WHO would be a blackcurrant farmer? This glossy, blue-blackberry may be Britain’s secret superfruit with, weight for weight, nearly four times as much Vitamin C as an orange, but it doesn’t make life easy for its growers.
It has to be harvested at just the right time, neither under ripe nor over ripe. If it’s picked in the wet, it’s very susceptible to mould but if the weather’s too warm, it’s at risk of shrivelling or even cooking on the bush. And then there’s the inconvenient fact that it needs to be eaten soon after being picked because it has a shelf life of just three or four days. That’s why most of the crop is used in juices (95 per cent of the UK’s blackcurrants go to Ribena), jams and preserves.
Perhaps the farmer’s biggest enemies, however, are wind and frost, says Jo Hilditch, who grows more than 300 tonnes of blackcurrants in Herefordshire each year.
“Poland had a week of frost in April and it’s thought their harvest dropped from around 150,000 tonnes to 70,000 tonnes,” she says.
Jo herself lost 40 tonnes of fruit earlier this year due to high winds. “It happened overnight last Thursday. My dad used to go mad but I’m a lot more sanguine,” she says, smiling ruefully.
Faced with such obstacles, you might wonder why Jo puts herself through the rigours of blackcurrant farming each year. And yet, looking around her rolling Herefordshire fields with their rows of glossy bushes, as the warm sun slants through the hedgerows, you find yourself asking: who would not be a blackcurrant farmer in such idyllic surroundings?
It’s easy to see why she felt compelled to take over the 650-acre farm after her father, Richard Green, died in 1997. Herefordshire is one of our most beautiful and overlooked counties and there is a tranquility about this rural corner of England which transports you back three or four decades to a slower and kinder era.
It was her grandfather who first planted blackcurrants here 150 years ago and Jo grew up to the rhythm of the farming year: “I just love the landscape and the farm. Land is so emotional, it’s not like a widgetty business you can sell off. It becomes part of you,” she says, picking a glossy berry from the bush in front of us and handing it to me.” Its taste bursts on my tongue – sweet and sharp at the same time.
“Blackcurrants are incredibly nutritious and our British blackcurrants are very well flavoured,” she says.
Indeed, they are so nutritious that they
should be called Britain’s superfruit. They’re
packed with high levels of vitamins – C, B2, E
and K – as well as calcium, iron and selenium,
and also contain phosphorous, potassium
and zinc.
“We want them to become the fresh fruit of the summer,” says Jo.
Despite her childhood, she did not expect to take over the family’s Whittern Farms business. But in 1992, her older brother Johnny was killed in a car accident in South Africa.
Ironically, he wasn’t sure about the path he wanted to follow and, just four months before his death, suggested to Jo that she should perhaps take over the farm instead. “It was rather nice that we’d had that conversation,” she says.
She was living in Cheshire at the time and working in marketing and public relations, which was “not very fulfilling”. So she and her husband Gio moved to Herefordshire, and now they and their three children, Willa, 12, Hannah, 10, and Johnny, eight, live in the big, comfortable home in which she grew up; her mother, Julia, lives nearby. She grows six varieties of blackcurrant and supplies Ribena with 95 per cent of her crop. Around 20 tonnes go to a local juice company, leaving Jo with two or three tonnes to use in her cassis.
“Three years ago, I knew we’d have some extra fruits so I thought why not make cassis? The French have been doing it for years,” she says.
Less sweet than the French version, her British cassis has proved very popular with customers. Michelin-starred chef Jean Christophe-Novelli describes it as “simply delicious” and it recently received a Gold Star in the 2007 British Great Taste Awards, organised by the Guild of Fine Foods.
Blackcurrants and cassis are not Jo’s only projects: the farm also produces cider apples and broiler chickens, and she’s just converted some of the farm’s buildings into five star holiday cottages.
The golden afternoon light is lengthening over the fields as I leave the farm and birdsong fills the tranquil air. Life as a blackcurrant farmer in Herefordshire is pretty good after all, I decide – despite the vagaries of the British weather.
For more information on Jo Hilditch’s cassis, visit www.britishcassis.co.uk. For details of her cottages, visit www.whiteheronproperties.com