Life on the pea harvest

I hope you’ve all had a look at the Growing for the future website which is where we explain what we are doing on sustainable developments.

I just wanted to bring this subject up really, why are we interested in sustainable development? Well of course, it’s our 60th pea harvest this year as I’ve mentioned before, so what do we have to do to ensure that we have a 120th harvest and during that time, maintain a healthy business both in terms of supply of raw materials, in terms of a healthy business in the marketplace and one were everyone can operate successfully as we have for the last 60 years.

I think part of what we have to do is recognise the challenges we’re going to face over those years and indeed have a plan to addapt to those challenges. Things like pollution which has to be brought under control, the whole issue to do with non-renewable resources—we have to find a solution to that—and of course climate change which we’ve mentioned earlier. So their are many, many things that are there to be dealt with.

With our sustainability programme, we’ve divided it up into three main sustainability indicators. These look at three main areas:

1. The physical aspect—the soil, water and air
2. The environmental aspect—where we take into account our responsibility towards the environment
3. The social aspect—what we do within the community and what we do with the people we rely on in the supply chain, whether that’s our suppliers, our harvest people, or our transport people, so it goes right the way through the whole business.

This is a very complex subject as you’ll appreciate, but if we look at in simple terms, if we’re not sustainable, we don’t have a business into the future. So there’s a significant case for sustainable development.

We’ll need to understand what customer expectations of us as a leading brand in the future will be, and in particular be sensitive to consumers’ need to know the companies behind the brands…

I’ll give you some more of my thoughts perhaps tomorrow.

thank you

Tags: sustainability, agriculture, sustainable agriculture, nonrenewable, pollution

Posted by Colin Wright at 5:02 PM | Permalink

Right, last week, how did we do? Not too bad. We’re a little bit down on volume compared to the previous two weeks, but that’s as a result of one of our supply groups coming towards the end of its season. Overall we’ve got about 18% of the crop left to harvest. We anticipate being finished by the weekend here in Lowestoft and it’ll take through to the end of the week after that for the Hull teams to get everything finished up.

So, to continue on the media interest in vegetable harvests, peas even got a mention on Terry Wogan (you could try this BBC listen again link if you missed it) this morning if you were up early enough to hear it!

Again this morning we’re very much tied up in a strategic review of where we are across our vegetable business to ensure we make the best of this quite difficult situation but that’s intriguing times as there are always opportunities to develop with this type of situation…

As far as this week’s concerned on Wednesday I’ve got Fergie, our managing director making a visit. We can talk him through everything’s that’s been going on and what needs to happen, so it’s all quite exciting and I’m looking forward to that, so I’ll keep you informed.

Posted by Colin Wright at 2:20 PM | Permalink

Well, something completely different now…

My son Dan races motorcycles (you’ll see from the pictures he rides for Ram It Racing, a Yamaha TZR 250 Racing outfit) so we came down to Brands Hatch to help him today.

He’s had a couple of races and got two third places. Not too bad obviously, he was a little bit disapointed but personally I think he did exceptionally well.

A couple more races tomorrow so we’ll see if we can’t make third into first.

(I might let you know what goes on)

Tags: Brands Hatch

Posted by Colin Wright at 5:52 PM | Permalink

Hi, it’s Colin on Saturday. Things are just starting to ease up a little bit now down in Lowestoft and we’re running only at half-capacity today. We’ll be a little bit busy beginning of next week and then of the three harvest groups we’ve got one finishing probably on Tuesday, so the end is in sight after a long, hard campaign.

Following on from the comments yesterday, obviously the press today has been full of the situation—the impact of the hot and dry on the availability of a whole range of vegetables. Peas feature very strongly in all those comments (they’re in the leader in The Times and everything else) so no doubt we can expect a lot more media attention in the next few days…

The ISO 14001 was completed at Hull and things look very encouraging but it will be be a week to ten days for Lloyds to do the technical assessment and then come back and let us know if we’ve been accredited, so we still have to keep our fingers crossed, but we’re extremely confident:-)

I’ll talk to you a bit later on.

Tags: sustainability, agriculture, sustainable agriculture, pea harvest, peas

Posted by Colin Wright at 10:27 AM | Permalink

Colin here, we’ve had quite a day today! No doubt many of you will have seen the breaking news, peas even managed to hit national news today, primarily surrounding the impact of hot dry weather on vegetables and vegetable production…

As a company we are affected by this and we’re currently taking stock of our position.

We’ve got a lot of avenues that we can pursue to make sure the nation’s favourite vegetable is available. We’re talking to our customers and we’ve had a lot of media interest today because as the leading brand, they’ve all been interested in our comments.

The other thing to note of course is that it isn’t just peas that are affected by these hot, dry conditions and it isn’t just in the UK this problem is Europe wide.

I’ll keep you posted on that one.

Tags: drought, sustainability, agriculture, sustainable agriculture, pea harvest, peas

Posted by Colin Wright at 5:17 PM | Permalink

Mick Sawyers, shift manager at the Hull factory

Hi James here, quick update with how things are going up here in Hull. We’re still very busy—lots of crops still coming on very quickly.

The day before yesterday we got 36 t-units (you may remember my discussion of thermal units earlier on) we budget for a certain level of thermal units in a season. Normally we expect to get 21 units in summer, so to get 36 is obviously—when you take and average of the max and the min—quite the warmest day for a lot of years! And in fact the first of the five groups is set to finish up harvesting middle of next week so that seems to have come very quickly, but the other four will still be busy for some time after that.

Other things going on, the ISO 14001 quality audit that Colin has been discussing is continuing in Hull. The experts had a field visit yesterday and the audit continues this morning, there are a few more things for them to look at this morning before they finish up this afternoon. It seems to be going well so far—we’re all keeping fingers crossed that everything is ok. It’s a massive achievement, so we’re all quite anxious about that!

Posted by at 7:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Hi, it’s Colin again, I thought you might be interested in this. I’m not sure how well it’s come out in the photograph, but it is a bees nest above a barn door.

We’re just out with James here and came to look at a couple of crops and we came across it—there’s always something interesting to look at when you are pea harvesting!

Posted by Colin Wright at 10:21 AM | Permalink

Hi, this is Colin. Well, I have come to Huggate Wold in the Yorkshire Wolds, this is my old stamping ground this, when I was when I was a lad and joined Birds Eye this was the area I had to look after.

You will see from these pictures, I have taken a photograph of a sartorially elegant gentleman in shorts;-) That’s Terry, he’s the field manager, and Terry and I go way back, he was working for Nufield pea growers right back when I started at Birds Eye all those years ago. So, it’s nice to see him as it always is, and standing next to him is the fieldsman who now looks after this area (you’ll see I’ve also taken a couple of general shots of what we are about).

James and I have a just another couple of plots to more to look at and then back into the factory.

Posted by Colin Wright at 9:24 AM | Permalink

Hi, it’s Colin, got back from London OK and just about sobered up;-) It was a excellent do—saw a lot my old friends anyway—but now it’s back to reality!

We had bit of bad luck last night up in the north of the operation where one of the electricity substations was struck by lightning which put that out of action, which wasn’t particularly helpful. Particularly at a time when we’re under pressure because of the warm weather and the maturity of the crops and in fact, I think down in the south here in Lowestoft where yield is maintaining a good avererage-to-reasonable level and quality OK given the circumstances it looks like we may well finish this weekend because of the rapid way the things are moving because of the hot weather and complete absense of any significant rain for quite some time.

Anyway, the other things of interest: I think I mentioned that we were having our ISO 9001 quality-management system re-accredited through an audit by Lloyds quality register. I’m delighted to say we came through that with flying colours. Particularly the agricultural operation which got special mention, which was good.

And of course, turning our attention to this week were we’ve got our ISO 14001 audit for accreditation. This is for our environmental management systems for agricultural production, and this is the way we hope to get credible endorsement for what we’re doing in sustainable agriculture.

What I’ll do this week is use sustainable agriculture as the theme and explain what we’re doing in that. if you want to following this and see what we do in some detail, visit www.growingforthefuture.com where there is a full explanation of the sustainable development programme we have in Birds Eye.

But anyway, I’ll keep you advised as we go through the week.

Posted by Colin Wright at 9:43 PM | Permalink

I’ve had a number of people asking me if Doris is alright—well, there she is, doing well:-)

One thing I haven’t mentioned lately is potatoes. We’d mentioned them earlier on in the diary back when we’d started.

We’re having a few fun and games in that area as well, again, associated with the drought. We buy our potatoes locally and they’ve suffered in a similar way to the peas—potatoes are no exection. In this sort of heat and dryness, it’s almost impossible have the abillity to apply enough irrigation to keep them going in the way that they need.

What’s concerning us now is that the plants have almost all shut down and when it rains, obviously growth will start again but we’ll get what we call secondary growth and secondary growth is not an ideal feature—causes all sorts of problems like small tubers and we also get what we call glassy tubers. As our products are all based on mash that’s a problem as glassy potatoes don’t provide a good quality for that…

We may have to do something different, but we’re in discussion with our suppliers to make sure we have sufficient raw materials of the right quality.

So, more exciting times ahead:-)

Posted by Colin Wright at 6:46 AM | Permalink

Out with Doris, contemplating the day ahead. You’ll see from the photograph that she’s looking out across the Blyth Valley. It’s misty this morning, also quite a contrast to the photographs that I did on Sunday of the London Docklands landscape!

So what’s in store for the day? We’ve got the harvest review meeting this morning where we discuss with the rest of the business what’s going on with the harvest. We do a commercial review and a quality and volume review so we know where we are in terms of strategy and can adapt it if necessary.

Thats to be followed by our initial meeting with the ISO14001 auditors, so we’ll need to be in top form for that!

Finally, we’re all extremely concerned by the forecast for Wednesday and Thursday for this part of the world (East Anglia). They’re talking about 40 degrees and I can’t see that being particularly helpful to our cause, but anyway, we’ll wait and see. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Posted by Colin Wright at 6:36 AM | Permalink

I’m looking at a slightly different landscape this morning than what I’m used to (skyscrapers, that sort of thing). I’m down in london for the weekend, a very good friend of mine got married yesterday in a church in Docklands, so we’re staying the night in the area…

Harvest-wise, yesterday went well. We had an exellent day at Hull in terms of throughput—nearly 1,500 tonnes of peas in 24 hours. We’ve even had a little bit of rain—5 millimeters in Hull with a similar amount in Lowestoft.

It all helps.

Posted by Colin Wright at 9:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Just finished the taste pannel at Lowestoft, which was good. although we’ve had a fairly traumatic morning as a result of a very disapointing day yesterday at Hull where we had all sorts of mechanical difficulties.

It meant that we weren’t able to harvest the tonnage that we needed to. When we’re in that position with this hot weather sometimes it becomes extremely difficult to keep on top of the quality in which case we have to bypass some crops which is what we’ve had to do.

This is extremely disapointing for us and also for the growers—they’re not particularly happy with us this morning, so we’ll need to have a bit of a reajustment there…

Everything’s working well this morning, looks like we’ve got the problems sorted out, so we’re looking forward to a good day.

Posted by Colin Wright at 4:34 PM | Permalink

I’ve just uploaded a couple of photographs as we’ve had a VIP visitor here today.

Our guest was Fergus Balfour—the Birds Eye Managing Director—who’s not been up to see the pea harvest in Hull before. He had a good look round both field and factory and it was good to be able to show it off to him (as we’re all very proud of it).

It was a good visit, the picture attached to this post shows Fergie in the field with two growers from the Lime group. The gentleman on the left of the picture is George Pickering, the chairman of Lime group and on the right is Ian Wright, the field manager for Lime group.

Fergie had a good look in the field to see how the viners operate and then came back to the factory to see the process right through the chain from field to freezer and indeed, on to the plate. If you click through to the photo album you can see him being talked through the different grades of peas by Steve Howland, our pea guru and QA department head. He’s in charge of all taste panels and quality audits here in Hull.

A really good visit :-)

Posted by at 3:56 PM | Permalink

Woh, that was a hot old night!

Hi this is Colin at quarter-to-seven on Friday the 21st. Last night was quite steamy as well, and we didn’t get the thunder showers that they forecast us so it looks as though we’ve missed any opportunity of rain which as you’ve probably gathered is quite a disappointment for us, particularly for our later crops.

We reckon from our review yesterday that we’re going to be finished round about the 11th of August, and those last crops would have really benefited from some rain, so it actually gets you thinking about global warming.

It’s an important aspect for us, certainly climate change is something that’s exercising our minds with regards to the future and strategically what impact that’s going to have on agricultural production systems.

There’s a lot of diverse views about the impact of it and we’re continuing to get a handle on what it means for us both for our current crops and opportunities for different ones but also the impact of the availability of water for agriculture more generally. That’s only going to get more difficult.

So we need to have on our horizon the impact of all this and react to it. it’s all part of what we’re doing in sustainability. We’ll talk a lot more in the next few days about our sustainable development as we lead into our ISO 14001 audit next week…

Watch this space.

Hi this is Dug, as this is such an important topic, I’m adding a few definitions from Wikipedia. Please let Colin know if there are other issues you’d like to hear his opinion on

• Climate change
• Environment
• Meteorology

Posted by Colin Wright at 6:48 AM | Permalink

Hi james here, harvest day 30. Haven’t been in touch for a while, been a bit busy you know;-)

This is just a quick one—I’ve just sent through a photo of the crop that we’re following through all its growth stages. It’s currently just past full flower stage, you can see the pods nicely formed on the bottom nodes…

Still a healthy-looking crop actually, despite the continued drought.

That’s it for now.

Posted by at 6:56 PM | Permalink

You’ll see from the photographs that I’m on the Yorkshire Wolds which some refer to as “God’s Country”—it’s our prime pea growing area here in the UK. The reason being is that the soil is superbly adapted to growing vine peas in that it’s basically chalk subsoil or chalk substratta which means it’s free-draining in the wet times and retains mostuire in the dry times so the best of both worlds really…

But even this is struggling to cope with the extreme heat we’ve been getting at the momment

I’m just taking the opportunity while I’m up here to take a good look at some of the later crops. In particular, some of the trial varieties that we’ve got in petit pois and they look good so I’m quite encouraged by that…

Talk to you later

Posted by Colin Wright at 12:33 PM | Permalink

Bit late with the report this morning, been rather hectic. I just thought I’d show you a quick pic of one of our new fridge vans— it’d be quite a good day for selling ice cream. Even at eight-o-clock this morning it was nearlty 28 degrees here!

We’ve got two very different problems today. Down in Lowestoft we’re nicely on top of the crop, in fact we’re struggling to find something that we ought to be harvesting. We really need to keep going with 35-degrees forecast it’ll all catch up with us if we don’t—causing problems as you’d expect—whereas up in Hull we have the opposite problem, where we’ve got an awful lot that we need to be harvesting.

We need everything to go particularly well for us today. We’ll just have our fingers crossed and we’ll see how it goes.

Posted by Colin Wright at 10:06 AM | Permalink

One of the features that you may be interested in as we’re about 60 percent of the way through this 2006 pea harvest is how we look ahead.

We’re already heavily involved in planning the 2007 harvest and there are two main features to consider. Firstly, comp prices prices with our growers which we will have to negotiate, and the second element of that is ensuring that we have seed in sufficient quantities and in the right varieties. Some of these we grow ourselves and some we buy from the many seed carriers who produce vine pea varieties around the world.

So, we’re beginning to talk to them about our 2007 requirements. This is a time I quite enjoy—it’s quite interesting all the cut and thrust and having to take into account all the factors that affect what you do, particularly with regard to negotiating prices, so that’s just another thing keeping me occupied at the moment…

Posted by Colin Wright at 6:45 AM | Permalink

Hi, it’s Colin. You’ll see from the photograph that we’ve had a little bit of mist this morning, often a feature of early mornings at this time of year.

It has been known to cause us a bit of a problem, particularly on the top of the Yorkshire Wolds were it can be really quite dense…

I remember once when I first started and was a fieldsman actually being in a field and the came down and I got stuck, I couldn’d find my way out of the field. In the end, I just had to skirt round the edge of the field until I could find the gate!

Speaking of the Yorkshire Wolds, I’m up in Hull this evening for the growers meeting and staying up there for tomorrow wednesday. I’ll let you know how we get on.

Posted by Colin Wright at 6:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Just couldn’t resist this photo seeing these two guys together. Andrew (on the left) is our meat buyer and Duncan (on the right, obviously) is responsible for the meat in the factory itself.

They’re a couple of great guys and I’ve known them for a long time—their diet is a little different to ours but we work closely together :-)

Posted by Colin Wright at 12:57 PM | Permalink

The other thing that’s happening today is an audit of our processes. We’re hoping to secure an ISO 9001 accreditation (the ISO is the “International Organisation for Standardisation”).

The audit will be looking at our harvesting and the logistics control. As you know, we make the claim that we pick and freeze our peas in under two-and-a-half hours as this is absolutely vital for our quality. This is an audit of the processes we have in place to control that fast freezing and to ensure that the claims that we make and indeed the quality we produce because of it that depends on it are exactly as they should be.

Within Birds Eye we’re unique in having that kind of quality outside endorsement, for that element of what is a vital component of producing quality product, so I’ll let you know how that goes and we’ll keep in touch:-)

Posted by Colin Wright at 10:23 AM | Permalink

Bit late with the report this morning, been a bit hectic for a number of reasons… First of all, scorching day yesterday—32 degrees! and looking at the forecast, the temperatures are due to climb as high as 35 degrees and that could last right the way through to Thursday so we can anticipate some interesting days ahead…

Obviously, as I’ve explained before, with those sorts of temperatures, the rate at which the crop matures is really quite rapid, so it should be an interesting challenge dealing with that…

Also this week we’re back into potato production. We’ve had three weeks out, that’s two weeks for maintenance and for one week we delayed the start because the crops weren’t ready—specifically in terms of raw material requirements they weren’t quite as they should have been.

But anyway that’s all been resolved now and we get the first load in for production at 11:00 this morning so it’ll be interesting to see how that goes. That is of course for our range of potato products: waffles, alpha-bites and fritters which I’m sure you all know and love:-)

So that’s going on as well as peas for us…

More later.

Posted by Colin Wright at 8:50 AM | Permalink

Pete Brown, a Birds Eye fieldsman

Pete is a Birds Eye fieldsman and as I’ve mentioned before, the fieldsmen have a really key role in whole opperation, they live with the crop to ensure it’s harvested at its absolute peak condition.

Pete should really go down in the same expert category as Colin as it’s his 33rd season:-)

Posted by at 6:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Absolutely glorious morning in Suffolk today. It’s really a perfect July summer morning, not a single cloud in the sky, dew overnight so things are just fresh at this time of day.

You can also see from the photo, Doris in a field of barley that’s been harvested. Spring barley is probably nearly finished in this part of the world now. The weather’s looking good for the rape harvest too, it should start sometime midweek, maybe sooner. All this type of weather means things are looking good for these types of crops…

Reflecting on the week gone by, it looks like we’ve produced another eight-thousand tonnes of peas with a mixture of garden peas and petits pois, so quite a successful week really. It’s not been quite as busy as I’d like in the north anyway, but we spoke about that yesterday and hopefully things will pick up this week. It’s getting busy otherwise, in the south we’ve been busy right from the start, so no let up really.

Looking forward to the week ahead, there’s pretty much lots of routine stuff to do everyday, but on tuesday we’ve got the people from the advertising agency who we use (no doubt you’ve seen the latest campaign) comming to look for ideas for the next one with us. Then, towards the end of the week we continue the value-chain analysis with the people from the Cardiff business school.

It’s going to be a busy week, hopefully we’ll produce ten-thousand tonnes of peas, looking forward to it:-)

Catch you later.

Posted by Colin Wright at 6:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Hi, James here, I’ve just sent a picture through of a nice piece bit of advertising for us… That’s taken from the main road into Hull:-)

We’re the main sponsors of an event that’s called The Bridge Bash which is a special event to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Humber bridge being opened. There are all sorts of events hapening this week-end including Katherine Jenkins singing tonight (Yellow Pages Main Stage - South Bank) which is great except that they’re actually closing the bridge for a fireworks display at 11 tonight which is not good as we’ll have to stop vining on the south bank for half and hour or so as we can’t get the wagons across on time…

On a different note, the videos we’re taking are getting up to youtube quite slowly, here’s one I mentioned quite a bit earlier, showing one of the vining units hard at work in Hull (no voice over, just engine noise):

Posted by at 10:10 AM | Permalink

Just taken a photograph of the pea control room at Lowestoft with Stuart and Julie in charge. Andrew’s gone down to Chichester today to inspect the seed crop we’ve got growing down there…

Andrew’s left me in charge today, so I hope everything goes alright!

I’ll catch up with you later

Posted by Colin Wright at 9:03 AM | Permalink

It’s nearly half past four on Friday the 14th. Bit late with the report today but it’s been one of those days, trials and tribulations of the pea season.

We’ve had some refrigeration problems with Lowestoft with all sorts of experts trying to sort this out, which is causing us some concern…

We’re in a bit of a lull at Hull—in a gap in proceedings. We’re busy, but not under any great pressure. This corresponds with the drilling gap we had when planting the crop. It was too wet so we paused planting for a few days. As a result, we’ve got a nice steady weekend and a good chance to do some proper cleans and some engineering work at the factory. We’re looking busy again towards the beginning of next week.

The forecast is slight cooler particularly at the coast with temperatures around 19.5 - 20 degrees which is quite good really. The breeze doesn’t help much though, as this tends to dry out the crops and they mature quicker so we’re watching carefully. With a bit of luck we should have a better day tomorrow.

I’ll keep you informed, bye bye for now.

Posted by Colin Wright at 5:05 PM | Permalink

Just uploaded a photograph of two serious-looking fellows… Phill Harmer, the chief engineer at the Hull factory is the guy on the left.

The guy on the right is Graham Cooke who is the factory manager in the Lowestoft factory, where Andrew and Colin are on our other pea operation, Graham’s come to have a look at how we do it in Hull; I could say he’s come see how to do it properly, but I might get sacked;-)

Posted by at 11:57 AM | Permalink

Hi, this is Colin,

I’ve uploaded a couple of photographs here from the cab of one of our harvesters, I thought you might be interested in the the driver’s-eye-view. Oh, and also a quick snap of a very good friend of mine, Barry Saxon. Barry has been harvesting peas for us for forty-odd years so there’s not a lot about harvesting peas that he doesn’t know.

He’s driving the harvester at the moment, giving one of the lads a rest. Barry is actually in charge here—he manages the operation. He’s responsible for the setting up of the machines and making sure everything is working as it should be.

Getting all the peas harvested in the field, not damaging them and sending us the best quality.

He’s very good at it.

Catch-you all later

Posted by Colin Wright at 5:32 PM | Permalink

Hi James here.

I’ve managed to escape the factory and I’ve come out to have a look at one of the groups—Purple group near Beverly.

I’ve not been out for a few days now, we’ve been very busy at the factory. I didn’t have a very good day yesterday with lots of things not going quite right. The operation was going ok but for me personally the little things were getting me down:-(

Much better today, but it’s like that sometimes in the peak season when you’re tired and stressed. So anyway I’ve managed to get out today and I’m going to catch-up with the guys in purple group.

I’m going to try and upload a video so here goes.

Posted by at 3:36 PM | Permalink

…and here we are at the taste panel. I couldn’t resist taking this photo. This gentleman is Andy Stark—he’s the factory general manager for the operation in hull and here he is eating peas:-)

Andy and I go back quite a long way. He’s been responsible for pea operations for unilever in other parts of the world when he was factory general manager for our Hungarian operation, so lots of experience with peas…

I’ll let you know how we’re getting on later.

Posted by Colin Wright at 8:06 AM | Permalink

Morning, it’s Colin.

It’s a glorious morning here in Hull, I’ve just taken a quick photo of one of our new trailers extolling the virtues the of frozen over fresh (which is exactly the case, of course).

Just on my way to the taste panel, I’ll give you an update in a little while, bye bye.

Posted by Colin Wright at 8:01 AM | Permalink

Hi, it’s Colin. Just a couple of photos from the growers meeting that we’ve just completed at Hull. Each of the Five groups who supply us is represented there. They’re all cooperatives there and you can see the group chairman and the field managers, the guys who are running the operations in the field.

We hold these meetings so we can have a review of operations to to date, look at prospects and all the rest of it (and also give the growers a chance to air grievances if they’ve got any…). So, it just helps the whole thing go better everybody knows what’s involved.

The idea is to foster a spirit of cooperation as we’re all in this thing together and you can’t be in a job as dynamic as this without everyone pulling in the same direction. The meetings help that process.

signing off

Posted by Colin Wright at 6:31 PM | Permalink

Hi, it’s Colin again—Just a quick call with a photo going over the Humber bridge returning to my home county.

Born and brought up in the East Riding of Yorkshire. I live in Suffolk at the moment but as I was growing up my father was doing missionary work down there.

I’ll talk to you later!

Posted by Colin Wright at 4:06 PM | Permalink

Hi, this is Colin. Well, you can see from the photographs that I’m in North Lincolnshire. I’m working with North Lynn Viners, one of the cooperative groups that supply the Hull factory.

The interesting thing here is that the crop is petit pois. The market in the UK is segregated between garden peas and petits pois (petit pois is a specific vareity). They’re very similar to garden peas but smaller (obviously, hence the ‘petit’ in pois)

Like little green jewels they are today, absolutely superb! No doubt I’ll be tasting some of those on the panel in the morning and I’ll be able to tell you a little bit more about them…

Catch you all then:-)

Posted by Colin Wright at 3:55 PM | Permalink

Hiya, James here.

Just a quick update from Hull but first I couldn’t help noticing that Molly has been rated a favourite on Flickr! A nice lady called Chloefleur has listed my portrait of Molly in a field near Hull as a favourite—she’s brimming with pride (Molly that is).

It’s been a bit mad for a few days and over the weekend, lots of crop ready at once. I should mention that now that Colin has introduced Andrew (my opposite half in Lowestoft) I can reveal there’s a healthy bit of rivalry between us so I’ll keep you posted on how that goes.

Still no rain up here in Hull unfortunately, just one or two millimeters in some places but nowhere near enough, so some of the later crops are suffering from it.

Colin’s just on his way up here (just seen the flickr pic of his car). We have a weekly meeting for the field managers and some of the grower’s representatives are coming along for a meeting tonight. Colin’s coming along for that and it’ll be good to have his support.

Well that’s it I think, hopefully I’ll report back soon.

Posted by Colin Wright at 2:59 PM | Permalink

Hi, it’s Colin. We had a nice bit of rain overnight, 2mm in one rain guage (that’s the only report I’ve had so far). That’s pretty good, really, but could be better—we could certainly do with some more, so I hope the rain was spread across the area (it sounds like we had no rain in Hull last night).

As far as today is concerned, we finished taste panel which was good. Then I’ve got harvest review meeting and then I’m off to Hull as I need to see a few crops and we’ve got a growers meeting this evening (which is always quite an interesting occasion given the situation).

I’ll report back later, cherio

Posted by Colin Wright at 8:18 AM | Permalink

Birdseye pea car in…

A bit late with an update today—things have been quite busy. Unfortunately, yesterday’s rain was short lived. We recorded about 4mm which is not sufficient given how dry and hot things have been, so fingers crossed for tonight—there’s more rain in the forecast.

I’ve just taken a picture of the Birdseye pea car which will hopefully upload OK. This features in our latest set of adverts and is proving a real attraction—we use it in shows and some educational activities we get involved in and the kids seem to love it.

In the end, the Radio 4 programme ran about 8 minutes (from an hour-and-a-half or interview footage) but we got good coverage and it was quite interesting seeing how they do that—making it almost visual on radio if you see what I mean rather than just interviewing people…

There was a woman on the programme I had to disagree with, she was extolling the virtues of fresh peas straight out of the garden and saying that they were perhaps better than frozen. Clearly we don’t believe that, and in fact we know it. Then, she compounded her mistake by saying she cooked them with sugar. We don’t do that to improve either the colour or the flavour, you don’t need to do that with our peas as they’re good enough on their own. Just goes to show what an enduring myth that is.

Further updates later on, signing off, Colin.

Posted by Colin Wright at 5:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The directors of Anglian Pea Growers Limited

The eminent gentlemen seated around the table are directors of Anglian Pea Growers Ltd. We’ve just had our first review meeting with them this morning. Basically, it’s been a discussion of how things have gone with some information about the future and about some trials we’ve been running with regards to harvesters. From left to right, they are Richard Bazley-Fisher Director, Richard Hurst Chairman, Ed Haddingham Director and Knight Skipper Director and General Manager of APG.

Posted by Colin Wright at 10:39 AM | Permalink

Doris and I are getting rained on right now. There’s a novelty, it hasn’t happened in a long time and it’s most welcome I can tell you—been raining for an hour now in Suffolk. As far as I’m concerned it can rain all day (I know others might not be so keen with it being Sunday, but there you have it).

You can get some more information about what we’re doing if you listen to The Food Programme on BBC Radio 4 at 12:30 today (the programme is repeated on Monday 16:00-16:30) as there’s a feature on Birdseye peas! so listen in :-)

Catch you all later.

Posted by Colin Wright at 6:25 AM | Permalink

This morning’s taste panel

We started out early this morning with the taste panel you’ll see (I’ve included the photograph). This is the Lowestoft taste panel and includes from left to right Caroline, Andrew, Paul and Gail. It’s been quite an interesting panel this morning, the quality is good and certainly this slightly cooler weather is helping us and helping the quality, which is now significantly better.

What’s interesting about the panel today is the varieties we are growing. We’re checking two of Birdseye’s own varieties. We have our own plant breeding programme to produce varieties specifically for our own use. We name them them after birds just as a matter of interest and the Two varieties we’re tasting today are called Hawk and Swallow. Hawk is relatively new and Swallow we’ve been including in our programme for about five years now.

The programme itself is quite interesting. It’s a long-established programme not least because it takes eight years for a pea to come from the first cross, when we pair two varieties to a point were it can be included in the programme (assuming it’s got all the quality attributes we’re looking for). The fact that we’re planning so far ahead really show the degree of commitment we have to our pea business.

Maybe when we’re in the field I’ll be able to show you some of the differences between the varieties.

So long, Colin

Posted by Colin Wright at 8:57 AM | Permalink

I’m having a bit of trouble with the phone, I can’t get through on the special number. To do with 3G coverage, working on a fix—Dug

I hope the photos have come through, there should a photograph of a bottle of Becks waiting for me, which indicates my intent;-)

Friday’s been a particularly hard day for various reasons… haven’t really had a chance to update you. We got through the routine stuff we do on a Friday starting with what we call the Harvest Review group where we update the business on how the harvest is doing and followed by the taste panels. We’re now about 30% of the way through the harvest both at Hull and Lowestoft…

That was followed a meeting with Colemans, because in addition to peas and all the Birdseye vegetables we also look after all the mustard for colemans. Now, we only get involved with premium and interesting supply chains, and that’s quite good as we had to give our annual report to the crop strategy group and that went well—it went very well, actually…

And after that we continued the work we’re doing with Cardiff business school, the value chain analysis of pea production this year to see where we can introduce some improvements. It’s been a little stressful, but very interesting in terms of the way we look at things and approach things and hopefully we’ll get something out of that.

We have a couple more days later in july where we’ll be looking at process flows, and information flows. It’s proving very interesting getting an outsider’s view of the operation. Hopefully something will come of that.

As far as this weekend goes, we’re going to be fairly busy—no respite really, going to be working 24 hours as we’ve got a lot of peas to get through, weather looking better, sightly cooler… We’re right on top of the quality right now so it’s a pleasure having taste panels:-)

On a personal level, I’m on me own this weekend now my wife she’s gone away for the week-end with her cousin. she’s off to Edinburgh…

Going to be interesting, I have to choose my own tea this evening—could be Simply Fish, with peas and new potatoes I guess, you can’t beat it really:-)

We’ll talk to you tomorrow, cherio

Posted by Colin Wright at 5:50 PM | Permalink

A view of Pullman,WA from Paradise Ridge

Been looking at Flickr ever since we’ve been uploading pictures. Considering the images are taken by amateur photographers, the quality is really rather astonishing…

Posted by Colin Wright at 4:34 PM | Permalink

James Young here, still on harvest day 17. I’m just walking in the crop now I said I’d try and follow through its life to the harvest. This crop is planned for the end of the season and it looks like it’s moved on quite a bit since Saturday when I last photographed it. It’s just about to come into flower now and you can just see the flower buds. Little touch of downy mildew but doesn’t look too serious. I think it’s just sprayed for aphids—if they go uncontrolled we would get a low yield, and low quality so we need to try and control those. It’s a good crop, with a good root system.

We’ve had a bit of rain today, but not enough to end the drought. It’s been a busy day at the factory with a few problems. Big day tomorrow.

The grower, who’s field I’m walking across (we grow 9.5-thousand hectares every year across 220 farms) has been planting peas for us since we started in Hull (I mean his family has). We have long-term relationships with our growers and this relationship is very important. Our fieldsmen work very closely with the growers through the year to ensure the ground is prepared right to ensure we get a good crop each time.

So I’ll send a photo through of how the field is looking tonight…

Other photos in this series include one of Molly, my dog (I end the day with a walk with Molly) I notice that Colin has been uploading snaps of Doris and I think Molly would be jealous, so here you go Molly:-)

Posted by at 8:08 PM | Permalink

Hi, this is Colin, well, we’re at the other end of the day now, it’s about half-past-Seven. I’ve taken a quick photo of Doris, she looks as though she’s had as hard a day as me today.

It’s been one of those days today, you get them now and again… we work to such tight schedules in terms of quality and everything else… we’ve had a few problems today but just about got through it and we’re looking forward to a better day tomorrow.

Goodnight

Posted by Colin Wright at 7:37 PM | Permalink

Update from Hull. We’re flat out up here, we’ve not had the rain up here yet and we’re desperately hoping for some. It’s getting extremely dry—I’m keen to get some rain on the crops asap.

The crops are coming in very fast and we’re struggling to keep up with the increasing rate of maturity…

Why are we moaning about the weather you might well ask? Well, it’s worth noting that the whole pea growing operation—from drilling (planting) through to harvesting—works around the crops in a specific sequence (that the crops reach their peak one after the other in a sequence). We space the vines by temperature accumulation, that is, we create a map of which areas will be likely to mature first and work our plan along the subsequent maturations.

To do this, we need to measure the heat accumulation for a given area. Traditionally, we measure the high and low points with a traditional mercury thermometer and then assess the likely accumulation based on a Five-year average of temperatures.

Now, this generally works well, but if there is a significant temperature variance from the average we can get in trouble. This year we’re having a drought. In June, we had less than a fifth of the usual rainfall. Not only is the heat bringing the crop on more quickly, but the drought is impacting them as well as it brings on the rate of maturity. When that happens, our capacity for harvesting simply can’t keep up so we end up not having enough crop per day. This short supply means the factory stands idle which is equally not good as we strive to use our resources to full potential.

Well, that’s a little bit about why we’ve been grumpy about the weather…

The picture in this post is of an electronic weather monitoring station that we’ve set up in the centre of the growing area. We’re hoping this will help us put a bit more accuracy into the heat measurements—using it to measure temperature in a more thorough, scientific way (we take readings every half-hour instead of just the high/low points for the day). We’re finding it useful to build up patterns over the seasons and hopefully, this better data should help us improve the planning of the drilling sequence.

speak later.

Posted by at 12:15 PM | Permalink

Hi, it’s Colin, we’re out on the ground with the consultants I mentioned this morning who are doing the value chain analysis. I’m just taking a few pretty general photographs of harvesters working…

We’re in a field not far from Harleston in Suffolk and we’re looking at quite a successful crop of peas. A lot of the pods are filled so we’re getting quite a good yield from this crop. Also, it’s very pleasant today, quite a lot fresher than it has been for almost ten days now. This is making conditions much more comfortable for us:-)

The hot weather impacts the quality, causing the peas to dry out and get a little more chewy, not quite as tender as we’d like them to be. Hopefully the cooler weather will bring back the high quality crop we expect.

Although that said, looking at the forecast, this may be only a temporary respite…

We’ll see how we go and keep you informed, good-bye.

Posted by Colin Wright at 10:58 AM | Permalink

Hi, James here.

I’ve been taking pics but the automatic uploader on the phone has been going a bit mental. It could be 3G reception but we’re not sure. In any case, I’ve managed to upload some new pics!

If you click on the little thumbnails to the right or follow the Flickr link the picture are, in order of appearance:

1. Three tonnes of peas in the hopper
2. A bundle of peas
3. The quality management team at work
4. Peas in the bowl that gets checked by hand
5. A weather monitoring rig

The peas are being tested by people like Stella on the left in the third photo and some of her students who are doing all the quality management. The students work with the fieldsmen, they run samples every day from the fields into the quality testing facility at the factory where the quality measurements happen. The results are then send back to the fieldsmen who closely monitor the crop to catch the perfect harvest time and plan the next course of action.

These people are some of the unsung heroes of the whole operation who just get on and do a good job for us. There are many more in other parts of the operation and we’ll try to introduce you to them.

More later.

Posted by at 10:42 AM | Permalink

Been Googling to find other agripodcasters. Wow, you do a bit more digging and it looks like there are a lot of agricultural bloggers out there:-) This is an American outfit who write about agribusiness.AgWired � First Dairy Podcast

I’ll keep an eye out for other blogging farmers. Hopefully we can find more writers interested in sustainabilty and preservation issues…

Posted by dug at 9:35 AM | Permalink

The special phones that are automatically uploading these pictures go on hold when you take them abroad, so this picture of Mateo only just came in:-) The most recent picture on the right is Andrew and his team in the pre-control office in the Lowestoft factory. It’s a bit blurry so you can’t really see, but the team is pretty fraught as they had quite a lot of factory prolems yesterday. We’re a little bit behind programme this morning so we’re not happy!

Posted by Colin Wright at 7:45 AM | Permalink

Hi it’s Colin, half past six on Thursday morning.

Me and Doris out again this morning (good to be back). Had an eventful journey back from Italy last night—the plane was about Two hours late, so it was past midnight by the time I got home…

We had a successful trip, got our contract sorted out and made some good progress on the new project with the edible Soya. So All in all, that was good.

A friend of mine had a read of this blog last night and he reckons there’s a little bit of confusion about who’s who, so I want to put that straight.

We have two operations producing peas in the UK—one in Hull, and one in Lowestoft. My position is that I’m the head of agricultural for Birdseye, so I look after the whole lot. James is the agricultural manager of the Hull factory so his comments really relate to that operation. We have another agricultural manager, Andrew, who is agricultural manager for the facility in Lowestoft. I’ll make sure we introduce you to him in due time.

We have a potentially interesting day today—we’ve got some consultants coming in to do what we call a value chain analysis. They’ll be out in the field with us looking looking at the harvest operation. It’s all part of our continuous improvement programme both in terms of quality and indeed cost (which is always an important feature).

I’ll see if I can get some decent photos when we’re out in the field, and we’ll keep you informed.

Bye for now.

Posted by Colin Wright at 6:25 AM | Permalink

Hi, this is colin on Wednesday.

Just about finished our business now in Italy and am about to catch my flight back to the UK. I’ve been in touch with the harvest (obviously) and I was delighted to hear we actually had some rain in Lowestoft this morning, which will help considerably:-)

There’s a little bit of rain in the forecast as well, which will help. It’s not exactly a general improvement but it will help the crop. We’ll be back to normal tomorrow and keep you properly updated.

Posted by Colin Wright at 2:27 PM | Permalink

10.30 on Tuesday Morning.

I’ve come to meet my old friend Mateo the Agricultural Manager in our company in Italy. Mateo and I go back a long way, we must have known each other for 30 years. He’s a very good customer and buys a lots peas from us.

Peas are very popular in Italy surprisingly, although they usually use them quite differently. They tend to use them as ingredients in recipes, very often fried in olive oil, with ham, onions and garlic or in risotto. They sell around 30,000 tons into the market so it’s pretty similar to the UK numbers.

The purpose of coming to Italy was one, to meet with Mateo and sort out the details of this year’s contracts and two, because we’re looking at a new product, edible Soya.

We’ve done a small test market which is looking good so we’re extending the trial. You have to find the right area, the right climate, for Soya. That’s why we’re here in Italy. With the current varieties it’s not possible to grow Soya in the UK.

It’s a very exciting product that has all sorts of health benefits and is nutritionally very good. So as the day goes on I’ll take some more pictures and show you what we’re up to.

Signing off for now.

Posted by Colin Wright at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

bit hectic this morning, getting all the routine stuff out of the way and then getting in the car to go to the airport.

Bit frustrating when everything has to happen in such a rush. By the time we’ve been through the taste panels, the technical meeting and caught up with all the teams from both Hull and Lowestoft I feel like I’ve been rushing about like a mad thing this morning!

Managed to get Doris out for a walk this morning but it was a bit foreshortned and she looked a little bit grumpy when I left this morning…

The situation on peas is not particularly good, we’ve got another hot day today—currently 27.5 degrees in Lowestoft so I think we can anticpate some more problems with the quality and the rate of maturity.

Interesting times for us, we’re working very hard under difficult conditions.

Posted by Colin Wright at 11:00 AM | Permalink

Hi it’s James,
It’s harvest day 14, mid morning. We’ve had a hectic start to the day where we meet and plan out the day’s activity so everyone knows what’s going on.

Still very busy, did a couple of big big days at the weekend, one or two more crops we’re collected.

The peas are maturing very quickly as we’re still getting the hot weather. We will be very busy for the next few days at least as the forecast is still warm.

Just taken a photo of a lorry load of peas if anyone interested in seeing what three tons of peas looks like when they arrive at the factory.

I’m going to tell you a little about the operational set-up Birds Eye have in place to ensure we produce the best quality peas. Birds Eye employ 5 Fieldsmen who constantly monitor all the fields in our 5 areas and report back. Using this daily information we can plan when to harvest the crops in the right sequence depending on their maturity.

The system to do this is to take a sample of the peas around 4am in the morning and run them back to the factory. The pea bundle is fed into a test harvester and a quality measurement is taken. We then send a sample of the peas back to the fieldsmen out at the crop who can then gauge the quality from the factory as well as at the field. He does this by looking at their shape, size and colour, eating them, and squeezing them to test their quality. He can then make the desicion as to excatly when to harvest the field.

Couple of pictures of a smaple bundle of pea’s going into the small test harvester.

Posted by at 10:54 AM | Permalink

Colin here, we’ve had a bit of a fraught day today.

With another day of temperatures well into the 30s we found the quality of the peas this morning worse than we’d anticipated. The peas just dry out in these conditions and the quality is not good…

As a result, we need to include lower maturity crops which is something we don’t like doing, but we have to in order to maintain the quality.

Next week is a little bit different for me… I’m off to Italy tomorrow (back on wednesday night). I’m going primarily to see customers as we export to italy, but also we’re looking at a new product, vegetable Soya, and we’re looking to grow that in Italy. It’s an exciting project and I’m going to see how that’s progressing. By this time tomorrow I should be in Bologna, so hopefully do some nice photos and let you know how things are going.

Personally, feel a little uncomfortable leaving the harvest situation as it is, the forecast is for continuing hot temperatures well into thursday (on the coast we normally get a cool sea breeze but this time, nothing, just stifling heat…)

We can expect a difficult week, but we’ll tell you about that as we go through.

signing off.

Posted by Colin Wright at 8:40 PM | Permalink

27, 28 degrees in Hull!

Things are moving very quickly—crops are maturing very quickly. We’re not getting to the odd crop, but nothing too serious for the time being. Doing our best to keep up.

Fingers cross we’ll manage just that:-)

Posted by at 5:12 PM | Permalink

6:45 still out with Doris enjoying this glorious morning...

Time to reflect on the week that's just past. There's been quite a bit of pr visits surrounding the harvest this week as a lot of people are interested, and it's the 60th harvest (which I think I mentioned earlier). We managed to appear on BBC "Look East":http://www.bbc.co.uk/england/lookeast/ who did a feature on the Birdseye pea operation where we talked about getting the best quality, our heritage an so on.

It's an intricate, dynamic and interesting job to be involved with. We'll be discussing that today with a journalist from Radio 4 who is doing a piece for the BBC Good Food programme that will be going out on the 9th of July (now that coincides with the world cup final which is a bit unfortunate, but it's repeated on monday 10th in case of you want to tune into that).

Posted by Colin Wright at 8:42 AM | Permalink

Hi it's Colin at 6:30 on Sunday morning.

I'm starting my day with my dog Doris which I try and do as often as I can. It helps to contemplate my day, and the week ahead. It's a fantastic morning here in Suffolk, and it's definitely going to be another scorcher (which is not what we want), but there's a bit of dew though which should help freshen things up a bit. It'll soon burn off mind...

I'm in to work for 8 o'clock and it's straight into the taste panel. We do this at this time of year to evaluate and assess the quality of the peas, so it's peas for breakfast:-)

Posted by Colin Wright at 6:36 AM | Permalink

Hi, it's Colin on Saturday night.

As we expected, we haven't had a particularly good day today. We've had temperatures up to 30 degrees and peas don't like that. We've got a lot of peas ready. It's typical really in a way, when we've got a lot of peas, the factories don't perform , but that's the way it goes sometimes...

We've had a few difficulties today, but mind you so have the footballers, feel sorry for them, bad result really...

Anyway, lots to do tomorrow, a mountain of peas all ready, so we need everything to go really well for us!

Here's hoping for the best, signing off.

Posted by Colin Wright at 9:38 PM | Permalink

Originally uploaded by colin's pea harvest.

Posted by at 1:41 PM | Permalink

Hi, it's James here on Saturday morning, harvest day 12.

We have Five groups operating in Hull and five separate areas they coordinate. We know the areas and the associated teams by colour: amber, gold, lime, purple and silver. Our management team is split across those teams as well and it's their job to coordinate the area into one factory intake.

With the hot forecast things are looking a bit frought and there's plenty to do. Better make sure we're on top of things this morning...

Posted by at 5:54 AM | Permalink

Originally uploaded by donkeyontheedge.

Posted by dug at 1:48 AM | Permalink