A Perthshire fruit farm has decided to stop growing blueberries after 29 years as it can no longer compete with imports from the Southern Hemisphere. In a normal year with access to 200 pickers, the farm would harvest around 300 tonnes of blueberries a year.
Peter and Melanie Thomson of West Haugh Farm and Westfield Farm in Blairgowrie instead decided to let the public pick as much of the crop as they wanted in exchange for a donation to Macmillan Cancer Support, raising £4,000 in the process.
Peter said, “We gave up entirely on the blueberries because we can no longer make money on them. We have no realistic prospect of making money unless the supermarkets are prepared to pay for Scottish blueberries. But they know their customers, and the customers are not prepared to pay a premium for Scottish fruit.”
He added that new varieties have also made it harder for Scottish-grown crops to compete. “What gave us the edge was that both blueberries and cherries need a frost to stimulate growth the following spring. Scottish blueberries got a high price because they were ready at a time of year when no others were ripe.”
He continued, “Suddenly a new strain of blueberry plant was available that didn’t need a frost to thrive, so it could be grown in places like Peru and South Africa where labour was cheap. And these imports hit the market in September/October when our crop was ready, so suddenly we were not getting the prices we needed… You can cheaply put blueberries from South America on a ship and they will reach UK supermarkets just fine.”
The farm will continue to grow cherries and the blueberry plantations will be neglected until an alternative use is decided upon, which could be housing. “I’m absolutely gutted having invested in growing blueberry plants that could keep going for 50 years, that have no commercial future now,” added Peter. “We are at an age where we probably should be retiring. It may force us to slow down and take some time to enjoy a semi-retirement, if not a retirement.”