Pears, Apples, and British Heritage Under the Hammer

Livelihoods, heritage, and biodiversity are at stake. The uprooting of British apple and pear orchards is a cruel indicator of British food insecurity, not to mention the threat to businesses, culture, and the countryside. However, food insecurity is not only a threatnationwide, but also has global implications. The increase of production prices lies at the heart of these food crises and wastage, with Brexit, climate change and war all playing a role.

Crunch Time

During the winter and spring of 2023, UK apple and pear growers were forced to dig up swathes of orchards rendered uneconomical. Richard Budd from Kent had to uproot 50 acres of apple trees due to tumbling profits on the produce. Reuben Collingwood is surrounded in heritage as a fourth-generation farmer, however he is anxious for the future. Collingwood’s electricity bills for the cold storage of fruit have risen 300% from last year alone, and labour costs hiking up by 15%.

Brexit, the Bearer of Stunted Growth

This spike in production costs is partly due to the soaring electricity prices: a result of inflation and the global energy supplies cut from Russia during the Russian-Ukrainian war. Furthermore, an increase in labour costs, a fundamental part of the production process, is largely due to Brexit. Leaving the European Union has stunted freedom of movement, resulting in copious amounts of bureaucratic red tape which has hindered the flow of labourers to the UK.  In fact, there has been little change since 2019, when shortages of fruit pickers meant that British produce, equivalent to16 million apples, were left to rot. This unwelcome cocktail of paperwork, strict immigration checks, and uncertainty, brought by Brexit, has left many people searching for farm work in countries such as Germany and the Netherlands, whose healthier economies promise better pay, too. This concoction of uncertainty was highlighted by Minette Batters, president of the National Farmers Union (NFU) at the NFU Conference 2023: ‘volatility, uncertainty and instability are the greatest risks to farm businesses…’. Lack of investment in British farming is experienced starkly by farmers with the government’s poor Brexit negotiations: many farmers feel short-changed by the unsubstantial post-Brexit Environmental Land Management schemes (ELMs), which replaced the EU’s common agricultural policy (CAP).

The Grass is Greener on the Other Side

This very instability of British farming has led to British supermarkets outsourcing fruit and vegetables from cheaper suppliers abroad. However, it is in these countries such as Spain or North Africa that climate change has brought unpredictable weather patterns with cold spells that have reduced harvests. If British orchards are to thrive, profits must increase, which is currently far from reality: Ali Capper, the head of the British Apples & Pears association, said that supermarket returns are “unsustainable” with returns of less than 1%. Ultimately, the more buyers outsource to foreign suppliers, the fewer British orchards that will remain in the future. 

Granny Smith would be Furious

‘The industry is on a "knife edge", according to British Apples & Pears Limited (BAPL).’ It is not only profits and livelihoods which risk being lost, but also the loss of the rich cultural heritage associated with orchards, an image of quintessential British countryside. Apples were originally of the prehistoric world in the Stone Age, dating back to 6500 BC. The fruits were appreciated globally, and the Persians introduced the concept of grafting fruit trees to the Romans, who then spread the practiceof cultivated fruit across Europe. Orchards have long been places of experimentation and innovation: the Normans improved British cider with their tannic and acidic cider apples after the Norman Conquest in 1066, and in 1533, King Henry VIII’s had hardy, disease-free apple and pear varieties brought over from France and Holland to his orchards in Kent. Today, Mark Diacono experiments with fruit orchards and forest gardening to counteract climate change.

Places to Dream

Not only places of practicality, orchards also reap beauty and mystery which have inspired artists over the centuries.  Shakespeare’s As You Like It, explores the complexity of an orchard space being both something of escapism in the summer of romance and desire, but also shaped by the seasons of winter harshness and ‘the penalty of Adam’ with guilt in the Bible’s book of Genesis, according to Bate and Rasmussen. Virginia Woolf’s  In the Orchard, where‘Miranda slept in the orchard, or was she asleep or was she not asleep?’ Woolf’s orchard conjures escapism as a place which makes us challenge the state of reality in contrast to dreams and mystery.

Tapestry of Language 

Orchards play a vital role in creating a rich biodiversity in the British landscape, providing us with a fine-tuned ecosystem that welcomes essential pollinators, a habitat for wildlife, and essential opportunities for carbon capture. What is more, British orchards are a tapestry of different heritage fruit varieties, often ancient and anchored in place. One of the first named ‘British’ pears were Wardens,grown at the Cistercian Abbey of Warden, Bedfordshire in the thirteenth century. But British apples and pears were not only the fruit of the powerful Kings and Monasteries - the heirloom varieties also paint an intricate picture of humble, daily life in villages throughout the country: Hendre Huffcap, Swan Egg, Merrylegs (pears); and Cornish Gilliflower, Lemon Pippin, and Rivers Early Peach (apples)are just some from the bounty. Yet these names do not just trace histories, we must preserve the many heritage varieties so that we maintain a healthy gene pool for the future of fruit farming.

Under the Hammer

Apples and pears have made an epic journey, across continents the world over. Orchards are a vivid tribute to people, place, and culture, unearthing histories of the humble to the mighty. These fruits have traversed millennia, from the Stone Ages to the present day, surviving the Black Death and Covid-19. Let us ensure that our British orchards also survive the current challenges of food insecurity and food waste. Let us ensure orchards do not become a thing of history and continue to pack a punch for future generations.

Image courtesy of Van Gogh Museum via Wikimedia Commons, ©2015, some rights reserved.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the wider St. Andrews Foreign Affairs Review team.