Tim Chambers

About

Interviewed by: Katy Sharpe
Date: 28 April 2015

Transcript

Tim: …It’s the green sand ridge through here, and that’s, that’s that area which stretches all the way from… I suppose Egerton…right the way through to… Brenchley, Tunbridge Wells?

Katy: Yeah, cause we’re on the halfway point

T: And you’re on the, on this ridge, running through here and the good characteristic on this ridge is that it is, er, ragstone. You know the quarries at Boughton?

K: Yeah

T: And, Hermitage Lane?

K: Yeah

T: Umm, so it’s all ragstone, so it’s very free draining soils, and being on a bit of a ridge it would make it a bit frost free, so all the, all the cold air would drain off it. So it became an area which was associated with fruit growing.

K: Ahh, And you’re a fruit farmer aren’t you? Are you?

T: We are a fruit farm yeah, yeah. And every…you’ll find different areas were….predisposed to growing different crops. So if you go out to Thanet, it’s vegetables, if you go on the North Downs, it’s sheep and arable. If you go into the weald of Kent you’re looking at…again, grazing and hops, and this ridge through here was always fruit. And that was because it was just better conditions. In the old days when you couldn’t control the environment so much, naturally things grew better in certain areas and then so it evolved really. You found that your best orchard was on this ridge, so the next orchard you planted was again on the ridge, and then someone looked at your orchard and thought “oh they’re better than mine, why are they growing?And so it just grew organically into an area which was for fruit growing.

K: So was your farm sort of always a fruit farm? This particular one.

T: I think all the fruit farms you could say through this area were…fruit and hops, if you went back 150 years. Probably if you went back to about 50 years ago, um it was still mainly fruit, hops were beginning to tail off a bit by then, and now it’s a real mixture, but still predominantly the bigger farms are fruit farms.

K: Yeah… and was your…with you know…your business always…was it…was that started as a fruit farm? Has that particularly changed?

T: Our business was always fruit farming, but if- you went, again if you went back…50, 60, 70 years, the majority of the farms through this area were quite small, probably no more than average of 30-40 acres.

K: Yeah. I mean I have to say, I was surprised, I mean it’s probably a bit naïve but I was surprised when I drove on and even driving here, where, when you know, when I drove onto your offices, that was huge… um, yeah…it [trails off] do you supply sort of, who do you supply? Do you supply any sort of main…retailers?

T: Everyone…Everybody apart from Waitrose, in fact. But you see here, if you- just driving through here, now you, you’re kind of attuned to fruit growing, see that’s all blackberries on there…this is…

K: Is that, who is that, Winterwood?

T: That’s us

K: Oh that’s you?

T: This is Winterwood here…So that’s blackberries, blueberries, gooseberries….Then if you go along a bit further…again, he’s got some more blackberries out there

K: So what fruits do you grow then?

T: We’re mainly raspberries, but then we grow blackberries, cherries, red currants, white curr-…red currants, blackcurrants, rhubarb…so we grow a bit of a mixture, but we’re more specialised than we used to be.

K: What’s the reason for that? Is that just because, what the retailers demand, or is that…?

T: Business…you’ve got to be bigger and more specialized, because the margins are getting less and less. If you went back, 50 years, then you would be growing….a traditional Kentish farm would probably… a traditional Kentish fruit farm would have been growing…well I can go back. If when I started with my father, we had one farm in Otham which was about 45 acres. We grew Kent cobnuts, plums, about 4 or 5 varieties of plums, probably a dozen varieties of apples, raspberries…occasionally we’d have potatoes, cabbages, a few cauliflower. And that was a traditional Kentish farm, so you grew a bit of everything. Not a lot, but a bit of everything, because it reduced the risks. It’s all…Farming is about risk, is all about risk reduction. Because you never known if you’re gonna get a frost, if you’re gonna get disease, if the people aren’t gonna to turn up to pick the stuff. So you grow lots of crops so that you can start as early as you can in the year, and finish as late as you can in the year and then you have a much more longer season so hopefully something in that season will come up trumps.

[Interrupted by phone call from a colleague. 05:49. Call ends at 9mins 40. We arrive at the first field – raspberries.]

T: So now, we’ve yeah, so we’ve gone from producing a bit of everything…to, much more specialised in growing specific types of crops. More of them and, hopefully, better, so we get higher yields. So for example now, this is all…if you came, if you were here 10 years ago you wouldn’t see crops growing like this. This is all, it- now it’s all in pots. That’s coconut fibre.

K: Oh wow, that…so is that, is that a better than….why, why do you use that over….?

T: Cause it’s cheap

[Both laugh

]

K: Yeah, on this scale you need to [laughs]

T: So it’s cheap, and it has the right, I suppose you could say, texture. Because the coconut fibre doesn’t have anything in it, it’s pretty inert. You can’t get, as a, a plant root you can’t get anything out of that. And what it does, it acts as the scaffolding which the roots go into…And then all the food comes from that…

K: Oh that’s clever, so it’s all sort of like…do you sort of have to, you know, measure them?

T: Yeah yep, we measure, we measure- we know exactly what chemicals we’re putting in, so it’s fer- it’s liquid fertilisers, and then you measure, the…well you call it the electrical conductivity of the pot, which determine, which tells you how much fertiliser you’ve got there. You measure the moisture, in the pots so… I don’t think…I can’t remember where it is now. But out here there’ll be a station, which measures automatically for us, in one pot the electrical conductivity, the humidity, the temperature, the water moisture content, and it sends it back to the farm. So we get continual read outs all the way through the week. And we know what the temperatures in the tunnels are…It’s literally.. it is- unfortunately it’s only for one pot., it’s not for all of them, but then we have to….um…

K: Assume that one pot…

T: we have to assume it’s average, but we do send people out all the time to make sure, there’s a person permanently on this site, going around checking pots and making sure drippers aren’t blocked. So this is, this is at the moment is as close to kind of industrial production of raspberries as we can, we can get, yeah. So, this again, this is a variety… I’m just, really, I’m just checking this field cause, if you had a look… just wanna make sure that….the chap who’s doing the job, managing…. so there’s one which has decided not to….be rather late growing.

K: So if you get ones like that where they’re not growing, do you, do you replace them?

T: … we can do. I’m not gonna… I’ve got, see shoots coming through here? So I’m not gonna get worried, I’m just…concerned that a pot like that is now taking a lot of water…well not a lot of water…it needs more water than that pot. And what we could end up doing… is because we can’t give that pot less, or that pot less than that one [points], we over water that pot, and raspberries don’t like being overwatered, they drown.

[more walking]

…sensitive to moisture, so we’ll try and grow raspberries obviously as cheaply as we can, as uniformly as we can, and as long a period as we can, and then if we go to Sainsbury’s and we say, we want to supply you with raspberries, they wouldn’t be very interested if we said, well we can only supply you for three weeks in June and then we’re gone. They’ll say, you’ve got to supply from the beginning of the season to the end of the season.

K: And how long’s a season?

T:…from mid May til the end of October

K: Ok…so that is quite long

T: Yep and they’re gonna want so much….kind of…we do, they’re gonna want us to.. [says hi to colleague]… tend to be making sure that everything’s done as well as you can, programme…almost programmed in a way…

[walking back to the car]

K: So do you supply only to Sainsbury’s, or…?

T: No we’re Sainsbury’s, Co-op, Lidl, Aldi, Tesco’s….Marks and Spencer

K: Oh. So is that just in Kent or is that nationwide or?

T: That’s nationwide. We export to Holland….That’s changed, that’s the biggest change you could say, in the 50 years…is that 50 years ago, a traditional, very small Kentish farm…has evolved into growing mainly raspberries for everywhere…That’s rabbits, in that pot, that’s what the rabbits…That’s rabbit damage, it doesn’t really…

K: So when you said there’s a farm up nearer Kingswood…. Is that this one, in the field…or is that… this farm… [?]is that this one or is it the because I know there’s a field

No K: …just past Edmed’s… is that the one?

T: That’s it

K: Do you know who owns the one, I don’t know if you, if you go towards like Platts Heath, from Kingswood?

T: Yep

K: There’s a new sort of one, field.

T: That’s Rumwood Farm, with raspberries in it

K: Rumwood Farm?

T: With raspberries. So that’s… if you go down towards Maidstone, past Langley church, there’s a farm, bends, the road bends round to the left. The farm’s just there on the top,

K: Oh ok and they own that one….so the field I’m thinking is… do you know sort of Wents garage?

T: Yes

K: Yeah, so if you go towards Platts Heath from there

, T: That’s it yeah

K: …so they own that,

T: Yes, that’s it yeah, yeah. So they were similar to us, in that they again were a small farm and, they’ve expanded a lot as well [wind]. So, yeah they’ve, they’ve done the same as us really. All the farmers who are staying in business, tend to be getting bigger, and more specialized, and I suppose you could say almost like agribusinesses. And if you don’t get bigger… see that one is coming [points at plant]

K: So is that just a mixture of the coconut fibre and just compost, or….?

T: It’s just literally coconut fibre

K: Just the coconut fibre, oh ok…

T: It’s just coconut fibre, there’s nothing else

[Continues to walk]

T: Yeah… you’ve either got a choice really, you either become smaller, and do all the work yourself. And…try to supply say farm shops, and restaurants… and then that’s.. we almost call that lifestyle farming in a way now.

K: Yeah because there’s a few of them round…well I think on the way to…like you know if you go down..what’s it called…Plough Wents road towards sort of Boughton there’s a tiny farm somewhere near there isn’t there? I suppose they’re one of those lifestyle sort of farms…

T: Yes, yeah, yeah. We’ve just… [wind cuts audio]

[Both get back in the car].

T: You can’t really…well you can…I mean, anyone can run a business, it just depends how you do it. But if you are smaller, you obviously have, your costs are a lot lower… it’s only down to you what happens, but if you break your leg you’re stuffed because there’s no one else then to pick it up. Or you go bigger, and you start employing people and then, as soon as you start going bigger, you realise you can’t then stop. [laughs] It’s like being on a treadmill, because the customers that you are now supplying are much more demanding. You could ring up the farm shop and say “I’m sorry we haven’t got any raspberries tomorrow….because it’s raining” But if you ring up Sainsbury’s, and say “I’m sorry I haven’t got any raspberries, because it’s raining”, they’ll say “well, don’t bother supplying any more, you know, you’re unreliable”

K: Yeah. Is that, is the demanding-..is that something that’s got.. I don’t know…worse, maybe or…?

T: No, see the demand for, the demand for soft fruit has been probably growing steadily for about 25 years. 20 years. Conceivably… 25 years. 25 years it’s been growing, and it’s been growing because people are more aware of what they eat.
[seatbelt beeping noise] And, wanting to live forever, be healthy. So there’s been a probably a 20, 25 year wave that soft fruit farmers have been riding, with increased demand year on year. It’s beginning to slow now though, because the, I mean, where the economic problems with the supermarkets have meant that they’re not now opening shops. 10 years ago, you could guarantee that someone like Tesco would probably be opening another 20 shops a year, 30 shops a year. So, there was another 20 meters of shelf space every year that needed to be supplied with soft fruit, there was more consumers going in to buy it…so it was all on the way up, really. However, now it’s starting to…there’s no more shops opening up really, the shops, the shelf space is actually going to contract, it’s not going to get any bigger. People want to pay the minimum all the time…that, that’s no change, they’ve always wanted to pay the minimum, but the supermarket wants to retain its margin, and the only way it can do that if the fruit is cheaper, is by paying the supplier less. So we have to become more efficient in order to maintain the sale, and it goes on, and it’s a never ending spiral really.

T: See there, that’s more traditional really, when you see the oast houses everywhere, and that used to be hop growing, used to be hops in this, in these fields round here…There used to be hops growing in these fields.

K: Yeah, cos’ a lot of farms…are you sort of in…Would you say you’re in competition with the… farmers around here?

T: No, not really. Our… our competition is with other marketing groups in the UK with farms dotted all over the place who are also supplying strawberries or raspberries and that’s our competition. It didn’t, never used to be a competition because the market was growing at a rate that for every field you increased year on year you found somebody who wanted to buy it, but now you have to be much more planned in what you do….Let’s go quickly down here to see how they’re doing.

[Drive to another field]

T: See that’s the weald…

K: Yeah it’s so beautiful

T: So you can get an idea of how Kent is…now we’re on the, still on the green sand ridge, so we’re on basically on ragstone and if you…let’s see if we can get a good view…that’s not too bad…so you come off the ridge…

K: And go down into the weald.

T: You go down into the weald and then on the other side, the ridge goes up again, can you see? So that the weald is just a long valley which extends that way [points west] well beyond Tonbridge to Sevenoaks, and in that way it just opens out into Romney Marsh. So if you can picture it geographically, we’re just a big wide valley. Here, we’re on ragstone, and then onto clay, and there all the ragstone’s gone, it used to be ragstone all the way through…

K: Oh in the weald you mean it’s gone?

T: Yeah and it’s just gone, it’s eroded away. And that’s created that wide valley. And I think years ago we used to be, there used to be chalk here, so we would have been chalk above us, so the downs are higher than us aren’t they, so this whole area was chalk, ragstone, clay. The only bit of chalk left is the downs and that’s the North Downs and the South Downs, which is another big valley, and then… here we’re on the ragstone, and there, here the chalk has gone, and there the chalk and the ragstone has gone. So now we’re going into the weald, and if you see there, if you look out there, you can’t see any fruit farms can you? Not now. There used to be a bit of fruit out there, but on the higher areas like Marden, would have been a fruit growing area, well it still is, but down here, this was always going to be hops and sheep, because the soil isn’t, isn’t good enough, it’s fairly thin. And the fruit finishes on the ridge really. So….look, we’ve got some cherry orchards down here, I just need to check if they’re covering those.

K: In terms of sort of the structure of the farm, like, do you have sort people that are responsible for the different types of orchards?

T: We have 10 managers. So we have a manger who controls production, so harvesting. We have a manager who controls the irrigation and the husbandry, a manager who controls the tunnels, like you can see here, so any tunnels that go over the top, so any plastic tunnels, or cherry covers. We have a manager for health and safety, one for accommodation, because all the… those 800 people all live on the farm. So we have campsites, and mobile home sites… so they all need, you’re running a hotel really. Then you have people who work in the office doing the wages, so you have an office manager who does the accounts, wages, and it goes on and on. So the structure is no different… than you would expect any business. So this is rhubarb.

K: I noticed on the gate it says Boyton Farm – do you give your fields different sort of names?

T: No, no, this is, well, every field has its own number. So we can trace what we pick back to the field where it came from. But in the same way as when we started, when I started with my father, we had a traditional farm, of say 35, 40 acres. We have grown by taking over other farms of 35, 40 acres. So this actually was, this is Boyton Court Farm, and we took over this farm about 7 years ago, 8 years ago.

K: Oh ok. How many farms, have you sort of taken over, is it quite a lot, or…?

T: Oh.. hm…I don’t know…. I could count them up…Probably half a dozen, a dozen, I’m not sure.

[turn into field]

T: So this is, these are cherry orchards. And this is completely different to how cherries used to be grown 50 years ago…

K: How were these?

T: They were much taller trees, probably 40, 50 foot tall. You wouldn’t have any covering structures over the top of them, and they would have been quite a profitable crop to pick, but you’d have probably only picked one year in about 4, because the other three years, either the birds would have eaten them, the frost would have had them, or it would have rained and then they’d have all cracked, so this is why we cover now, because we need to guarantee that we pick the crop. Cause the difference now is that you cannot afford to grow anything that you can’t pick. So, we… like any business in that… if you invest a lot of money, you’ve got to get a return on it, and it’s the same for farming, because the way we farm costs a lot of money.

K: Yeah. Does that sort of influence the choice of, of sort of what you grow, so you, you know you choose the crops that are the most profitable?

T: …we choose the crops that are the most profitable in the area that we know what we’re doing. And we can scale-up, cause it’s marketing is the key thing…

[Interrupted by another phone call]

T: Um…so… yeah, I mean, it’s just, it’s just big business now

K: Yeah I know

T: In the, this orchard here probably costs us about…£50,000 a hectare to set up…So we have to somehow get our money back…and so, you invest structures to make sure you pick the crop. You can’t not pick the crop now. You invest 10 – not 10 times – you invest 5 times the value of the land, in the stuff that you grow on it. So the land actually is the cheap bit. The cost of setting them up is the expensive bit.

K: How long does it take to, to set up a, an orchard, or a field?

T: You could, you can, if you, you’d need to plan it, and get it…you’d be thinking a year ahead. But once you’ve got your plans and everything is in place, it would only take you a few months to set it up.

K: Do you enjoy farming?

[Tim pulls a face, both laugh] T: … I enjoy coming to work, so I don’t, I, well I would say I enjoy the challenge. It’s the challenge as much as anything. It’s…it is always, it is challenging, you have to be…fairly patient, in that you don’t get results…see, what we plan this year, we might not see the results of that for two or three years ahead.

K: So you’re constantly sort of having to anticipate?

T: Yeah, so you have to plan a long way ahead, that hasn’t changed though. That, that side of it hasn’t changed though. You’ve got to be fairly immune to failure. In that you could have a lovely crop of cherries like this potentially coming on, and then we could get a heavy frost and it’s gone. And then, what do you do? Do you, you can’t sit down and cry about it. You have to push on.

K: Are those to the right, are they apples?

T: Those are apples, that’s Friday Street farm….Skinners, yeah… it’s fantastic isn’t it?

K: Yeah it’s really beautiful, I have to say, it’s very pretty.

T: Yeah. That’s “Early winter” that variety. See apples, you don’t need to cover them, because they don’t crack with the rain. With cherries, if they, if it rains on a cherry, the cherry just splits open. So cherry growing is a bit like…if you say farming is a little bit like…betting and that this is, this is the real casino side of… this is like….bust or… win or bust on cherries…So you’ve got to be financially able to take the loss. Apple growing is a much safer. Apple growing is a bit like betting on a two horse race, you’re at least going to win half the time. This is like betting on the Grand National. The other problem we have, every, which is… they had it 50 years ago but they, we probably feel it more now, is pests and diseases. The netting, or- the- that’s netting on the top there, its not polythene,…and it’s a really fine mesh, because this…the last few years, a new insect has come across from Europe and it originated in the Far East…you know fruit flies? You get them on bananas, if you leave your bananas out. There’s a fruit fly, that’s, it was, I suppose, endemic in Asia, has now reached us, and is, is like, just like the fruit flies we get here. But the fruit flies we get here can only lay eggs into rotting fruit,

K: Oh…and these can lay eggs…

T: And these can lay eggs into ripening fruit. So we have to now start protecting the fruit on the trees before the fruit flies can lay their eggs into it. And it’s a huge, it’s gonna be, it’s the biggest threat to someone like me for maybe 20 years.

K: Really?

T: Yeah. So we’re having to invest in different ways, we’re, we’re trying insect netting.

K: So how do you monitor, is it a constant, do you have to kind of be constantly monitoring?

T: Constantly monitoring, yeah, yeah. We have to make sure we know, if it’s in the area, and then we have to trap it and we… reach say 10-12 flies in the trap, then we go out and spray. But the spray is not…it’s never 100%, nothing ever works 100%, so you end up having to find, kind of, I suppose physical barriers to stop it getting into your crops. And every year, there’s less and less pesticides available. 50 years ago the pesticides that were first… I suppose the first pesticides started coming out soon after the war, Second World War, and they were pretty good…

K: Yeah. Pretty harsh

T: yeah there’s no, [jokingly] not a lot was left. So they were pre-, so as far- as farmers, it was amazing really

K: Yeah, but I suppose…

T: See those little red traps in the hedge?

K: …yes, are they?

T: Now, these are…We’re monitoring for the spotted wing drosophila. So we’re trying to catch it. In the winter, it lives in woodland, so we’re trying to catch, if we can catch one spotted wing drosophila now, that, every female can lay 300 eggs, and it has a, in warm conditions, 21 days for an egg to become a female again. So 300 eggs, say 150 could be females, so that’s another 300 per 150…so it’s exponential. So every one we trap now.

K: Do you, do you kill it I presume?

T: Yeah, they drown. There’s those traps have cider vinegar in them, cos it’s, it likes the smell of cider vinegar. So it, yeah so it, yeah the chemicals they did have were heavy metals, mercury compounds, arsenic compounds, organophosphates, you know generally developed in the First World War to kill people were also quite good at killing, killing flies. And every year we get…one chemical gets taken away. We lost the really good stuff maybe 25 years ago. And now we’re using chemicals which are very…much more specific…to an insect type. So we have chemicals that will kill aphids, chemicals that will kill mites, but gradually those are getting withdrawn as well.

K: Are they? Is that because, is there a general sort of trend towards not using pesticides?

T: Yes. Yeah. There’s a gen, well, generally….there’s a public perception that pesticides are no good,

K: Yeah, all organic…

T: …no good for your health. Now…science is so much better that you can trace a chemical molecule down to probably one millionth of a kilo.

K: Oh wow

T: So you can detect a chemical of very, very small amounts, now…that suddenly makes people more aware that there’s more chemicals in the environment than they ever thought there were. And..it, it’s generally people don’t want that. So we’re, we are, tasked with the, of trying to actually get rid of chemicals. It won’t, it won’t, it can never…practically happen

K: Technically, everything’s sort of chemical

T: Yeah, technically everything is a chemical, everything, DNA is an organic phosphate. Hopefully it doesn’t kill us….well maybe it will,

K: [laughs] who knows, maybe that’s the reason we all die?

T: Yeah, ways in which we act like we do, I suppose… so there will be a…at a certain point, once we got rid of so many chemicals and we start, hitting food availability, then the, relax… people become more relaxed over it. But that’s a big challenge to us at the moment, which wasn’t a challenge to my father’s generation. It’s definitely not, a way- it was a way of life, it really literally was a way of life and now it is a business just like if you were making tins of beans, or cans of Coke. Ahh… I think that might be… I think that’s blocked… cause we’ll have to go down the bottom….

[Road is blocked, car reverses]

T: Is there anything else specifically you need to…?

K: No that’s fine, it’s sort of um… [looks over sheet]….. yeah you’ve sort of covered it really, you’ve sort of told me about it, you’ve told me about how your farm’s sort of changed, I suppose the one thing they want to know is do you see it, how do you sort of see it developing in the future? Do you sort of see it, I don’t know, sort of remaining the same, or changing at all, or…?

T: No, just the, the pace of specialisation, and technology used in how we grow stuff will just gain pace. The smaller farms literally will become niche producers of… stuff they sell at the farm gates, and the larger farms will get even bigger. So we can’t stand still. We produce now, about …I think last year we produced 15% of all the rasp- all the UK raspberries sold. That’s just on one farm. If you go forward 10 years, we probably will need to produce 20%, or 25%.

K: Would that be to sort of maintain yourself, would that be to…

T: Just, just to be viable. It’s much, when you saw those, those pots growing…it’s becoming much more formulaic in how you do stuff. So you, you….I’m a farmer only because my father had a farm, not because I was top of farming school. And that’s the reason most farmers are farmers, is be- is literally because they inherited the position. They didn’t earn it, it’s not a meritocracy. But, that generally means that of all the farmers who farm, half of them probably shouldn’t farm [laughs], if you see what I mean.

K: [laughs] Yeah, they’re not necessarily cut out for it

T: No they’re not cut out for it, and they not…well they might like it, I’m sure they all like it, they love it probably. I mean who would, you know, you’d rather do this then you know, get on the train and go up to London everyday. But it’s not particularly efficient, so farms will become, the farmers will become landlords, those that have the ability will farm, those that don’t will literally just stay as landlords and employ – or not employ – have a company run the farm for them, because the farming side will be done by people who are much more qualified at farming. So I could have an agronomist to look at all my pests and diseases, which we do. I can pay people who know what they’re doing to come and set up the orchards more efficiently than our own labour can. I can pay people to run the pack houses and the marketing side of it and they all know what they’re doing. Whereas before, I had 50 hats. So I was the camp warden one morning, I was the person controlling the picking gangs the next morning, the next morning I was spraying the crops, then I was driving the fruit to market… and now, you get to a point where you pull a lever and at the end of the lever is somebody with a combination hat on, and then there’s someone at the end of the lever who does the spray programmes, and someone who does the irrigation, so that’s how it’s evolving.

K: Yeah, and I suppose that naturally happens as the business gets bigger so you need more people to manage it?

T: Yeah, yeah, and we will use more technology as well. I can see fairly, fairly soon it’ll be happening, on, on some farms it is happening, but not, haven’t seen it on fruit farms yet in this country, is where you use a drone to fly through the crops…and the drone will be using maybe infra-red or ultra-violet, taking pictures as it goes, and telling you where the pests or the disease threats are because by looking at a plant under a different light you can determine whether it has disease, you, maybe in the future you’ll be able to determine the nutrient content of it, so you can determine whether the fruit is ripe or how long till it’s ripe, so there’ll be a lot more technology like that used. I mean at the moment, we, we, we now analyse continually what the raspberries want, in terms of, what would they like to eat today? Would they like more nitrogen, or would they like more potassium? So, we’re continually monitoring that, yes…

K: Do you use that sort of…an- analysis for the other crops as well or just the raspberries?

T: Anything, anything which is grown in pots is analysed continually. The stuff in the ground is analysed maybe two or three times a year. In the ground you have much more, it’s harder to change the structure of the soil, whereas a pot you can change the water moisture content in 10 minutes, and you can change the fertiliser in 10 minutes. Whereas the ground has a buffer of all the chemicals in it, so it’s more important in the ground that when you start planting your orchard, it’s…that the soil is in good health.

According to my thing, I’ve got two miles left to drive before I’m out of fuel.

K: Oh dear. [laughs], yeah I’m the same, I think mine’s quite low as well… but I’ll get some on my way back. [pause]. It’s nice that it tells you the exact mileage, normally it’s a massive guessing game –cause my, obviously my cars a lot older than yours!
[both laugh]
Hopefully it’s er, accurate enough, and we’re not going finish, it’s not going to..
Not going to cut out right now [laughs]

[Another brief phone call 48:26 – 48:48 – arrive back on the farm]

K: So what are these?

T: They’re blackberries, and these, these are more raspberries in pots

K: Ahh. Yeah I was looking at the photos in the office, and erm…were, erm, were any of these warehouses here, were any of them originals?

T: No. We’ve done all this…. There’s a picture in the office of what this farm looked like when we took it over.

K: When did you take it over?

T: We took this farm over… 12 years ago. K: So who, who was it? Before?

T: There’s a picture on the wall telling you what it did look like 12 years ago, funnily enough K: Do you know, who owned it before you owned it?

T: Yes it was.. people called Bristow. [pause] Sid Bristow. I know all about him because my grandmother would have known him, she told me all about him. He used to, he made a lot of money during the war, when you could make a lot of money during farming, because there was a set price, prices There was no imports of food, so everyone – all the farmers did really well.

K: Was he the one that started this farm? Was it Bristow? Was he the sort of first owner of here?

T: No he’d have bought it off someone else. Yeah, he did really well in the war then bought it off someone else. He, apparently he used to chase land girls,
[both laugh] And I guess he chased land girls, he probably used to have a fast car, and all the other stuff that went with it…and consequently he ran out of money

[Walking back into the office]

T: Do you want, do you want to have a look at that picture?

K: Yeah, that might be a good idea.

T: But, like I said, this farm would have been owned you know, by hundreds of people. I’m, I’m the owner now, you know in 10 years time I might be bust

K: [laughs] You might go around chasing land girls, who knows what’ll happen?

T: Yeah it might be land girls, who knows what… but you see that’s what it looked like. If you took away that building, that is what…we are standing now in the building which is in front of this one. So that was about 50 years ago. The trees weren’t there then, this was, this was taken in the 70s, but those buildings would have been put up 50 years ago. So, it’s constantly, constantly evolving. So we’re now building all these buildings, because we need to pack fruit to a certain standard, supermarkets have expectations.

K: Will it, will it be alright if I took a photo of that?

T: Yeah of course you can. It’s evolving all the time, and different people… in my family, my family come from Otham.

K: Yeah, cause I think do you, they, still live there?

T: Yeah, yeah, they still live there, yeah. And I, in, in Otham, when I tried to trace it back, it was… people with my surname, farming, were, I my, I can check through…there… definitely my ancestors farming back to 1730 in Otham, and then prior to that it’s a bit patchy, but they were still, there were people with my surname in Otham in 1630 who owned the mill. So it’s always, we’ve always been here. And we’ve always by the sounds of it, been farming. But…

K: It’s quite nice…

T:…generations come and go. So you know, I might be the last one. I, you never know

K: Will your, do you think your kids will not want to do it then?

T: I’d have thought…they might do, but it’s not farming really…

K: Yeah…it’s business!

T: When I, when they take it over, if you know, touch wood we still have a business. Well it’ll be a business. No different than, yeah, making bottles of coke, or anything else. It’s changing. But I t might, you never know it might go full circle. It might end up being lots of small farms again, with people farming organically and all this thing now, supplying local produce to, you know, up to London, that’s how it used to be. Our market 50 years ago was London, so you never know… you never know… can’t, can’t bet on it can you? Can never second guess…

T: Well I’d better get on

K: That’s great, thank you.

T: Thank you for coming, hopefully it was interesting.

K: It was, it was really interesting.

Audio

Photos and Documents

Tim Chambers Interview Archive – Download .pdf version