Moat Farm: Really good apples at the right time

Moat Farm in Suffolk has had four owners since it was planted in the 1960s, with current owner Henry Dobell at the helm since 2005.

Henry was brought up on a mixed farm in East Anglia, then worked in plantation farming in East Africa for 20 years before returning to the UK. Initially the farm grew apples and raspberries, but now has a focus purely on apples.

Eating seasonally

The farm has taken the opposite approach to the current trend for having the same varieties available all year round, regardless of where they have come from.

Instead, Henry wants to encourage people to eat seasonally and appreciate the product that’s available. “It’s worth having a really good apple at the right time rather than a mediocre apple at any time,” he commented.

Fresh apples are Moat Farm’s main business, growing a range of traditional English varieties –predominantly Cox and Russet, with a fair amount of Windsor and Worcester, plus some Spartan and Bramley.

Small patches of old-fashioned varieties like Lord Lambourne, Blenheim Orange, D’Arcy Spice and Charles Ross, are also grown, and have a niche market with farm shops and independent greengrocers that put a focus on seasonality. It also supplies the Co-op, Roys of Wroxham and wholesalers in Norwich, Birmingham and London.

“The Co-op will take four different varieties at any one time; we sell Charles Ross, Spartan, Worcester and Windsor through them,” Henry explained.

“They are pretty good at being open minded about having varieties for relatively short periods of time. Some varieties may only be available for four weeks but they’re willing to work with that through their source locally programme in eastern England. I think it’s the only supermarket that’s genuinely doing it in that way, directly with the farmers without going through an intermediary.”

Taste and recognisability are key traits in the varieties Henry chooses. Supply runs from August until mid-February, starting the season with Discovery, moving on to Windsor and Worcester which eat well in September, followed by Cox at the end of September/beginning of October. Some are much later, such as Jonagold and Russet, with D’Arcy Spice the last to be picked.

All done on the farm

Everything is done on the farm, including packing and even sales and marketing, and they have their own transport for delivery.

Despite being part of a PO and a large marketing group back in the early 2000s, two years after buying the farm, Henry decided this didn’t work for their scale and wasn’t cost effective. Henry describes it as “slightly control freakish” but it works well for them – however, he says, it is “manic”.

“From August I don’t really look up, and then suddenly it’s Christmas. It is a juggling act, but it just doesn’t make sense to pay anybody else to do it. I’ve used a few wholesalers who are reliable and trustworthy, but I find with the marketing desk system, it’s very difficult – I just don’t really feel it’s very transparent.”

Juice and cider

The farm has also been making juice and cider on site for the past eight years, buying a press in 2017, as the market for juiced fruit was so poor, it wasn’t even worth picking it.

Fruit is pressed onsite, and the juice is pasteurised, bottled and labelled there too, which means a lot of late nights. The juice is sold in shops, cafes and pubs. “We were finding we just couldn’t get a sensible price even though we’ve got Aspalls one field away from us. It just wasn’t viable to pick the fruit, so we were leaving most of our juice fruit in the orchard.”

Tackling pests and disease Scab will always be a problem for the farm but 2025 was the first year they didn’t have to spray for it. Codling moth appears to be on the increase, however – likely due to the warm weather.

The big challenge is the continuous loss of ag-chemicals, which Henry feels are being replaced with products that are more expensive and more restrictive in terms of when and how they can be used.

“When I used to grow for one of the big groups, we worked under the zero residue attempt – we tried to spray so that by the time the fruit was picked we had zero residue – and that’s what we’ve maintained. We’re pretty good at it as long as we keep the trees clean early on in the season. There aren’t too many nasties and we’re not surrounded by too many other fruit farms.”

The whole orchard has been replanted since Henry purchased the farm, and changed from a Dutch three-bed system with 1,400 trees/acre, to half that density in single rows. “The trees have got a lot more light and air which helps enormously. We don’t spray an awful lot.”

Under the old system, despite having twice as many trees, the yields were not much higher.

“The fruit didn’t grow particularly large and it didn’t grow particularly coloured, and these days the specification is very tight – it’s very difficult to sell what is beyond specification. If anything, I think the yield’s better, but they’re young trees and they’re growing well.”

Planning challenges

Increasingly erratic weather has made planning impossible for the farm, with very wet conditions last year, and markedly hot, dry weather this year.

Henry said: “It’s crazy. Last year I didn’t turn the irrigation on once all year and it’s now running constantly. We lost some trees last year due to being waterlogged and flooded and obviously now we’re more worried about them keeling over because they’re dry.

“Last year was a very, very wet, cold spring; this year it was actually perfect growing conditions – it was almost too growy, I think some of the crop has been pushed off by the growth, but that’s no bad thing, it saves a bit of thinning.”

He added: “Every year is different and you can’t bank on any continuity. You look back at
your records and you think you must be mad. It’s pointless trying to plan.”

It also makes it difficult to plan time away from the farm. “We did manage to go away on holiday for a week, but trying to just put a pin in the diary and decide which week is going to be a good week to go away is impossible these days. You used to be able to say early June would be a nice quiet time but not now.”

Being in a particularly dry part of the country, they have a borehole and drip irrigation, which is an old system but very robust and it’s served them well. “I wouldn’t be without it. Trying to grow without irrigation or with overhead sprinkler systems must be very difficult.”

Their location at the top of a hill – or the closest to a hill that can be found in East Anglia, Henry jokes – means they do not suffer much with frost risk, however.

Retiree pickers

Harvest was well underway at the time of our visit and has since been completed, with fruit safely in store. Yields were high after the dry conditions in spring and summer and few fungal diseases, though there were slightly more aphids than ideal and some sunburning of the Bramleys. Apples were on the smaller side which is desirable for the supermarkets, with good flavour and colour.

Unusually, the farm’s pickers are predominantly retirees in their 60s and 70s. “Most of our recruiting is now done by word of mouth and recommendation, and they’re brilliant. They are certainly not the fastest pickers in the world, but they tend to be very careful and they understand that there’s not a lot of point picking and storing fruit which nobody would want to eat. So although it costs us a little bit more, and this year the cost is becoming outrageous, it is quite effective.”

A small number of pickers now are also Romanian workers from a meat processing plant in Ipswich, who come to Moat Farm on their days off.

“We used to use a team of Eastern Europeans who were brilliant, really hard workers, very quick, but it was much more difficult to get them to concentrate on quality of picking and so we’re very lucky to be able to do it this way.”

The fact that they stay on site also means they can be flexible and adapt to the best times of day for picking, depending on conditions. “They tend to be terribly nice people,” Henry said, adding that they make a point of having a party each year to encourage them to come back. However, he notes that this system wouldn’t work on a large-scale farm.

Trying to find people in the local area has been “impossible” over the years, he said. “It’s not work people want to do and I quite understand why. It worked very well in Covid, we had our best year possible when we had travel agents on furlough – there were lots of them available so but other than that it doesn’t really work.”

Many of the varieties that are grown in smaller quantities can be picked over time by family and a few local people, but when it comes to picking Cox, they have had to condense the picking into a 2–3 week period as most of the pickers are only willing to come for between one and three weeks.

“By changing the way we space the trees, the way we prune the trees, and the varieties that we grow – particularly with Cox now you can get varieties that colour up nicely – we just have to go in for one round of picking. With the old varieties, we used to go and pick three or four times to try and pick the colour and size; and it’s just not viable to do that anymore.”

Whilst not impacted by the Employer Pays Principle themselves, which requires growers to cover costs associated with recruitment. Henry describes it as “madness”, noting that workers are not obligated to stay once their travel has been paid for.

“I know some of the larger growers who have gone through all this and paid to recruit staff and got them here and they’ve hung around for a couple of weeks and then disappeared. There’s nothing you can do about it, you’re seriously out of pocket and the crop hasn’t got picked.”

Merging camping and growing

Since the farm stopped growing raspberries, this has freed up space to start a camping diversification. Previously, when more pickers were needed, the space was used for accommodation – but it is now 50% campsite, 50% accommodation for pickers.

On the whole, the diversification fits in very well with fruit growing, but there are some minor challenges, Henry added.

“I feel we’re constantly trying to educate campers. They see the sprayer come out and they all run for the hills and you have to explain what you’re putting on and why – and we have to do it at funny times of the day and night to avoid them. But that’s sort of part of trying to educate the public on where their food comes from. On the whole it works very well; it brings a nice bit of income in.”

An Airbnb on the site has been quiet this year, however, despite the decent summer weather.

Machinery purchases

The farm had also taken delivery of a new Borelli Ciao+ automatic bottling plant three weeks prior to our visit in mid-September, supplied by Core Equipment Ltd. Whilst investment is difficult to justify on apple farms at the moment, Henry said he’s “delighted” with it so far and it has taken them from filling and capping 200 bottles an hour to 800.

When it comes to machinery, with the exception of a 1940s Massey Ferguson tractor, which has been on the farm since new, all machinery is bought second-hand – largely from dispersal sales from farms that have been sold off.

“There has been a fair run of farm sales following people going bust, which has been very handy – though very sad – but that’s where most of my kit has come from: auctions of farms giving up. There aren’t many left around here.”

There are very few people growing apples commercially in the area now, he added. “There has to be a return on investment.”

Loyalty for British produce amid food shortages in the pandemic disappeared quickly, and Henry believes there is a “ridiculous confidence that it doesn’t matter if we don’t produce apples in this country, we will import and they’ll be cheaper.

“One day that’ll come home to roost,” he said, noting that food shortages are likely to become more common.

Grower Profile

Owner: Henry Dobell

Location: Suffolk

Total size (fruit): 12ha

Varieties grown: Cox, Russet, Windsor, Worcester, Spartan, Bramley, Lord Lambourne, Blenheim Orange, D’Arcy Spice and Charles Ross

Soil type: Clay loam

For more information on Moat Farm, visit the company website.

Read more grower profiles.