Green Lane
Moulton Seas End
SPALDING
Lincolnshire
PE12 6LT
Fax: 01406 371937
The Buck family have been farming in Moulton Parish for more than 150 years and always growing rather unusual crops. The tradition continues today. Jack Buck (Farms) Ltd grows on 1300 acres with a dozen different arable, vegetable and flower crops. The company is led by David Buck, Robin Buck and Julian Perowne. They are assisted by a Field Manager, five full time, three part time staff and agency staff at the busiest times. We are fortunate to farm some of the best silt land in the country.
Cropping Tamsyn
Our year starts as it means to go on. As soon as the Christmas holidays are over we begin cropping our Tamsyn daffodil variety. We have grown this variety since 1983 when we bought the entire stock, about 10 kilos, from the breeders. It has turned out to be a real winner, perhaps the best daffodil ever, with attractive flowers, good health, very long flower life and almost the first to bloom each year. We now have over a hundred acres of Tamsyn and we will have 100 or more people cropping. Not many people know that most of the daffodil flowers grown in the UK are exported to Continental Europe especially Scandinavia.
Valentines day
Sustainable Loving for Valentines Day A carbon audit of our business has discovered that CO2 emissions due to a bunch of 10 daffodils is 98.8gms which is a bit more than half the emissions due to one stem of rose from Kenya, 183 gms. (Cranfield University February 2007) Roses are red but daffodils are green.
Spraying for weeds
March is the month for drilling Peas, Sugar Beet and planting Onions. If the land is dry and the winter has been cold it will be easy. If there has been no frost more work will be needed.
Planting potatoes
In April soil temperatures will be warmer and it is time to plant 150 acres of potatoes. This is deeper work than onions or beet and larger horsepower tractors are required.
We don’t always get it right.
We will plant our earliest crops of celeriac and cover with polythene for a July/August harvest .Of course we will be spraying the wheat for weeds and disease and fertilising also. When we have finished planting potatoes we will plant our Jerusalem artichokes.
Planting celeriac
May is one of the busiest months with 110 acres of Celeriac to plant and the same area of chicory to drill. There are very few celeriac growers in the UK and it is becoming quite fashionable although November, December and January are the big months for root vegetables. We supply celeriac all year round to Jack Buck Growers who market it to all the better supermarkets so at this time we are still taking celeriac out of store to wash and market.
We are the only grower of chicory roots in the UK. Chicory is drilled into a fine deep seedbed and looks like a poor crop of sugar beet from a distance. It is not vigourous at first so tractor hoeing and hand weeding are necessary and expensive.
The first half of June is usually quieter (if we have managed to complete our May jobs), keeping the crops clean and growing, but we are planting fennel each week to give continuity at cutting time .
Onions in July
Daffodil bulb lifting will start towards the end of the month and then cleaning, grading, marketing, hot water treatment for nematodes and planting back will be the biggest task for the next eight weeks.
Harvesting celeriac
In addition the peas will be ‘vined’ (harvested for frozen peas) by the group to which belong, (Holbeach Marsh Cooperative). The pea fields and the daffodil fields will quickly be ploughed and prepared for cauliflowers. Growing and selling brassica crops is a large scale specialist business so the cauliflowers will be grown by another grower.
Maris Piper potatoes
Harvesting continues in August with the onions, which we lift ourselves and the wheat, which is combined by a contractor. We dry and ‘cure’ the onions in store and sell as soon as possible to make room for other crops. The wheat is stored at a central cooperative store. We are lifting early celeriac crops and finishing the planting of the daffodils. The fennel is being cut. This is another vegetable that seems to be growing in popularity.
September and October are potato harvest months. We grow varieties Marfona and Maris Piper for the top quality prepack market as our soil can give an excellent skin finish to the potato. Difficult summers like 2007 can confound our hopes! This is a busy time, we will handle thousands of tonnes and avoiding bruising is vital. The crop is loaded into one tonne boxes and carefully labelled as with all the crops to ensure that it is fully traceable.
We follow several growing protocols, some generated by customers,(Tesco Natures Choice, Marks and Spencer Field to Fork) and some by industry bodies( Assured Produce, Assured Combinable Crops). Traceability is at the heart of all of them along with food safety, staff welfare and environmental welfare. Leaf (Linking Environment And Farming) has environmental welfare as the main focus.
Wildlife areas
Jack Buck (Farms) will be entering the Countryside Stewardship at the entry level, leaving two and six metre buffers around the fields, managing dykes and hedges for wildlife and planting areas for birdseed, pollen and nectar and rough grass. This will total more than fifty acres.
Topping celeriac
November is harvest time for celeriac and chicory. Celeriac is notoriously difficult to store. We say that celeriac is the vegetable equivalent of sheep. While sheep spend their lives thinking of new ways to die, celeriac thinks of new ways to rot! We have twenty five years worth of experience and it is not enough.
Both chicory and celeriac must be harvested in a narrow ‘window’ between maturity and hard frosts. In a wet time we will transport more soil than crop! Our chicory roots go to Jack Buck Growers where they are ‘forced’ in hydroponic solution in dark rooms. This produces the wonderful slightly acerbic salad/vegetable much beloved in Europe but less well known here.
Autumn Ploughing
December is a race to finish the land work before Christmas. We will have started drilling the 400 acres of wheat in September and all the ploughing for next year. The later we plough and drill the poorer the result generally. Sugar beet and artichokes are the last crops to finish harvesting. Artichokes (the Jerusalem sort, not the Globe) are a very interesting vegetable. They along with very few other plants contain the carbohydrate inulin not starch in the tuber. Inulin is not digested in the stomach like starch, it is fermented in the colon promoting the growth of the ‘good’ bacteria (bifidobacteria). This effect is called prebiotic and inulin is extracted from other plants (chicory) to be added as a health promoter to some manufactured foods. Jerusalem artichokes are therefore the most natural prebiotic food and likely to be much more effective at promoting a healthy gut flora than the expensive and heavily advertised probiotic yoghourts.
December is a peak month for celeriac sales so while some staff take their holiday after Christmas we must keep the washing going and keep an eye on the daffodils ………