickers average £10 an hour, including bonuses for productivity, and £15 on bank holidays. But villages around here do not have many labourers left in them and Mr Smith gave up trying to recruit locally. After trying the workers of the world, he hired an agency in Riga when Latvia joined the EU and 90 per cent of his 80-90 staff have been Latvian ever since. A number have settled locally... “It is a relationship which has worked well both ways.”

During the 90s, a lot of growing was contracted out. Farmers would run a few sheds. Even some Yorkshire prisons got involved. But fuel costs started to make the satellite model uneconomic. And – we have heard this one before – the Prison Service decided agricultural labour was not ambitious enough, or something, and dropped a number of collaborations it could now do with.

Everything was changing anyway. Mushrooms, we might recall, used to travel in 6-lb baskets, from which they would be weighed out by a greengrocer. But the supermarkets wanted small pre-packs.

Mr Smith sums up: “You needed three times the pallet space, three times the trucks, three times the cooling capacity...”

Greyfriars met the challenge by becoming a member of the Northern Mushroom Group – formed to take advantage of the European Fruit & Vegetable Aid Scheme, which offered producer co-ops a 50 per cent refund on approved investments. The packhouse at Wath belongs to Northern Mushrooms and the group reckons it is still owed repayments on similar investments.

But the Rural Payments Agency ran into trouble with EC auditors over who could be paid for what. And after a review, a number of producer groups were declared ineligible. Northern Mushrooms was among them but is fighting the decision, and takes comfort from a recent court victory for some Scottish fruit producers, Angus Growers, who disputed a similar ruling – see http://tinyurl.com/6ltx2ny/ The RPA is considering the verdict.

Mr Smith might well feel it is his turn for a win. He has just swallowed a £100,000 bill from a lost battle with local residents for permission to build a huge new mushroom shed at a cost of £4.7m, including the latest computerised growing technology, to grow 120-160,000 lbs a week.

He shrugs it off. But he points out if the building had gone ahead, North Yorkshire Council would have upgraded an alternative access route. As it is, the new growing facility and accompanying jobs will be elsewhere – probably Market Weighton – and packing and distribution will involve more trucks coming through Wath.