Supporting Anglo-Japanese Apple Relations!

As a Daiwa Scholar 2007 I spent the month of September 2008 unaware of the unfolding global financial crisis. Instead I was on my homestay living in the foothills of the Japanese Alps whilst working on a Japanese apple orchard in Nagano prefecture. This was the start of a journey that then led me to spend 6 months living in Aomori helping with the export of Japanese apples.

This year I was very pleased to welcome my homestay hosts and 14 other apple growers from Nagano for a visit to the UK. As a break from the day job in London I volunteered to act as a tour guide and brush up my rusty Japanese.

We started the visit with a briefing at Daiwa House, then followed by three days of touring sites in Kent. Despite being January we were fortunate with the weather and were able to balance walking through muddy orchards with some inside activities.

The Japanese group were impressed to see significant investment in new orchards and packing facilities. The adoption of technology being very different from Japan’s traditional small scale production methods.

Particular highlights of the trip included:

• Seeing inside one of the largest storage and packing facilities in the country. We watched the facility in full production mode – packing 10 tonnes of apples per hour for UK supermarkets including Sainsburys and Waitrose
• Visiting new concept orchards of Jazz apples – these have been planted using different template structures with a view to optimising yields and enabling automation
• Touring 3 different farms – seeing a range of orchards as they have evolved over the last 20 years
• Stopping off at East Malling – modern apple production was only made possible with research developed at East Malling. The M9 rootstock created a dwarf tree which is now responsible for 90% of world production including Japan.
• Visiting two of Kent’s most iconic buildings – being January we almost had Canterbury Cathedral and Leeds Castle to ourselves
• Enjoying an authentic Ramen lunch in Canterbury in a restaurant run by a friendly Anglo-Japanese couple

Many thanks to those who helped make the tour possible including the hospitality of the UK growers and Worldwide Fruit.

Ed Knight

DS07