Weather conditions lead to bumper strawberry harvest

As much as 200 tonnes of surprise “big, juicy, luscious” strawberries are heading to shop shelves, a leading supplier has said attributing recent spell of warm weather after a rainy and cloudy start to the summer for the bumper harvest.

Lee Port, the chief executive of the Kent-based fruit grower Mansfields, told The Guardian, “The cold and wet spell earlier in the year, plus the recent mini heatwave, have resulted in pushing more of our predicted crop volume into late July and early August.

“This will result in an abundance of strawberries – roughly an extra 40 to 50 tonnes a week until the end of August. The good news is that they are big, juicy and luscious.”

This comes a week after it emerged that two-fifths of British growers of strawberries and raspberries could go out of business by the end of 2026 amid rising costs and poor pay from supermarkets.

According to a survey by British Berry Growers (BBG), an industry body that represents farmers producing 95 per cent of the berries sold in the UK, almost half of British growers said they no longer make a profit and 53 per cent reported the financial health of their business as bad or very bad.

If problems are not addressed BBG warned of “a future massive reduction in the supply of fresh British berries”.

Nick Marston, the chair of BBG, said, “We must take this survey as a wake-up call and a sign to take urgent action. The future of this great sector hangs in the balance. It would be a travesty to lose British berries. We need support from retailers in the form of fair returns, but we also need support from the government to ensure we have an uninterrupted supply of pickers during our peak season.

“Our belief is that growers are not seeing their fair share of that inflation,” Marston said.

BBG wants the government to increase the length of the seasonal worker scheme visa for overseas pickers from six to nine months so that people are available throughout the growing season.

It also wants improvements to the export system to make it easier for growers to take advantage of market opportunities in the EU and farther afield. Marston said the volume of berry exports had fallen to a seventh of pre-Brexit levels because of the introduction of complex rules such as phytosanitary checks since the UK left the EU.