Farm of the Week: Goodness from the soil in a life without gloss

Some farm shops have got so glossy it is hard to see what makes them different any more. Some organic veg boxes gleam with imported fruit.

The Brickyard Organic Farm is worth a visit by anyone with a soft spot for the real thing.

John Brook's shop is a shed full of peculiar potatoes, beetroots with white and golden flesh, rare carrots and some mud.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

His office has racks of plastic baskets for a filing system. His website does not exist. And at this time of year, apart from a few hothouse tomatoes, his veg-box customers get potatoes, onions, carrots, sprouts, leeks and cabbage – seasonal and local.

He hangs on in by being handy with a welding torch on tractors and tools, inherited or dragged out of ditches, which date from the days when every small farmer did a bit of planting and weeding without chemicals or prairie machinery. And by working hard with a hand hoe as required. And by offering his customers more varieties of potato, cabbage and carrot, than Tesco has hot dinners.

He is not the usual organic evangelist. Now 59, he left school at 15 and went to work with his dad, Jack Brook, who had a little bit of land, a couple of tenancies and some jobbing contracts on country, between Pontefract and Barnsley.

In the 1970s, as the competition got tougher, they started to use chemicals, on their land and others'.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Mr Brook says: "I went on a sprayers' course and it made me aware of the things we were using. The oldest of my children was about eight and I thought this was not the kind of stuff you wanted kids to be breathing, let alone eating."

After his father died, in 1980, John and his sister split the business and he and his wife, Lynda, ended up with a house and 35 rented hectares and began the conversion process which got them Soil Association licence number 598.

At the time, they were growing wheat, barley and potatoes – all of them notorious, nowadays, for needing chemical assistance.

John says: "We did lose yield dramatically. But after a few years, as we learned what to do, and which plant strains to use, we were getting 30 cwt of barley and two tonnes of wheat an acre.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

"That sounds like nothing nowadays. But we were back at the levels you expected from a good crop in the 1960s and, of course, we were not putting as much money in the ground as everybody else.

"It was the same with the potatoes and carrots. You have to watch competition from weeds but a bit of weed means less fly and blight.

"We can't do anything about the subterranean slugs, though, except choose the ground. They like clay.

"I sometimes think the rules on what is organic are too strict. We used to be allowed to use ordinary clean seed. Now even the seed has to be organic, and that is causing problems of supply. You certainly couldn't feed the country organically. I'm happy with what I do. But there has to be a middle way."

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

They grow sprouts, beets, carrots, broccoli, chard, swede, turnip, sweetcorn, cabbages, onions, squashes, lettuce and beans – plus hothouse tomatoes and peppers.

They are in the West Yorkshire Organic Group, which is about to hold its annual Potato Day – seed potato tubers on sale at 15p each at Shipley College Exhibition Hall, Saltaire, BD18 3JW, from 10am to 2pm on Saturday February 20.

Mr Brook picks up leftovers and always has at least 20 varieties on the go over the one-and-a-half acres he uses for potatoes, including, from last year, exotica such as the Shetland Black, a salad potato with purple rings in its flesh.

He grows five kinds of broccoli and six of squash and his tomatoes are all "oddballs". Half his customers come to him for variety and half for the organic guarantees, he guesses. The only livestock are a handful of Old Spot pigs, aged up to 15, kept for manure.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

They sell at the farmers' markets in Holmfirth, Leeds, Wentworth, Cleckheaton and Saltaire, and through the farm shop. They used to do a lot more.

At one point, they were employing themselves, two or three of their four children, and three or four regular part-timers. Now the children have their own lives and the allotment gardeners who helped part-time have faded away with the coal business, so John and Lynda are rationing their energy.

It takes them two days to lift enough for one market and they have cut down on the number of markets, stopped going to the shows and reduced the area under cultivation for veg to six hectares. They need a lot of space for rotation anyway, to keep down the pests, and the fallow ground grows grass they cut for hay and silage. They can also let for events for 15 days and this year will host a lorry show, a steam rally and a circus.

Mr Brook cheerfully admits he used to be heavily dependent on "cranks and weirdos". Now he sees more and more of all kinds who worry about what their children are eating. Contrary to the wisdom, that includes some who literally count pennies. On the other hand, the supermarkets are now catering for them too.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

He says: "We can't afford to charge much different from the supermarkets. If we get 1.10 a kilo for potatoes – maybe 2.20 when they are new – we are happy, and that's no more than the Jersey prices in the shops. A 10 box of organic veg is still good value in comparison to takeaways."

We meet in mid-January, when snow and ice have made it impossible to dig since Christmas. His ripening caulis have been turned to mush but everything else should survive the freeze. His main problem is pigeons on the brassicas, which are the only food on show for miles.

The farm is on the A638 Doncaster Road at Badsworth Common, between Ackworth and the turn-off for Badsworth village, WF9 1AX. The shop opens on Saturdays, from 9.30-3.30. There is room for some new veg-box customers on existing delivery routes. Call 01977 617327.

Related topics: