Joe Rolfe

“I just always had organic farming in my mind and in my heart,” says Joe Rolfe of RBOrganic, who farms organic carrots on the Houghton Hall estate, deep in the beautiful north Norfolk countryside. Joe grows around 5,000 tonnes – or approximately six and a half million bags – of organic carrots across 270 acres of fields.

Born into a dairy farming family, Joe believed in farming organically from an early age, at a time when, he says, “it wasn’t really cool to be organic.” But times have changed. More people are buying organic fresh carrots and recognising they are one of the best examples of the quality and flavour that organic farming can provide.

“The quality of organic carrots is really high,” says Joe. “Organic soil is alive; it’s got everything the carrots need in there already. We don’t put anything artificial in, so we don’t tend to push the crop, we let it develop naturally. Taking this time allows the sugar and cells of the carrots to develop very well and that’s where the sweeter taste comes from. I think a lot of that sweetness comes from giving things the right amount of time.”

He adds that as well as the extra time, organic farming takes a lot of extra work. “We don’t use herbicides, so we do a lot of weeding by hand and do land work to make beds, which are easier to weed. We know every field and every soil type around the farm. We need to know how the crops – and the weeds – grew in each location last time it was planted and know what the problems were and how we fixed them, and so on. You need lots of attention to detail – there’s more to do and you need more people to do it.”

Organic farming combines traditional hand-farming methods with the latest cutting-edge technology. At RBOrganic, this includes using an optical grader that takes a 360-degree photograph of every carrot to automatically sort the crop, and a natural water filtration system that recycles and reuses water from the factory.

“We are even looking at using waste crops to make carrot juices, baby foods and dog food,” says Joe. “We have a dream that we’ll have zero waste on the farm by 2020.”

Joe concludes: “We’re committed to organics – and we have to be. We start preparation in August and we do land work from January to April. We drill in May and June and water, hoe and weed into July. We start harvesting in August, so that’s a year from preparation to the point of harvest. We harvest from August through to April, so our cycle is about 20 months – and bear in mind that every year in August, you’re also starting to get ready for the next crop.

“I still feel like it’s my first day here because the job is every day of every week of every month of every year. It never ends. And do you know what? The more you do this, the more in love you fall with it.”

Meet the growers…