Charles Shropshire is giving me a tour of the family farms and an insight into one of the most well-known businesses in fresh produce.
It’s a tour that in some ways encompasses a slice of fresh produce history – we begin at his grandfather and company founder Guy Shropshire’s original workshop, where he used to build farm machinery and rigs from scratch, move on to Fordy Farm with its state-of-the-art organic growing techniques, and finish at Plantation Farm, production powerhouse and home to the G’s 2.4 MW AD plant and energy business, Shropshire Energy.
Second son of chairman and industry legend John Shropshire, Charles recently returned from a stint with G’s España to head up the company’s UK growing operations, as managing director for Cambridgeshire Farms Growers. His big passion is the link between the environment and intensive farming, and he is slowly putting his vision into place with initiatives on soil, biodiversity and growing technology.
For an intensive farmer and landowner – G’s is one of the UK’s leading supermarket suppliers and has an estate stretching to thousands of hectares – Charles is perhaps unusually environmentally conscious, evident in anything from his silver eco Range Rover, which shuts off when paused, to his passion for wildlife that begun when he was a schoolboy and “always building hedges and spinneys”.
He credits his interest in the environment to a combined love of the countryside and field sports, as “it all works together”, and he is at the forefront of G’s sustainability efforts in its UK growing operations. In a rare insight into Shropshire succession planning and the future of the G’s business, he says it’s been agreed with the family that he will continue to run the farming side of the business. His brother Guy, current MD at G’s España, is set to take over from John Shropshire, as according to Charles their father would like to step down in the next few years. Younger brother Henry is heading up the Polish operations, but being “good with numbers”, he’s expected to go into the finance side of the business.
As the Range Rover purrs to a halt at Fordy Farm, the hub for G’s organic operations, he says: “Farming organically has helped us become better conventional farmers. We pulled back slightly in 2008 when the market declined, but we then saw catering and foodservice markets grow, especially in London, and now retailers are catching up.
“As well as being an intensive farmer, I want to see the environmental impact of what we do reduced. We need to reduce our carbon footprint. When thinking about the future I have three areas of focus: biodiversity, soils and reducing reliance on pesticide and fertilisers.”
Fordy Farm is pioneering many of Charles’ environmental initiatives, such as starch rather than petroleum-based crop covers, and wildlife corridors, and he talks with passion about anything from reed growth in ditches to nesting birds. An investment into drip irrigation in some crops has led to using up to 50 per cent less water, and he also instigated a PhD student from Cranfield University who is looking at how to gain optimal yields through crop rotations and minimal tillage to reduce CO₂ output.
The G’s estate in Cambridgeshire is between 1-2m below sea level, meaning drainage is a big concern. The company collaborates with the Internal Drainage Board (IDB) and has a comprehensive network of carefully maintained ditches, which also function as irrigators, as drained water can then be pumped back through fields. When he acquires a neighbouring farm, as happened recently when a local farmer retired, Charles first sets about physically realigning fields and ditches to match his intensive farming model.
“We have 1m of top soil so we are mainly farming the peat, but in some parts of the farm we are farming the sub soil. One of our biggest challenges is to slow down the rate of top-soil oxidisation. To help this we use mushroom compost as a byproduct of the mushroom operations, spread onto the land before the lettuce is planted to try to maintain the organic matter, as well as waste from the AD plant. We farm intensively here so it’s important to give the land what it needs.
“I am really driving the interest into our long-term soil health and pitching it to the family because without soil we have nothing. The last generation, such as my father, neglected the soils somewhat as they didn’t know how to care for them properly.”
Overseeing a team of specific crop managers – a deliberate decision over having people responsible for individual farms – Charles has spent the last year consolidating workshops and offices to bring teams together. “Every single crop has a profit and loss, and crop managers are managed on that. They also liaise with the marketing team at G’s Fresh, but there is a very distinct division between selling and marketing, and growing, which is necessary within a grower cooperative,” he explains.
Typically media-shy, G’s has been vocal in pre- and post-EU referendum discussions – and Charles is similarly opinionated. “I’m pro EU and I always will be,” he says. “The shift in the exchange rate has already affected the labour supply – working in Germany and Holland has become more attractive as they get more money. But the biggest challenge to the business from Brexit and leaving the single market is moving rigs from Spain to the UK and visa versa. At the moment it’s very quick, but with new regulations and checks this might take longer and would cause a lot of problems. One of the positives is we might see prices go up, and we also might get SAWS back.”
He may be responsible for the profitability and efficiency of the company’s vast farming operations – but it’s clear his heart still lies in the fields. “One thing I do miss is the action – I used to love walking the crops and physically working and irrigating. Overall farm management is great fun, and I get a lot of satisfaction over seeing the management grow,” he says. “My favourite crop is celery and I love the organics, because that is real farming to me, where you’re thinking about what to do and solve the problems.”
Fresh produce has been in the Shropshire family for decades now, but it’s clear that the torch has been well and truly passed down to the next generation, and with Charles at the helm, soil and sustainability are now a firm part of the company’s future.
G's organic factfile
G’s produces five organic crops – onions, little gem, Romaine, bunched beetroot and celery – over 250 hectares. The company isn’t looking to increase organics acreage but instead is looking to technology to increase yields, says Charles Shropshire. “Organics is growing by between 15 and 20 per cent year-on-year, and we are investing in that side of the business. We now have a specific organics crop manager to drive it forward,” he says.
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