28/06/2025

LYFE SATURDAY | JUNE 28, 2025

22

UK sees bigger, sweeter strawberries

Berry Growers, which represents most of the UK’s soft fruit farms. “I have been in the berry industry for 30 years and this is one of the best springs I have ever seen, in terms of the weather and also the crop,” said Marston. This year, Britain experienced the warmest spring in terms of mean temperatures since records began in 1884, the Met Office announced this week. It was also the second-sunniest and the driest spring in over a century for England, known for its damp climate. Southeast England received only 30–50% of its average spring rainfall, according to the Met Office, raising fears of drought for many farmers. Human-induced climate change is driving longer-lasting, more intense and more frequent droughts, heatwaves and other extreme weather events. To conserve water, the WB Chambers farm in Dartford uses drip irrigation – which involves water slowly trickling to the roots of the plant through a controlled pipe. “We have reduced our water usage for growing strawberries quite significantly. So I hope we are in a better place than others,” said Miller. According to Marston, British producers have already sold nearly 21,600 tonnes of strawberries – 5,000 tonnes more than by the same time last year, when the country experienced an overcast spring. This is in part due to warmer conditions yielding an earlier crop Norway’s Bergen University and a specialist on Black Sea fishing, said Russia offered “an available market that was easy to access, near Turkey”. For him, the “spectacular success” of trout is also down to Turkey’s experience and the technology used in farming sea bass and sea bream, a field in which it leads Europe. Turkish producers have also benefitted from the country’s large number of reservoirs where the fish are raised for several months before being transferred to the Black Sea. There, the water temperature – which stays below 18°C between October and June – allows the fish to reach 2.5–3kg by the time they are harvested. Last, but not least, is the price. “Our ‘salmon’ is about 15–20% cheaper than Norwegian salmon,” said Ismail Kobya, deputy general manager of Akerko, a sector heavyweight that mainly exports to Japan and Russia. “The species may be different but in terms of taste, colour and flesh quality, our fish is superior to Norwegian salmon, according to our Japanese clients,” said Kobya at Akerko’s headquarters near the northeastern town of Trabzon, where a Turkish flag flies alongside those of Russia and Japan. Inside, a hundred or so employees in long blue waterproofs, green head coverings and rubber boots behead, gut, clean and debone trout that has an

B RITISH strawberry farmers say this year’s record-breaking spring sunshine and warm days have yielded the cream of the crop, with a bigger and sweeter harvest than usual. Long periods of sun and cool nights provided “perfect” conditions for the strawberry harvest, according to James Miller from WB Chambers Farms. The dry and pleasant weather also boosted insect pollination, which further improves the quality and shape of the berries, Miller explained. “They are bigger and sweeter this year than we have seen in previous years,” said Miller, the commercial director for one of the country’s biggest berry producers. At one farm near Dartford in Kent, southeast England, rows of strawberry plants drooped with the weight of the gleaming red fruit housed in insulating polytunnels. As farmhands made their way meticulously down the semi-circular white tunnels, punnets were filled with ripe strawberries – some the size of small fists. The weather has resulted in “super berry size and super flavour”, said Nick Marston, chairman of British o Warmer weather brings fruit windfall, also risk of drought SITTING in his spacious office with a view of the Black Sea, Tayfun Denizer smiles: his rainbow trout, raised in submerged cages, have made him a wealthy man. “Our exports surged from US$500,000 (RM2.1 million) in 2017 to US$86 million last year, and this is just the beginning,” said Denizer, general manager of Polifish, one of the Black Sea’s main producers of what is marketed as “Turkish salmon”. In its infancy just a decade ago, production of trout – which in Turkey is almost exclusively farmed for export – has exploded in line with the global demand for salmon, despite criticism of the intensive aquaculture required to farm it. Last year, the country exported more than 78,000 tonnes of trout raised in its cooler northern Black Sea waters, a figure 16 times higher than in 2018. And it brought in almost US$498 million for Turkish producers, a number set to increase but is still far from the US$12.8 billion netted by Norwegian salmon and trout giants in the same year. Russia, which banned Norwegian salmon in 2014 after the West imposed sanctions over its annexation of Crimea, accounts for 74.1% of “Turkish salmon” exports, followed by Vietnam with 6% and then Belarus, Germany and Japan. Spectacular success Stale Knudsen, an anthropologist at

British strawberry farmers say this year’s record-breaking spring sunshine and warm days have yielded the cream of the crop, with a bigger and sweeter harvest than usual.

“The sun is our biggest salesman in the UK. When the sun picks up, then the demand picks up,” said Miller. – AFP

demand when the sun comes out, said Miller, with consumers hankering for British summer classics such as strawberries and cream.

than usual, with large and juicy strawberries hitting the shelves in April, rather than May. But it is also due to a rise in

‘Turkish salmon’: Black Sea’s new rose-coloured gold

fish stocks, predominantly in the reservoirs. “When the fish are small, their immune systems are not fully working,” said its deputy general manager Talha Altun. Akerko, for its part, claimed to have “reached a stage where we have almost no disease”. “In our Black Sea cages, the mortality rate is lower than 5%, but these are farming operations and anything can happen,” Kobya said. Fake fish Visible from the shore, the fish farms have attracted the wrath of local fishermen worried about the cages, which have a 50m diameter, being set up where they cast their nets to catch anchovy, mackerel and bonito. Mustafa Kuru, head of a local fishermen’s union, is a vocal opponent of a farming project that has been set up in his fishing zone just 70km from the Georgian border. “The cages block the movement of the fish and what happens then? The fish start leaving the area,” he said, accusing the trout farmers of pumping chemicals into their “fake fish”. He said a lack of fish stocks in the area had already forced two boats from his port to cast their nets much further afield – off the western coast of Africa. “If the fish leave, our boats will end up going to rack and ruin in our ports,” he warned. – AFP

Workers at a Turkish salmon processing company in Trabzon, on the Black Sea. – ALL PICS FROM AFP

Norwegians have some kind of control,” he said. In a study last year, researchers from a Turkish public institute raised concerns that “the rapid growth of the trout farming sector... led to an uncontrolled decline in the survival rate” of the fish. Pointing to the “spread of diseases” and “improper breeding management”, the researchers found that nearly 70% of the trout were dying prematurely. Polifish, which also has an ASC certification, acknowledged a mortality rate of around 50% of their

Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) certification for responsible farming practises. Disease risks “Over the last two years, many Turkish producers have moved to get those certifications,” said Knudsen, though he does not believe such labels are always a guarantee of sustainability. “I think the rationale behind that is not only to become more sustainable, but is more importantly a strategy to try to enter the European markets... where the