When history won’t pay the bills

Charlie Gallichan, owner of Woodside Farms, says he cannot cope with inflationary costs in the growing industry, at a time when the same bag of potatoes which nearly 50 years ago would have been sold locally for £10 is still selling at more or less the same price today.

Inflation over that period should have meant the bag should now cost £60 or so.

‘We probably need it to be double where it was in the 1970s. There is only so long you can keep that going,’ he said.

‘Some of the problem is that we are in that difficult position where we are too small to be big and too big to be small. Being in the middle is difficult – we either need to be very small and niche, or very big and cheap. We are neither of those.’

Woodside took over the business of collapsing UK-owned Amal Grow in Jersey in 2015, supplying the local market at a time when local politicians were saying it would be unthinkable for Jersey not to have access to its own vegetables.

The States of Jersey gave grant aid of £450,000 to the business over a three-year period while Woodside itself invested £3.5m.

Mr Gallichan says his destiny feels ‘inevitable’, and the ‘unthinkable’ of almost all the Channel Islands’ veg being imported appears to be just around the corner.

Sadly it’s a clear case of modern economics trumping the islands’ proud growing history. Guernsey has done much in the past decades to support dairy farming – and by extension land management – and islanders pay a premium price for the product as a result, but little to support local growing.

Looking from over the water, Mr Gallichan says it is a matter for the States of Guernsey to consider ‘agricultural policy’ to enable the growing industry to ‘survive’.

Because as farmers with a 130-year history such as Woodside can vouch, in an environment of spiralling costs and ever-cheaper competition, heritage doesn’t pay the bills.