Grower Profiles

Tio Ltd Grower Manager Kirstine Dinnes

Mid Coul Farms, set in the Moray Firth in Scotland, is one of the country's leading growers of organic carrots. Wholly-owned sister company Tio (This is Organics) Ltd handles the packing and distribution of the crops. Tio's Commercial manager Kirstine Dinnes is a bit of an expert when it comes to growing organic carrots.

"As organic farmers, we work with nature", she explains. "Trees, hedges and wide un-farmed field edges are important on organic farms like ours because they provide habitats for natural predators such as beetles, spiders and birds which control pests."

The farm employs various levels of weed control - ranging from the use of stale seedbeds, thermal weeding, both manually steered and computer vision guided mechanical hoes, all the way through to hand weeding. Weed competition is one of the biggest threats to the crop, because carrots struggle to compete against them. As the farm is organic they don't use any chemicals, so mechanical and hand weeding is the only option. "Its one of our biggest production costs - we spend about ?480 per acre on weeding and on our scale this gets well into six figures", says Kirstine.

Hand weeding at Mid Coul Farm

And if you are imagining fields full of people on their hands and knees, think again; Tio have a much more 'high-tech' way of weeding their fields? "Rather than having our guys crouching down in the field, we use a specially adapted tractor which has two attachments either side, each holding 16 mattresses on which the weeders lie, face down, and weed the field as the tractor slowly drives around.

The fields are fertilised by rotating the crops, using composted manure and planting crops which naturally feed nitrogen to the soil.

Tio handles around 13,000 tonnes of organic carrots each year and supplies pre-packed organic carrots to some of the major supermarkets all year round. From August to November they supply around 100,000 bunches of carrots, topped with their beautiful green foliage, to the supermarkets.

Kirstine loves the versatility of carrots. "I like to oven roast them as it really brings out their sweet flavour." But, as she says, they're just as good eaten cold and are packed full of goodness and fibre.