We need a powerful and eco-friendly message to see off apple imports, says Joanna Blythman


Wouldn't it be great to see English orchards with sheep grazing underneath fruit trees again? It used to be a quintessential image of the English countryside. Fruit growers kept them to clear weeds but more recently chemical weedkillers have been used instead.

How encouraging, then, to learn of the results of a three-year trial at the Fruit Growing Research Centre at Lake Constance in Germany. It found that one of our most traditional breeds, the Shropshire, can do just as effective a job as man-made herbicides, but without polluting the local groundwater.

Better still, the good old Shropshires replace the need for mowing and happily chomp their way through fallen leaves that could spread fungal diseases such as scabies. Overall, researchers calculated that, even allowing for the costs of keeping sheep, fruit growers could make a saving of a staggering £500 per hectare per year from using Shropshires. These results have not gone unnoticed in Europe. French fruit growers imported 150 Shropshires in 2008 and, impressed by results, placed a further order for 100 more this year. Let's hope British growers quickly grasp the potential of these lawnmowers-on-legs.

Part of the problem home-grown apples and pears have in competing with cheaper, inferior foreign imports is that despite the best efforts of industry marketing bodies, most shoppers have no strong sense of the UK being a vibrant producer of orchard fruits. No wonder. About three-quarters of traditional English orchards have been grubbed up or abandoned since the end of World War Two. Once we went into the EU, the one-time protected market for UK apples during the UK season was opened up to the full blast of imports and wooed with well-funded marketing campaigns for foreign apples, such as Le Crunch. All this has led to a massive reduction in consumption of homegrown apples and pears and heritage varieties.

But you can imagine that if British orchard fruit growers had a more inspiring story to tell, this downward spiral could be halted, even reversed. How about "English apples come from traditionally managed orchards where chemical weedkillers have been replaced by an ancient breed of sheep"? Not snappy, granted, but the ad department could work it up a bit. Let's not be caught napping on this one or the French will beat us to it!

Joanna Blythman is a food journalist and author of Bad Food Britain.

More opinion

Topics