Carrots

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As I stood on a balcony looking down I marvelled at the simple ingenuity of what was before me. A lorry laden with carrots from the field entered at one end of the line. They were washed in chilled water to start the chilling process, topped, tailed, washed again, chilled and bagged ready to exit on another lorry to be distributed across the country usually via supermarket hubs. All this happened in minutes rather than hours from entry to exit. It is hard to believe that a hundred years before the primary purpose of growing carrots in the fields of the Fens and the East Midlands was to supply food for livestock. Carrots were a crop of the market-gardener or allotment holder, or the garden of a country house providing various  vegetables for the squire and his family and guests. This was not the case in much of Europe where war and revolution had conflicted with farming to make people hungrier.

It was perhaps no accident that eastern England was where commercial carrot growing for human consumption developed, especially as seed had been imported from the Netherlands into east facing ports from the seventeenth century onwards.

There is a popular myth about the carrot that it was originally purple and bred to be orange by the Dutch in support of William of Orange as an act of protest against the Spanish rule of the Netherlands. To coin a Dutch phrase this appears to be “a little bread monkey storey”, or in other words a “made up” story or “tall story”. Alongside this story is the marketing of  heritage carrots that are purple as the “original” colour of carrots. This does not appear to be the case, although purple carrots did exist  before orange the predominant colour of carrots grown in western Europe up to the 17^th century was yellow with purple ones found primarily in Turkey. Orange carrots do appear to have been developed by selective breeding in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century. It is not exactly known why, but politics  is popularity for human consumption because they tasted sweeter. It is also evident that orange carrots grew better and produced higher yields than their yellow, purple and white counterparts. Orange carrots also looked pretty on people’s plates adding colour to a dish.

In England it appears there was very little trading of carrots for human consumption based upon remarks of a merchant from the Netherlands in 1509, although carrot seed was being brought into England from Holland by 1580 as more people migrated from the Netherlands to eastern England. Whilst carrots were grown in gardens and by market-gardeners their primary use was a s fodder. In 1777 we see the Norfolk Society for the Encouragement of Agriculture offering a prize of 5 guineas “To any person who shall make the best most accurate experiment, in order to determine the value of carrots when applied to the fattening of cattle and sheep, the quantity of carrots not being less than the produce of three acres, and the value of the carrots to be compared with the value of the same quantity of turnips applied in the same manner.”

It is not that the use of carrots for human consumption was not appreciated, it is simply that from a farmer’s point of view the higher value was to fatten  stock. Indeed, the nutritional value was appreciated as evidenced in a letter forwarded to the Admiralty, “on making a marmalade of carrots for the use of seaman in long voyages as a preventative from the scurvey.” The Lord’s Commissioners of the Admiralty, “….ever attentive to the preservation of the lives and health of seamen directed a considerable quantity of the marmalade to be prepared in order that proper and effectual trial of its utility may be made.”[1]

As we entered the nineteenth century the expansion of industry, towns and cities saw more processing of food. This can be seen today in the number of household food brands still existing today that originated from that time and increased at an accelerated rate as the railways enabled them to distribute their products.

Carrots started to be used in food processing as a filler in jams and preserves. They were also used commercially in cakes to extend shelf-life, most notably chocolate and tinned cakes. Despite this in 1906 we still see British farmers using carrots primarily as a fodder crop. Those that did crop for human use still had the use of carrot tops as feed, but the value of carrots to fatten stock was considered greater than the value for market. It has to be understood that vegetable growing was, as a rule, still only extensively carried out in the vicinity of towns and cities where large quantities of town dung could be procured at low cost. The alternative was to combine such crops requiring high levels of nutrients with dairy farming to enable a good supply of manure. The introduction of synthetic nitrogen in the early 20^th century broke this requirement and the double-cropping soils  of the Fens gave the region an edge in the growth of vegetables.

Today we see great pressure to revert farmland back to being fen and marsh, but I often wonder if such a “green” policy overlooks the green benefit of growing a crop in the best soil and thus use the lowest level of inputs is also green. It also needs consideration that the use of cyclical farming does not have to be just the use of livestock, but human waste can be used in proper controlled manner to complete an organic cycle.

Currently the growing of carrots is favoured by largeness of production, handling, packing and distribution. This is highly successful at feeding a much larger urban population. Without either a revolutionary or catastrophic change to this structure  I cannot see a reversion to urban centric market gardens being achieved in such a way to meet modern demand.

In 2012 I met a Lincolnshire farmer that invested in the development of new carrot varieties, but this work was not being done in the UK, but in India. He explained that there was a different scientific culture and greater freedom especially with genetic modifications that did not exist in Europe. His desire was to create plants that required lower input costs and less pest and disease risk whilst still retaining yield and flavour. He also explained to me that India had a long history of carrot cultivation having introduced them from Persia a thousand years ago before the Dutch brought them to Europe.  In interesting insight into the past of the carrot for which hopefully the future is bright and possibly orange.

[1] Ipswich Chronicle December 1771

Clem Tompsett showing off his carrots