‘We have to pay more for food’: Britain’s biggest tomato farmer on the runaway costs of growing

theguardian.com:

Multiple glasshouses owned by tomato grower APS Group were left empty last year, for the first time in the business’s 80-year history.

The current shortages of tomatoes and other salad crops on British supermarket shelves have unfortunately come as no surprise to Philip Pearson, development director at the UK’s largest tomato producer.

“We did say, as an industry, last year: ‘If you don’t support us through the winter you will have empty shelves,’” Pearson says. “Government didn’t listen, our customers didn’t listen, nobody listened.

“I don’t want to sound ‘I told you so,’ as that doesn’t help anybody, but we are where we were worried we would end up.”

The combination of soaring energy bills to provide artificial light to help the plants grow, especially during the winter, combined with associated surges in the price of fertiliser and the cost of packaging prompted many British producers and their European counterparts to take the decision to plant fewer crops this winter.

APS chose to leave about 8% of the glasshouses across its 70-hectare estate empty for the first time since the family-owned business was founded by Philip’s grandfather Albert Pearson, who started off with a single nursery in Alderley Edge, Cheshire, in 1949.

The company decided it could not afford to run the LED lights in its glasshouses required to grow a winter tomato crop, which is traditionally sown in August and harvested from Christmas until July.

“We have only ever gone forwards, never gone backwards,” Pearson said. “But I think it was the right decision. It would have had a much more negative impact on the business had we not done that.”

At the time, rising energy costs had been sent soaring to near-record highs by the conflict in Ukraine. Pearson