Taylor Grown is an organic vegetable growing business run by Joe Rolfe. We grow organic carrots, potatoes, onions, leeks & also do the arable contracting apart from the combining. Our crops are primarily aimed at the UK retail sector, but we also supply restaurants & independent retailers in London as well as some export to Ireland & Scandinavia.
We are one of the interactive business’s that make a successful organic estate in this sandy, dry, Norfolk area. We share the 3000 acre Houghton Estate with poultry, beef, dairy, sheep, pigs & arable, all of the enterprises are run by specialists but work in harmony to create the bigger rotational & management requirements to make the estate work for everyone involved.
Soil health & increasing organic matter are key to the success of the estate & that’s why there is so much livestock; to feed the biological life in the soil.
September is a very important month, the culmination of all the hard work & attention to detail that has gone into the growing season; we will be harvesting our potato & onion crops for storage & carrot & leeks will be harvested daily throughout the autumn up until Christmas.
Carrots
We do use the variety Nairobi, as commonly used in conventional farming, but in organic we are less dependent on it and we are increasingly using other more disease resistant varieties with more erect foliage to reduce canopy humidity. The big challenges are aphids, carrot fly & weeds - I’ll come back to weeds in a bit.
We have been playing around with active predator release for the past 2 seasons, honing & refining the technique, if you’ve a couple of minutes watch this. We are also playing around with hungry beetles & “good” nematodes to control carrot root fly & Contans is already a proven biological control of Schlerotinia.
Onions
We now grow all of our onions from seed, the onion crop has had a real mixed fortune over the years we’ve been doing it, we’ve had some cracking crops but we’ve also had years when we didn’t sell an onion due to disease. After almost giving up on this crop we have developed a method of growing that seems to work & have been slowly scaling this up, the biggest problem is trying to compete against the Dutch with their weed free polders, our weeding cost on onions is staggering as they never really out compete the weeds.
Potatoes
This year we decided to grow without using copper for blight control & we’ve been conducting a number of trials with varieties, irrigation & some novel biologicals.
The crops have yielded well & will all be burnt off before the visit, there have been some clear differences between the various regimes employed.
Weed Control
One of the bigger management challenges; attention needs paying all the way through the rotation, perennial weeds need controlling & the extensive use of cover crops & stale seedbeds helps reduce the overall burden.
In the row crops we can use camera steered & GPS implements to control weeds between the rows, Potatoes & Leeks can be totally controlled this way, however with the onions & carrots we rely heavily on hand weeding within the crop row, this is both very expensive but also requires a large number of workers for 12 weeks a year, with Brexit & Sterling devaluation, an increasingly difficult challenge.
Longer term we need to mechanise this more but the technology does not currently exist, so until then we welcome our European workforce to enjoy a few weeks sunbathing & listening to music as they crawl up & down the fields wedding the carrots & Onions.
Both Joe & I love the technical challenges of Organic Farming, trying to find an answer to a problem without a visit to the chemical store requires some lateral thinking & problem solving skills, often it requires several things to work together instead of the one solution approach, it’s about managing & reducing risk, instead of treating the symptom. I think UK government could learn a lot from this approach.