Mayfield organics

Whitehall Fm, Lynn Rd, Littleport

Area: 26 acres

Certification: Soil Association

Crops: Mixed vegetables

Outlets: Farmers' markets, farm shop, wholesale

Telephone: 01353 862251

Simon Steel has been working the black land of Littleport, in the Cambridgeshire Fens, for around 12 years. With 400 years of market gardening in the family he couldn't contemplate doing anything else. His family have always worked in the London area and had their own stand at Covent Garden Market until recently. They grew first in Knightsbridge, where Harrods now stands, and moved west as the city grew. Simon's father farmed between the runways at Heathrow until 1970 and his brother still works just beyond the airport's perimeter fence.

Simon was already well established as a conventional market gardener when he took the decision to convert to organic production. Though long attracted to the idea of growing organically, he'd been wary of the costs of converting. In the end it was the despondency of struggling to make a living through conventional growing that spurred him on to change. Most of his 26 acres are now fully organic, and after 3 years of organic growing it looks as though it's beginning to pay off - he's finally been able to stop working nights to keep the farm going.

Ideally he'd like to see the whole farm organic, but feels he ought to keep just a little land in conventional production to be sure of a successful potato crop. With so much potato growing in the area, risk of blight is high and difficult to counter by purely organic methods. In the future, it may turn out that Martin Wolfe's research at Fressingfield will allow Simon to grow solely organic potatoes with confidence.

Simon grows principally for Eostre and for the farmer's markets he attends at Cambridge, Ely, Wisbech, Whittlesea and Watton, often working 3 in a weekend. At these markets he sells only his own produce and aims to have as wide a range of seasonal vegetables as possible. He likes to give his customers plenty of choice at fair prices, which he sets to match conventional produce in supermarkets.

The land on Simon's smallholding is rich fenland peat, but he's seen it disappear while he's been here, leaving a thinner and thinner layer over the underlying clay. To maintain fertility, he leaves the fields under clover for two years out of every five, rotating the crops in the other three years. His rotation runs through brassicas/potatoes lettuce/beans/spinach/chard and

leeks/carrots/squashes/beans. The vigour of his plants testifies to the success of this system.