Is there a future for fruit growers in the county, we meet one of the youngest, and oldest to find out.
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00:00 The Garden of England, home to a quarter of a million hectares of arable farmland.
00:10 But Kent's traditional industry is under threat.
00:14 In this Kentonite special, I'll be discovering how rosy the Garden of England really is.
00:21 Meeting our veg farmers.
00:23 There's only half a dozen market gardeners left.
00:27 Finding out why much of our supermarket veg is now grown abroad.
00:31 They can shop around the world to find the cheapest, not necessarily the best.
00:36 And discovering the future growers in the Garden of England.
00:40 So I'm Jack Scott, I'm 20 years old, I grow vegetables.
00:56 Could this be the future for farmland in Kent?
00:59 This housing estate in Reynham used to be an orchard and many farmers are now turning
01:05 to selling their land in order to make money.
01:09 You can tell it used to be an orchard by the road signs.
01:13 The loss of farmland in Kent is concerning many, including the NFU.
01:18 We should be looking to maintain or enhance in certain areas the level of food we produce
01:24 here because we are an island and it doesn't make sense in the long run to be heavily reliant
01:30 on imports because as we saw with, for example, the war in Ukraine and other issues when we
01:35 had COVID, we're very vulnerable to supply chain issues where if we can't access those
01:41 products from abroad and we're not producing it here, simply the supermarket shelves will
01:44 go empty.
01:46 The organisation says there are broken supply chains.
01:49 Now supermarkets dominate the industry.
01:52 They control the prices and over the years farmers are leaving the industry in droves.
02:00 But there are still some veg farmers in Kent and I've come to Green Lane Farm to meet one.
02:07 The farmer here grows carrots, spring onions amongst other veggies and it's 84 year old
02:13 Dickie Ovenden who runs it.
02:16 He's concerned about the sustainability of his farm for when his family take it on.
02:22 I'm not sure why but I always endeavoured to be a farmer.
02:26 Though my dad was a farmer but I was the eldest of seven so there wasn't much fusion the rest
02:30 of us.
02:31 And you don't sell to supermarkets do you?
02:33 No.
02:34 Why not?
02:35 I'm just not big enough to sell to supermarkets.
02:39 I can go to Sainsbury's and buy cauliflower cheaper than I can actually grow the darn
02:44 things for.
02:46 So I don't serve supermarkets.
02:47 I'm actually not big enough to serve supermarkets.
02:50 But that's fortunately if people get so big that they have to serve supermarkets, in my
02:55 opinion that's their own fault.
02:58 You've been on this farm for 60 odd years now.
03:01 Would you ever do it differently?
03:02 If you could go back again would you do it differently?
03:06 You need to be half mad to do this I think.
03:10 There are very, very few vegetable growers left.
03:13 I will just say where we're standing here, if you look around I've got 30 acres here
03:19 in a block and since 1960 I've bought it off nine different people and they all had
03:26 livings out of it once upon a time.
03:29 Nine different people.
03:30 But they're not farming it anymore.
03:33 It's only half a dozen market gardeners left.
03:37 Mainly because they don't get the returns.
03:39 It's only because I and my younger brother work for half a crown an hour if you can remember
03:43 that that we make a living.
03:49 Well how lovely was Dickie.
03:50 He's so passionate about the fruit and veg that he sells and he point blank refuses to
03:54 sell it to a supermarket.
03:56 But there is one man, he told me he sells it to a guy in Maidstone.
04:00 I'm on my way to meet him now.
04:03 I've come to the Kent Veg Box.
04:06 Farmers say they avoid supermarkets like the plague.
04:09 But why are they selling to this delivery scheme?
04:12 I'm here to find out.
04:14 Hi Steve, lovely to meet you.
04:15 And you again Gabriel.
04:16 Tell us all about this veg box.
04:18 What's on offer?
04:19 We've just bought in some cabbages.
04:21 All of this produce came in yesterday.
04:23 All cropped yesterday.
04:24 Cabbages, beetroot, we've got some squashes there, swede, there's some carrots just tucked
04:30 in there.
04:31 Behind us we've got green kale, black kale.
04:34 Steve's been doing this for the best part of 20 years.
04:38 So this fridge is full of local fresh veg from right across the garden of England.
04:44 It's a bit like a supermarket distribution centre.
04:47 However, this is independent.
04:50 The supplier here knows all the farmers' names.
04:53 All the veg each week is packaged up into these heavy boxes and delivered to locals
04:59 around the county.
05:01 Well it sounds like a great scheme.
05:03 But why aren't we all buying these boxes?
05:07 Steve says he pays twice as much as supermarkets pay for their veggies.
05:12 But that does result in a bigger cost for the consumer.
05:15 Yet how can it be that the veg in this warehouse, grown just down the road, is more expensive
05:23 than the produce shipped from thousands of miles away by plane to our local supermarkets?
05:29 The buying power the supermarkets have and the bulk buying power that they have, then
05:34 they can shop around the world to find the cheapest, not necessarily the best.
05:39 You've been in business for 20 years.
05:41 In 20 years' time, do you think there will be farms across Kent?
05:46 Well, it is a struggle.
05:48 There's no two ways about it.
05:50 Having said that, they have existed before and the farmers we use are nothing if they're
05:56 not resourceful.
05:58 And they will change to the market and they will adapt to the conditions.
06:02 But there comes a point where, and this is of a concern to us, there will come a point
06:07 where people will just go, "Well, do you know what?
06:10 I've had enough of the struggle.
06:12 I'm going to take an easier route."
06:14 Wow, he really is concerned.
06:17 Will anyone want to take on the challenge of arable farming in Kent?
06:22 Well, there is one 20-year-old going against the grain.
06:27 This is where Jack sent me to come.
06:29 It's his acre of land that's in his trial year and he's actually doing quite well, he
06:34 tells me.
06:35 Just waiting for him now because he's actually a university student and juggles growing crops
06:41 and veg alongside his university studies.
06:43 I wonder where he is.
06:46 He's been growing veg now for two years and his parents aren't even farmers, so he really
06:52 is a new generation of growers.
06:54 Hi, is it Jack?
06:57 Hiya.
06:58 Hi, lovely to meet you.
06:59 Lovely to meet you.
07:00 Let's see your veg pack.
07:01 What's here?
07:02 Let's go and have a look.
07:03 He doesn't own this land.
07:04 He rents it, but he's going to be taking on more land in a few months' time after a successful
07:10 trial period.
07:11 We've got failed broad beans this year, surprise, surprise, the wet weather.
07:14 The soils just got really tight and slumped, so we're struggling to get broad bean germination.
07:20 We've tried celery this year, not really succeeded well with it, so we're growing leaf celery,
07:25 like a stem variety.
07:27 You are doing a lot of things at once.
07:29 You're a student, you're growing veg here.
07:31 How did you find the time to do this all?
07:34 And how's it going?
07:35 Quite lucky.
07:36 We're busy in the summer, quiet in the winter, busy at uni in the winter, quiet in the summer,
07:41 so it fits in really well.
07:43 So you've been doing this for two years.
07:46 You're currently at university.
07:47 When you finish, do you think there's going to be a career in Best View?
07:50 At the moment it's tight, but I'm the only employee.
07:56 The costs are minimal.
07:57 The only cost is myself.
07:59 The fact that we're supplying local restaurants and local supply chains also helps, so they're
08:03 paying better than a supermarket would, but we are dealing with bigger wholesalers, so
08:09 there is money there.
08:10 Are there any other farmers your age doing this?
08:12 None.
08:13 They work for other people, but they haven't done it themselves.
08:16 There's people, say, ten years older than me that are doing it, or just started doing
08:21 it, but no one my age.
08:23 They're 50, 60, 70 years old.
08:27 What do your friends at uni think about you?
08:28 I mean, you started going into farming.
08:30 Do they think you're crazy?
08:32 They think I'm mental.
08:33 They're sort of, "Oh, have you done this assignment yet?"
08:37 "Nope, busy picking Brussels sprouts."
08:38 Wow, it was great to meet Jack, probably one of the youngest farmers and growers in Kent,
08:47 and what's really interested me is that we are going into the winter months now, and
08:51 how much veg is still growing at his farm.
08:55 But what happens if you're willing to forget traditional farming methods?
08:59 Well then, you can practically grow all year round.
09:03 Kent is home to Thaneddurf.
09:06 It's the largest greenhouse complex in the whole of the UK, covering 50 hectares.
09:12 But in recent years, they've had to scale back because of labour shortages following
09:16 Brexit.
09:19 How about vertical farming?
09:21 They're starting to appear all over the UK.
09:25 Grow up in sandwich can grow salad leaves all year round.
09:29 They claim they've already saved 3.9 million food miles and used 94% less water than traditional
09:37 farming.
09:38 But this technology is still new, and it's currently mostly limited to salad leaves.
09:45 Then of course, there's growing your own food.
09:48 But I've come to one start-up business in Whitstable who say this is the way forward.
09:54 They send grow-your-own-mushroom kits through the post.
09:58 Part of what we're about and our model is kind of gifting food sovereignty back to Joe
10:05 Bloggs basically, and enabling people to be able to grow food in methods and ways that
10:11 they previously weren't able to do.
10:13 So by food sovereignty, it's kind of like taking back ownership of the source of your
10:18 food.
10:19 Do you think this is going to be the future?
10:20 Is everyone going to be growing their own food in 20, 30 years' time?
10:24 20 to 30 years, though, I'm not sure.
10:25 I think we probably need to get a couple of generations come through, improve the educational
10:30 system, start really gearing it towards this stuff, because currently the educational system
10:36 is geared around a consumer mentality and it needs to be switched.
10:39 They say they're disrupting the food industry in a positive way.
10:42 So what's in every box, Ben?
10:43 We've got loads of different types of kit, and what we're all about is providing a solution
10:48 for everyone, OK?
10:49 So this kit is a lion's mane kit, and it's what you call a ready-incubated.
10:55 When it arrives, you just follow the simple instructions, and essentially you put a bag
10:59 over it and spray it with water and it will grow.
11:03 Put a cut in the bag, which allows oxygen, which is a trigger, spray it, and then within
11:08 a few weeks you'll be harvesting delicious lion's mane.
11:11 Well could this be the solution?
11:13 Maybe in a couple of generations, but it doesn't solve the issues farmers are facing today.
11:19 Well it does seem that we are now at a crossroads.
11:22 There are different directions that farmers could take, and the way that veg in our county
11:27 is grown.
11:28 Do you keep to the traditional ways of farming like Dickie does, or do you follow Elliot's
11:33 way and go radical and different?
11:36 But I have a feeling farmers will use their adaptability and resourcefulness.
11:41 Maybe the future can be bright for the Garden of England.
11:45 [birds chirping]
11:55 [BLANK_AUDIO]