The situation on the UK vegetable market is tricky at the moment, after a year of extremes in weather, but one carrot grower said it is not as bad as he had expected it to be.
“We may be looking at a slightly shorter season and may have to import earlier than normal, but we are still out looking at the fields to see how the growth is coming along,” explained Alan Hunt from Freshgro.
“We are hoping that we will have carrots until mid-May but it might be only till the end of April. We had bad weather for planting and the seed pollination wasn’t good, this was followed a prolonged hot, dry summer, the perfect storm in fact. It is a lot better than we thought it would be, we thought we’d be short of 40+ sizes but that has not been the case. There were less carrots, so the sizes are better. I can only speak for Freshgro and we are able to irrigate, I don’t know how it is for other parts of the country.”
The current mild weather has not affected demand but in the summer, it was down due to the hot weather and the fact that supermarkets have not done promotions on carrots this season. “This actually has not been such a bad thing as it means we can supply for longer.”
Freshgro also grows the Chantenay carrot and Alan said the situation is the same for that.
With Christmas fast approaching it has been a busy few weeks as demand has been high from processors and food service customers, this will peter out then there will be a huge demand for fresh carrots from the retailers for a few days then it will all stop and go back to normal.
