Fruit and Veg Mud, Sweat and Tractors: The Story of Agriculture

The home movies shot by some of Britain's farmers

are a unique insight into the 20th century revolution

that swept across the countryside.

It was a revolution that changed every area of farming

and the way farmers grew fruit and vegetables

changed more than any other.

We think of horticulture as kind of big gardening

but, in some ways, it's the most technically complex

and one of the most technically advanced sectors of agriculture,

and has been so for at least 150 years.

How did horticulture go from this...

to this?

EAST EUROPEAN DIALECT

Why did we move from produce being grown outside,

to under acres of carefully controlled microclimates?

And why did so many small-scale producers,

at one time the backbone of the industry, lose out?

If you go back,

we were a name and now we're just a number.

And if that number is not there next year nobody is really going to mind.

Told through the home movies of the people

who experienced these changes, this is the story

of the horticultural revolution from the grower's point of view.

The range of fruit and vegetables

grown by horticulturalists in the 20th century was huge.

By following the growing season of three of the most popular -

strawberries, tomatoes and apples - this programme reveals the way

horticulturalists developed new growing or propagation techniques.

And their increasing use of science and technology

to revolutionise the way fruit and vegetables were cultivated,

harvested and sold.

In the early part of the last century,

the varieties that horticulturalists could grow

depended very much on where they farmed.

Climate and soil determined everything.

Apples were grown commercially in Kent, Herefordshire

and the counties of Southwest England.

These orchards belong to a large country estate in Somerset.

They're owned and farmed by Jonathan Hoskyns.

The land that I farm at the moment, has been in the family since 1760.

My ancestors were involved

in banking, locally in banking, and further afield with tea in Ceylon.

In the early years of the 20th century, land on the estate

was rented to tenant farmers.

But by the 1930s, low prices and low rents

led to changes in the way the estate was run.

My grandfather, who was the oldest ancestor that I knew,

would have considered himself a landowner rather than a farmer.

Although in the latter part of his life he got involved in farming,

including planting the farm

as we see it today back in the 1930s and developing his estate,

as it was then, which involved mostly selling it off in the late 50s

to invest in the fruit farms.

Jon's grandfather was an amateur film enthusiast.

As well a recording a whole range of family events and activities,

he filmed the commercial fruit farm that he was developing.

He realised that having tenant farms was not a profitable thing to do

and that he needed to be getting into farming himself.

Fruit had been in short supply during the war

but after 1945 demand surged

and the Somerset growers responded.

By the 1950s, Jon's grandfather

had increased the size of his orchards

to almost 50 acres. And as the Hoskyns estate changed,

filming went on, capturing the yearly cycle of production.

Preparations for the growing season,

started with mid-winter tree pruning.

Traditionally, mid-winter was also the time

when communities across Somerset

and other rural counties

would perform long established customs to protect their crops.

They hoped to drive out pests and other evil spirits.

# ..And hope that thou will bear

# For the Lord doth know

# Where we shall become apples another year

# To bloom well and to bear... #

In the odd Somerset village

on old 12th night, the wassail still takes place.

# ..Apple tree. #

ALL CHANT: Oh, apple tree, we wassail thee

And hope that thou will bear

Hatfulls, capfulls, three bushel bagfulls.

CHEERING AND GUNSHOTS

Crop failure could be disastrous for the local economy

and, as the 20th century evolved,

growers like Jonathan Hoskyns' grandfather

began to rely less on custom and more on chemistry.

The application of science wasn't new.

By the 19th century people are spraying.

People understand fertilisers, they understand that you need to weed,

that you need to keep stuff well manured and so on.

So the scientific revolution

which we make so much of in the 20th century

is not ONLY a product of the 20th century,

it's the product of something that's been going on for a long time.

In the early years of the 20th century,

growers in Southwest England

had been keen to use science to find ways to improve

both propagation techniques and the quality of local cider.

When the Long Ashton

Research Station first opened in 1903,

these were the first experimental trees to be planted here.

They're apple trees and every year they still bear fruit.

But today's modern fruit grower

wouldn't thank you for trees like this.

They're much to big,

they take up far too much space

and they're very expensive to harvest.

The Long Ashton Research Station,

funded by the apple growers, opened in North Somerset in 1905.

It wouldn't surprise me

if by the end of the century

the fruit tree has almost disappeared altogether

and that we're producing fruit with hardly any tree at all.

This boundless optimism about the potential power of science

came into its own after 1945.

Chemical research done during the war

was turned over to the battle against pests.

The Hoskyns family adopted the new science enthusiastically.

This 1952 film shows new saplings being sprayed.

In the 50s,

they used to start at the beginning of the season

with a rigid programme of sprays and they would stick to that

right the way through the season. You don't care what's going on

on the farm, you just stick to your spray programme.

In the old farm office, there is still

an old spray programme on the wall, and it would not have varied

from year to year, effectively.

Unless ICI, as it was then, brought out a new chemical and wanted to make

a bit more money by pushing it, you stuck to the same thing

that you did the year before.

But in terms of chemicals,

it was pretty much out of a book and paint by numbers.

-FILM TRACK:

-'There are 60,000 trees

'and every one has to be sprayed four or five times a year.

'When the trees are in pink bud stage,

'just before the blossom opens,

'they are sprayed with a solution of lead arsonate

'to kill the caterpillars

'that might otherwise attack them and spoil the crop.'

What we have to remember now,

looking back from the high point of the first part of the 21st century,

is that 60 years ago, chemicals of this kind were seen as saviours.

They saved labour, they increased productivity.

They attacked pests which could completely destroy a crop

almost literally overnight.

They also dealt with weeds and competitor plants in a way

which was unthinkable by hand or by normal machine.

It's mid April at Jonathan Hoskyns' Somerset fruit farm.

After 1986, the use of pesticides become more strictly controlled.

Whilst they're still useful to Jonathan Hoskyns,

he applies them more selectively.

This is a Discovery orchard which is the first variety which we pick.

There is actually... We've got a little pest here.

I don't know if you can see that. That's apple sawfly.

Just after it was pollinated,

a little caterpillar hatched and took a munch in a little circle

and then it disappears inside and it looks like

it's just either emerged, I think, from here, and it will now be a moth.

We monitor those moths using pheromone traps.

And we can monitor the male moths, counting them on a week-to-week basis

until we can see a flight which means that, all of a sudden,

the numbers of moths goes up quite quickly.

We know then that there's going to be a major egg-laying session

and we can time from that exactly when the eggs are going to hatch

and spray accordingly.

We would normally be happy to see a threshold

a threshold of five codling moths two weeks out of four weeks.

This now is an indication, we're looking at my records,

we've been catching two, nothing, four, six, four, six

and now up to about 50.

This would indicate we've had a flight this last week.

And so we'll time our insecticide to the middle to the end of next week

and hopefully we'll keep this flight well under control.

In the years after 1945, as the use of chemicals across a whole range

of fruit and vegetables became widespread,

yields began to increase.

But as well as using science,

horticulturalists were changing the way they grew plants...

..and these new propagation techniques

would have a massive impact on yields.

The strawberry, the most quintessentially English of fruit,

is a good example of the changes taking place.

This is the way strawberries were propagated up until the 1960s.

These were planted at Waterperry,

a girls only horticultural college near Oxford.

During the 50s,

college life was filmed by its principal, Beatrix Havergal.

That's her in the middle.

As well as growing some fruit and veg commercially,

the college prepared its young girls for careers in horticulture.

One of the students at the time was Bridget Lutyens.

I went in 53 and left in 55.

I was there for two years, hard graft.

SHE CHUCKLES

Bridget recalls the techniques they used.

Well, this would be

when they planted the big plants out in the west field

in, I suppose, in the spring

and grow them through the summer.

And then, in the late autumn,

they stacked them on their sides against a wall, covered with straw,

left them for the winter.

because they're hardy strawberries. So they survived.

And then, in about January, they brought them into the hothouses.

They were brought inside small glasshouses.

A rabbit's tail substituted for insect pollination.

They were precious, precious, precious plants.

And this agony, you know, if they weren't doing as well as they should

everybody got into a great gloom and we sort of lived and died and...

it was... At breakfast, Miss Havergal would come in

either smiling or scowling or whatever.

I mean, it was amazing.

Absolutely amazing.

And, well, we all went along with it.

These strawberries were ripened in time for the Chelsea Flower Show

in late May.

A huge effort was put into winning the top prize and they won it

13 times in the 50s and 60s.

Though not everyone was allowed to share in the success.

I'd made the terrible sin of getting engaged when I was there.

And when I finally told her that I was engaged -

which was the most terrifying thing I've ever done -

she said, "Nobody but nobody has ever got engaged here before."

And I was just dropped from all lovely things.

I was allowed to do the hard work

but I wasn't allowed to stand on the Chelsea stand. I might have,

I suppose, I might have contaminated the strawberries.

These images seem timeless,

yet Beatrice Havergal's camera captured horticultural techniques

that were on the cusp of change.

It was completely unchanged from when it started. I mean, way back

at the beginning of the century.

It was just those methods which had continued.

By the 60s,

people were beginning to question it

and the modern world was sort of coming in and everything changed.

Further down the Thames Valley in Wiltshire,

is the farm belonging to Norman Parry and an example of how

the growing of strawberries has changed since the 1960s.

It's mid April and Norman is planting strawberry plants

that will be ready in July but, unlike those grown at Waterperry,

he will be able to harvest well into October.

These beautiful plants come from Holland.

And they're lifted in the autumn

and stored in great big fridges.

And when we want... the crop of strawberries,

we basically plant them 60 days beforehand.

Norman uses polythene,

artificial compost

and varieties that would have been unheard of in the 1950s.

Each plant is fed and watered individually.

The plants are getting everything they need in terms of nutrition -

down to the very smallest trace elements.

And, of course, that's why they look so healthy and it's why the fruit

really is extremely tasty.

The roots become active

in no time at all and it would be very surprising...

It wouldn't be the fault of the system if a plant failed.

If a plant fails, it's because

it's been broken in transit or something.

Whereas in the field you might get

an 80% or 90% take under good conditions,

here it is just 100%.

This crop will ripen in time

for a weekend extravaganza when Norman hopes to bring in the crowds.

However good the plants look, it depends purely on how much you sell.

There's a saying in the industry that it's much better to sell

a bad crop in good weather than try and sell a good crop in bad weather.

The customer is king.

And I have got to get the customers in.

While new propagation techniques, plant varieties

and oil-based products like plastic and polythene were being used

by horticulturalists across the country to increase yields,

one more far-reaching development was on the way -

the glasshouse. The glasshouse was revolutionary

because it would do something every farmer wants above everything,

it would remove all the climatic uncertainties.

The impact of the glasshouse on post-war horticulture

is illustrated perfectly in the story of the tomato.

# I've red tommy-toes for the gentry

# And bloaters for the likes of you I've pears and I've peas... #

There's a wonderful moment in Flora Thomson's Lark Rise.

When, as a child, she sees a tomato

and spends her penny on it because it looks so beautiful

and she thinks it's going to be sweet and it's not, it's horrible,

it's sharp, she hates it. And the man selling it says,

"Well, gal, them's for the gentry, not for the likes of you."

# Yes, it's red tommy-toes for the gentry

# And it's...

# Bloaters for the likes of you! #

Tomatoes were historically difficult to grow outdoors

and early glasshouses

made them an expensive luxury for the middle classes.

The one area of Britain they thrived was the Channel Islands.

It was in the early years of the last century when a small number

of family growers on Jersey

began to produce outdoor tomatoes for the mainland.

Amongst them were the Le Maistres

who started growing towards the end of the 19th century.

This is Peter Le Maistre, surrounded by tomatoes in the 50s,

and he carries on growing them on the island today.

Well this is quite an exciting time

because this is, in effect, the start of a new tomato season.

I sowed these tomato seedlings about three days ago and, as you can see,

they're just beginning to germinate.

The very first ones are just coming up.

Seem to have a rogue here who's come up on his own.

Every year, the weather throws something different at you

and you wonder how this particular crop is going to grow.

All these things have to be carefully nurtured

because tomato seed is a very expensive commodity,

especially organic tomato seed.

I mean, this single little seedling alone

is probably worth 20p.

And when you multiply that up by the area I'm growing,

about three acres, it's going to come to somewhere

in the region of 7.5 to £8,000 for the seed alone.

So you can see, it's a very risky adventure.

Peter is getting ready to plant out the tomato seedlings for the coming season.

Because he grows outdoor tomatoes, to catch the best of the growing season,

he and his father have to plant in May.

When he began working in the business, it was a backbreaking job.

This is how we used to plant tomatoes.

You'd roll out a cord, basically a large piece of string or a long piece of string,

then set that up to provide the long straight row that would provide the basis of your tomato planting.

Every tomato is planted...

..in a couple with the man on a spade and the woman putting in the plants.

I'm the woman today.

And a good couple, Dad, how many would the plant in a day?

Well, about 12,000.

About 12,000 plants.

So, about two-thirds of an acre.

The other thing is, the quicker the planter, the easier it is for the man on the spade.

Oh, is that a complaint?

Because everything was so much smaller, so many more farmers

and, um, there was sort of competition then.

You'd see someone start planting the tomatoes and you'd think,

"Oh, I'd better start as well otherwise he's going to be ahead of me."

These days, of course, we're the only person left growing outdoor tomatoes in Jersey.

So, when we start is the date to start.

This system of planting, I suppose,

was the only way used until sort of the mid-1970s when the first mechanical planters appeared.

And people moved out from this system to the mechanical planting system that we're using today.

Yes, my father's very much involved

and, of all the things on the farm, he still likes to get very much involved in the tomatoes.

He still sows them, looks after their pricking out and the growing.

Outdoor tomatoes is one of the nicest crops to grow from a producer's point of view

in that, you've got a plant.

You see it growing for a long period of time.

I mean, these plants are planted out in mid-May.

And they're not harvested until August.

And then, of course, you can look - it's not like a potato crop where the crop is hidden under the ground.

We can actually look at the tomato plant,

we've got five trusses of hopefully nice fruit that's going to produce a satisfying yield of tomatoes.

Close to Peter Le Maistre is another tomato grower, Stanley Payn.

Like Peter, Stanley's family has been growing tomatoes for generations.

His records go back to World War One.

Right, I've just brought,

brought these.

If we go back to the tomato season 1916

and see every tray that's been shipped...

The way they were shipped, how many were shipped, the date.

Stanley and his father, Bertram, are looking back at their shipping records.

This goes on year after year.

Then you get to '39.

When I started.

It's the first year.

Bertram can remember how The German occupation of the Islands in World War Two halted production.

And how, paradoxically, liberation helped the family business start producing for the mainland again.

I thought the War was going to finish, so I started...

I planted tomatoes with the Germans still on the...on sentry duty.

Of course I was planting tomatoes and my uncle came along and he said, "You must be mad.

"The War is not finished yet. You won't be able to ship your tomatoes because there will be no transport."

In other words, there was more transport because they were bringing supplies in.

It all worked very well.

By the 1950s, the British economy was booming and the demand

for what had once been luxury items like tomatoes was growing quickly.

The tomato industry had been built up before the War.

But suddenly there was this huge demand for fruit

because the English in particular had been starved of it for six years.

And so, the Jersey grower was very quick to see the potential

and there were vast areas of outdoor tomatoes grown in the late 1940s

around 3,500 acres.

What helped producers like those on Jersey to meet the growing demand was the glasshouse.

After the War, glass became much more available and cheap to produce,

and building techniques and materials made the houses relatively simple to construct.

This is a picture taken in 1955 by one of my father's merchants

and it illustrates well how the industry has changed.

By the 1960s, large glasshouses were becoming an established feature of the rural landscape.

This portrays a little bit of glass and a lot of open fields,

which were all, at that time, all cultivated with tomatoes.

Every little corner was cultivated with outdoor tomatoes.

We now have glass all along this area.

And further down, further down towards the coast.

So the whole site has changed.

And as Stanley and his father built new blocks, they developed new growing techniques.

They added irrigation systems and they pumped in carbon dioxide.

Their houses created the optimum growing conditions and results were spectacular.

If I turn the clock back...

..and look at the way the family started growing tomatoes,

my grandfather or great grandfather was producing something less than a pound a plant.

And here we are in 2008 producing the equivalent

of over 40 lbs of weight in a plant.

So it really just shows how things have moved on.

Stanley Payn built his last and largest glasshouse in the late 1990s.

As glasshouses became ever larger, the cost of building them

brought new and much bigger companies into tomato production.

This one in Norfolk is state of the art.

The last phase was built in 2007 at a cost of 10 million pounds. Well beyond the Payns' budget.

It covers more than 25 acres and produces 70 million tomatoes each year.

It's owned by one of the biggest food based multinationals in Britain, British Sugar.

And it's managed by a real evangelist for large-scale production, Nigel Bartle.

Nigel has been at it for a long time.

That was way back when, when I first started growing things

and that was the infamous Wendy house covered in polythene

which I've been much maligned about by people over the years about having a Wendy house.

But it was a Wendy house converted into a greenhouse

so it was, you could say, a novel adapted structure for protected cropping.

Looking back 21 years to that Wendy house,

with a few bedding plants, a few tomato plants,

now across to 26.5 acres of glass, a quarter of a million plants.

If you'd asked me that back then, I don't think I'd quite have believed you.

I would hope that a Victorian grower would recognise one of our tomato plants as being a tomato plant.

The way we grow them is very different because we've adapted.

The key bit is we've got to keep adapting. We cannot stand still.

People have got to adapt to be able to survive.

These cathedral-like structures

have become the symbol of the horticulturalists' final triumph over nature.

In here the concept of the growing season becomes fairly meaningless,

tomatoes can be picked from February to November.

Horticulture actually is the epitome of what's happened in 20th century agriculture.

It is the area where what every farmer would like to do in a way

has come true. The total control of climatic conditions

and gearing climatic conditions totally towards increasing your yield.

That's all it's about, and you, in theory at least,

and unless something disastrous goes wrong, you can actually do that.

Year in, year out.

By the end of the century the revolution in output was complete.

The phenomenal increase in fruit and vegetable yields

was beyond anything that had been thought possible before the War.

But alongside the revolution in production, the years after 1945 witnessed other radical changes,

this time in the way fruit and vegetables were picked and sold.

Agriculture as a whole in the 20th century has increased its yield enormously.

Much of the harvesting of that has been dealt with by machine.

Think of combine harvesters.

Think even of battery milkers.

Think of potato diggers.

But think about how you harvest a raspberry.

Or a strawberry.

Think about how, when you pick it, you squash it in your hands.

A machine can't pick soft fruit and leave it whole and ready to sell in punnets in a supermarket.

It might be able to harvest them enough to make jam, but even that's difficult.

It's July in Wiltshire and Norman Parry's first crop of strawberries is ready for picking.

Norman's solution to the problems farmers faced in picking soft fruit is simple.

His customers pick their own.

This is proving to be a very difficult corner to manage

because everybody is going to the over-picked fruit.

So I'm spending a lot of my time up here.

At the end of the day, the only important thing is how much fruit there is in the baskets.

This is Norman's big day of the year, the Strawberry and Steam Fair.

CARNIVAL MUSIC PLAYS

He hopes to pull in a crowd who, while enjoying the attractions, will hopefully pick a strawberry or two.

This is our sort of premium marketing event, in high season, hopefully, to shift strawberries.

Now, this year, because of a cool spring and a fairly cool summer, the fruit has hung on extremely well.

The show's a little bit later than I would have liked.

But because of the nature of steam engines, they move slowly from show to show.

And this year, we had to go for the end of July.

The gamble is, is it going to rain or is the weather going to be lovely?

If it rains, well, basically, a lot of fruit rots.

What tends to happen is the fruit gets picked from both angles.

I make a conscious effort to feed people in from both ends.

Either by sort of telling them where it is or having signposts and walkways to guide them in.

You always end up with a gap in the middle where it hasn't been properly picked.

The "pick your own" approach to fruit became very popular in the 1970s.

Up until the '50s picking fruit had always been labour intensive,

and the work was done mainly by women and children.

This was traditional in the late 19th century and into the 20th.

But by the time we get to the 1920s and 1930s,

this casual pool of labour is declining for various reasons.

Some of them to do with the aspirations of women themselves.

They simply don't want to do this,

what was quite heavy, dirty and quite poorly paid work on the land.

They were increasingly being drawn into the local towns to do cleaner work,

to do shop work and office work, which was better paid.

The drift from the land was stemmed by the need for labour during World War Two.

Thousands of women, often from towns and cities, joined the Women's Land Army.

The taste of farming that these women developed during the War led to some surprising outcomes.

Their work in the women's Land Army often had quite a profound impact on their attitudes and expectations.

Many of these urban-born women, although they recognised that the work was hard, really enjoyed it.

There was a large trend after the War of women wanting to stay in the countryside

to work in branches of agriculture and horticulture.

It appealed to women for different reasons, in a way.

It offered urban-born women a new sense of freedom.

It gave them a chance to work outdoors.

If you like, to convene with nature.

And many of them speak about the pleasure of actually just working on the land,

watching things grow, understanding where food comes from.

So we do see a trend after the Second World War of women, if they can afford it,

if they have perhaps got a small private income,

actually paying to train professionally

and many of them go to institutions like Waterperry.

Waterperry's Principal, Beatrix Havergal, and her partner, Avice Sanders, took on new young students.

Jean Manger was one of them.

January 20th 1946 I came here.

It was a Monday. I came out on the bus from Gloucester Green in Oxford

and I was met at Wheatley by Miss Sanders in the little Austin car, Austin Seven,

and brought out, and I was taken in to see Miss H,

and immediately she said, "Right, if you go out and you find Rosemary,

"she will take you to the tool shed where you will find a spade and she will show you how to dig."

As it was a girls only college, there was no equality of the sexes.

Education was nearly always segregated in those days.

You had girls' schools and boys' schools.

There were very few places where girls could go to learn.

And so if you set a place up for girls, then you made it just girls.

And also, I think, probably, it was easier for them

to achieve what they wanted to do if they hadn't got the competition of men with them.

I think this had a lot to do with it really.

If you were segregated, you were able to concentrate on what you were doing more.

There wasn't the... you know, the added "interests" of a mixed community, perhaps.

Oh, she expected absolutely the tops, that you gave your very best.

So she was very careful in her training and teaching.

So that that was passed on to us

so that the theory and the practice worked well together

and from that students really did get a good grounding.

Gradually, Waterperry gave me a very great deal of confidence

and I think enabled me to develop a career of my own.

I think without it I don't know how I would have gone on.

So I always look back on the time at Waterperry as a very happy time,

but also a time that helped me to develop my life, sensibly.

While some left to forge their own careers, others became teachers at Waterperry.

I was asked if I wanted to stay on or whether I wanted to go back...

you know, to report back to the Land Army and go to somewhere else.

But I was very happy here and she seemed very happy in what I was doing and so that was it.

It was just...I just stayed.

In developing careers in horticulture in the '50s, Jean and Mary were unusual.

In orchards like the one owned by the Hoskyns family in South Somerset,

women were part of a casual and unskilled workforce.

Picking fruit in the late summer, sometimes with their children,

they were often the wives or mothers of estate workers.

Maurice Lane worked on the fruit farm from the age of 11.

There I am changing the wheel.

And I had hair in those days, look!

Maurice worked for the Hoskyns family all his life.

I suppose it was...

There was a special time when

everyone came to pick apples because everyone knew that

the apples were ready and you didn't have to ask people to come, they just came.

You just sort of drew all the people from around,

round the villages and they knew when it was apple-picking time, and...

the whole crowd came. That's my mother, there.

She looks so young, so happy there.

It's unbelievable that we only lost her a couple of years ago.

That's Norman Hamlin, he's putting mother's bag on.

As usual, Mum was so short,

that she had to put her bag up a bit higher

so she didn't drop the apples in and bruise them.

That time, you'll never see again.

It was so special because of the togetherness

of everyone picking and putting into the same box.

And the chat you had around the trees,

you could hear the women shouting from one tree to the other

until the management came around and then it quietened down a bit.

Sad to see all the people have left us,

but it's lovely to be able to look at the ladies

and think, I knew you.

Once the apples had been picked, they were packed on site.

The bomb trolley laden with full bushel boxes

was reversed into and unloaded straight into what would have been the store and packing area.

In the '50s, all the apples were picked into 40lb boxes, what we call a wooden apple bushel box.

If you come through here into the old grading room that you would have seen

on the archive footage.

We're now in the grading room which is full, effectively, of farm junk.

Through here...

..coincidentally, there is a...

Just turn the lights on properly...

A bit of the packing equipment

that featured in the archive footage.

This is where the lady was

packing her apples individually into some wraps which are still...

Still here.

So there is a piece of tissue paper

with my grandfather's Parrett brand Somerset trademark.

It would have sat here, probably the other way up.

Picked it up, put the cheek of the apple in against the logo,

turned it over, twizzled it round, into the bushel box.

The bushel box went up over the rollers onto some more rollers and out to dispatch.

So, a little bit of history we haven't got rid of.

Unfortunately, the grader wasn't quite so lucky.

Just 20 years later, this way of picking and packing apples had disappeared.

By the mid 1970s, the Somerset apple growers were in crisis.

In the '70s, when we joined the Common Market, it was a disaster for English apple farmers.

Overnight, this building became redundant.

Britain had joined the Common Market in 1973 and the impact on fruit farmers was profound.

British producers found themselves in competition with other Common Market countries

in what was now one large free market.

The price of apples coming into England fell through the floor,

and it lasted for several years and that is when fruit farmers

'had to get together with other farmers to share overheads,

'co-operatives were formed, it really took 15 or 20 years

'to get back to a situation where we were relatively stable.'

The Hoskyns survived, but many were driven out of business.

Whole areas of the West Country landscape were changed

as orchards were neglected, or worse, grubbed out.

As the orchards disappeared so did the local pickers.

They were replaced through another Common Market principle, the free movement of labour.

This Herefordshire strawberry plantation is typical of that trend.

We've been growing strawberries on this farm since the late '90s

and we have always used Eastern European labour since we've been doing it.

That was predominantly Polish and Lithuanian

and countries that have now entered the EU.

It's a good guaranteed source of reliable labour.

People that come on a set date, go home on a set date.

They come with a specific target in mind of what they want to earn, and hence are very reliable.

They have 140 acres of strawberry beds and the precise layout is

designed specifically to facilitate efficient and mechanised picking.

Strawberry farming now is all about efficiencies, really.

This field, when we set it up last autumn, was marked out

with a GPS system to make sure that we made the maximum use

of our available space, make sure that every row is straight.

So when the tunnel legs were drilled, they were very straight.

The rigs you see behind us, fitted up here perfectly.

There was no room for error.

These picking rigs help aid us to pick the fruit more efficiently, really.

They do that by presenting the picker

with the fruit as they're literally held above the fruit

and limiting all the other things they have to do, all the other operations, so they just pick.

All the sort of lugging fruit about, scanning it and grading it

and quality control is taken out by the supervisor who stands up on the deck.

-OK, what's your tray count so far?

-Huh?

How many trays?

'We don't want to be paying the pickers to sort of stand around or go to the toilet.'

They have allotted breaks, sort of 15 minutes, about half past nine...

But apart from that if we want their picking ability maximised,

so we have them spending as much time as they can

next to the fruit, picking.

Compared with hand pickers, hand-picking gangs out in the field,

they improved productivity by 25%.

They seem to be 100% happier on the rig because they have to do half as much work

and they generally tend to get paid more handsomely just through the presentation of the fruit.

It's all there for them, they don't have to do anything.

Happy pickers.

-Do you like working on the rig?

-Yeah. It's nice.

-It's nice?

-It's easy.

-Really?

Easier than hand picking, yeah.

What if I said tomorrow you're going hand picking?

I'm going to hate you!

THEY LAUGH

In the past, it used to be argued that the farm worker was somebody special,

he actually sowed what he reaped.

He followed the process all the way through.

He was peculiarly close to the land and often in mythical ways

this gave him a special status.

This simply is not the case any more.

Farm work is now divided, it's like factory work.

People carry out one process as part of a whole set of processes.

Now, what follows from the division of labour, it used to be argued and

to some extent is still argued, is what was called alienation.

That you no longer feel connected to, you no longer identify with your work.

One of the things that used to be said about a farm worker,

was that he or she had an absolute commitment to, belief in, a love of their farm and their job.

If you look at modern horticulture, one cannot even begin to think that that's the case now.

And the years after 1970 saw not only changes in the way fruit was picked,

they also witnessed huge changes in the way it was sold.

These strawberries are not bound for local greengrocers.

They are bound for a supermarket that has a direct contract with the growers.

For many years, horticulturalists would sell their produce at the market in the nearest town.

Or, if they were a larger grower, they'd send their produce to wholesale markets

like Covent Garden and from there onto local greengrocers.

What begins to change as the 20th century goes on,

is that the other end of the chain, the grocery end, the retail end

becomes more and more centralised and more and more "nationalised",

i.e. national in scope.

Firms like Sainsbury's, like Lipton's,

like a whole range of other companies, Mac Fisheries, many of them long forgotten now,

moved from being one or two shops in a town

to being 20 or 30 shops in an area, to being 50 and 100 shops.

Very quickly, the purchasing power of these chains becomes enormous and very quickly they recognise

the power and importance of their purchasing abilities.

And growers were quick to seize the new opportunities on offer.

Instead of having 50 different customers,

you just had one big customer,

nice, regular business, and...

the horticulturists were happy, they were happy to do it.

It didn't last for very long because it became increasingly clear there were risks

to having put all your eggs, or all your apples in the supermarket basket.

And it's really a case of make a pact with the devil,

because you've lost your other customers by helping the supermarkets

because you put all the independent greengrocers out of business.

But then you're in bed with these people and they just see you

as people who they can get lower and lower prices from.

By the end of the 20th century,

the structure of horticultural production and selling had changed radically.

The story of the tomato illustrates well what happened.

The number of growers shrank dramatically.

In 1970 there were over 700 tomato producers.

By 2005 that number had dwindled to just 40.

In the search for lower and lower prices,

supermarkets began to buy fruit and vegetables from across the world.

MAN: 'They say the best things come in pairs. Well, it's certainly true

'that some of the best pears come from the Cape.

'And that's true for the apples as well, Golden Delicious.

'How well this variety is named!'

In Britain, as the profit margins got smaller and smaller,

it was the large companies, like the one managed by Nigel Bartle, that prospered.

The vast glasshouses he manages are able to deliver a uniform product

in enough volume to be competitive.

The single fruit work their way up to underneath this box, and in there are cameras.

As it heads into the camera, the camera will look at the fruit,

photograph it about seven times a second as it rotates.

From that it will have a good idea of the overall colour.

Then moves on and under this section there is a weigh cell,

so the computer knows what colour it is,

it will then weigh it, and knows the relationship between the weight and diameter.

It then drops it into a cup,

it heads off down the grader and it will come out in different areas

according to both the size and the colour.

So we get lots of uniform tomatoes, uniform size and colour.

But for the very small grower there was an alternative -

to grow a premium product such as organic tomatoes.

Peter Le Maistre does just that, and he's surviving, even though

the dreadful weather in the summer of 2008 has played havoc with his crop.

This crop suffered quite badly and of course that's the downside of organic growing,

when the weather is against you it's difficult to get a full harvest.

Probably in here, I know we're right at the end of the season,

but I'll probably only pick about a third of the tomatoes that I would have liked.

The cost of growing a conventional crop where you're using chemicals and artificial fertilisers...

Which are at this moment in time going up by anything between 30 and 100%.

The organic grower doesn't use those inputs and so we may be able to

remain very competitive in the market place in the future.

There is an acceptance with the organic buyer

that you don't have to have perfect, unmarked fruit for it to be very tasty.

So that's given us a slight edge and reason to think we can be

successful growing outdoor tomatoes for the years to come.

But when you want to expand, suddenly you need supermarkets

because they've got 90% of the business.

I think there will be people who fall by the wayside because I think it's going to be very difficult

for people to survive in the current climate unless the prices for some fruit and vegetables go up.

Those who suffered were the mid-sized producers,

those who couldn't afford to scale up their production to meet the prices demanded by the supermarkets.

People like Stanley Payn on Jersey.

His business went the way of many like him -

the 2008 season of producing tomatoes for the mainland was his very last.

The Payns have been growing on Jersey for 100 years

but now they are cutting down the plants in this glass house for the very last time.

All I've ever known really is talking tomatoes,

growing tomatoes, packaging tomatoes, selling tomatoes...

We can't keep borrowing money to finance supermarkets, there's no return.

At the end of the day, why should we, as...

as a simple working family be subsidising a multinational?

Which is all very tragic, really, because it's a whole industry that's gone.

All the skills will disappear forever,

never to be replaced.

But that's... That's the way of the world,

everybody wants everything for nothing.

We've always been a bit of a large village here with over 50 employees.

There's always noise, there's always activity

and everything is just going to be totally silent.

Very eerie.

Go back 10 years ago, even eight years ago, we were a name, and now we're just a number.

If that number isn't there next year nobody's really going to mind.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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