Fifth-generation farmer moves away from growing apples

KentOnline / KMTV

James Smith of Loddington Farm near Maidstone discusses how he is trying to diversify his business, with the launch of a shop and move towards growing vegetables and rearing livestock.

Transcript

00:00 Fundamentally it's about shortening our supply chain and my vision is about

00:04 reconnecting consumers with their food. So the farm shop here is a window to the

00:09 way we farm at Loddington and the whole idea is that we can create as short a

00:15 supply chain as possible. So we're in the process of pivoting away from supplying

00:21 multiple retailers in the UK, pouring our heart and soul into production and

00:25 getting very little back. Here we can talk to people about what we're

00:29 producing, we can sell it directly to the consumer and it's a lot more fun. So we've

00:34 grubbed a lot of our orchards, we've stopped actively farming a number of

00:38 them and we're concentrating on a smaller area now that we're growing

00:42 organically as a sort of a core of what we were producing. And that is

00:48 about 20% of the area that we were farming and that's really because we're

00:52 having to move away from commodity crops. So we were working, as I say, we were 95%

00:57 red apples to two or three customers in the UK and with that comes a lot of risk

01:03 and we weren't making any money and the way we were having to farm

01:07 was not aligned with the way I want to farm in terms of the health of the

01:11 environment and the soil and everything else. So the move away from that I think has been

01:16 driven by my own interest and by doing what we're doing with our own retail and

01:22 ultimately realising that very intensive orchards producing a single crop are

01:30 contrary to the way I think we should be producing food.

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