The Wright family have been farming on the Brecks near Brettenham for 55 years. Mrs Wright is a churchwarden at St Andrew’s Church in Brettenham. Her son Alistair, looks after the national sugar beet crop and is also a crop protection scientist based at Norwich for the British Beet research organisation.
Their farming contract is for 12 thousand tonnes of sugarbeet which will be refined into 1.2 million tonnes of table sugar.
Alistair says:
“Growing any crop here on the Brecks is challenging, we’re probably on some of the very lightest sandiest soils in the country, its effectively a desert some years, its a very light blowing sand, so it doesn’t retain that moisture. Every time we put a crop in the ground, we’re rolling the dice, we don’t know what we’re going to deliver.”
He explained that climate change is bringing more risks;
“Of course, we’re seeing prolonged droughts, they are starting earlier in the season, which puts more pressure on the farmer. In some years we can see terrible yields and drought has a huge effect. We don’t know whether we’ll be able to meet our contracts, and that’s the way farming is these days. You’re not taking things to market to sell, contracts are done months in advance with big corporations and they expect results.
Farming is one of those unique industries, we’re reliant on nature, rainfall and sunny days to give us those yields.”