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In a 26-acre glasshouse in Lincolnshire, a robot is slowly wheeling down a long line of strawberry plants, picking ripe red fruit to be dispatched to supermarkets. This is the latest project of James Dyson, one of the UK’s wealthiest entrepreneurs, and now its biggest commercial farmer.
Dyson’s effort to produce superior fruit and put his British strawberries on sale at Christmas is characteristically ambitious. The inventor who revolutionised the vacuum cleaner business wants to do the same in horticulture, using technology to make premium produce branded with his name.
It is hard enough to make a Dyson electric fan stand out in the global market but a strawberry faces another level of difficulty. Fruits are mostly sold by weight or under supermarket brands in the UK, with the growers appearing on packaging in small print at best. If they look good and taste sweet, that is enough for most shoppers.
Dyson has backed British farmers’ protests against changes to inheritance tax, which could make his agricultural estate liable for £120mn in death duties. He insists that reducing tax liability was not his motivation for buying 36,000 acres of farmland, nor for moving his corporate headquarters to Singapore in 2019.
But whatever his approach to tax, Dyson has brought some much-needed new thinking to how UK farms operate, investing £140mn in improving and upgrading his own since 2013. He grows strawberries year-round in a glasshouse heated and lighted by generators running on biogas from other crops.
His Lincolnshire farm is quite a laboratory, as I saw when I toured it recently. Its trial of strawberry-picking robots made by Dogtooth, a Cambridgeshire start-up, is among several experiments in producing fruit more efficiently. The plants ripen in a blend of natural and artificial light, with diseases and pests tackled by robotic devices.
This investment will only pay off if consumers accept that it is worth paying more for a punnet of Dyson strawberries than for the imported berries from Spain or Morocco that typically fill supermarkets in winter. They need to taste good and have their British provenance recognised and valued.
Dyson is making some progress with branding. His strawberries were at first sold by J Sainsbury and Marks and Spencer under their own premium labels but the Dyson name is becoming more prominent. The latest M&S packaging features a Union Flag and the Dyson Farming brand.
Shoppers are used to the luxury of global supply, particularly out of season. British farms last year produced less than 20 per cent of the fruit bought in the UK by value, with more than £4bn being imported. Domestic berry production has been growing but UK growers face stiff competition.
Global companies have also made inroads into the UK. Berry Gardens, a large UK soft fruit sales company, has been owned since 2022 by Driscoll’s of California, the world’s biggest berry grower and marketer. Agroberries, a Chilean company, acquired full control of the UK-based Berry World group in September.
Driscoll’s is practised at branding, having sold its growers’ berries through US supermarkets in its own packaging since the 1990s. It launched its brand in the UK in September and Asda and Morrisons have started to stock its punnets: Dyson is not alone in wanting shoppers to seek out his name.
Perhaps Dyson should be intimidated by the scale of the challenge. His Lincolnshire farm grows 1,200 tonnes of strawberries a year but that figure is tiny compared with the 150,000 tonnes of berries produced by Agroberries in 30 countries, let alone Driscoll’s mighty network.
Nor, strictly speaking, are these strawberries his. Driscoll’s breeds and patents its own varieties, but Dyson produces a UK variety called Malling Centenary. This was bred at the East Malling research centre in Kent, whose strawberry portfolio was taken over last year by Bayer of Germany. Yes, Dyson berries are grown in a unique fashion, but they are not fruits of his invention.
But it would be out of character for Dyson to give up on horticulture and I hope he does not. He has taken on the world before with his own technology and he has a strong brand and plenty of capital, as well as a fighting spirit. If the UK’s largest farmer cannot make his British strawberries fetch a premium, it bodes ill for others.
He ought to scale up further and to start breeding strawberries that he can truly call his own. He must also convince not only supermarkets but British consumers that soft fruit really comes from Lincolnshire at Christmas. But who said farming in the UK was easy?