From muck to magic
Making Scotland’s best tomatoes
Jim Shanks tells us that his grandfather bought Standhill Farm near Hawick at auction in 1951. He recalls his grandfather as being very hand-on with the farm, but he also judged cattle across the world. He imported Friesian bulls which were at that time the dominant dairy breed. When his parents took over the running of Standhill, they invested in infrastructure before latterly making cheese.
However he said, "when the grandkids came along, they decided they would retire properly. Dad is still the oddjob, Mr-fix-it-man about the farm."
A Game changer came when Mr Shanks successfully applied for a The Nuffield Farming Scholarship, a legacy from Lord Nuffield, who was born 1877 who came from farming origins.
Nuffield scholarships are about travelling the world, to bring back ideas to implement on your farm but also to share with UK agriculture. Anyone involved in a rural sector can apply there are about 150 applications but only 18 get a scholarship.
"It's a wee bit like winning the lottery," Mr Shanks said. He went to Europe to learn about Bio-gas and anaerobic digestion on farms, where dairy slurry is turned into green energy, "some people were being quite innovative with what they were doing with the excess heat and carbon dioxide." As a result he diversified and become Scotland's only large scale commercial tomato grower supplying supermarkets.
He said: "I bought into the idea not to waste anything, and just put everything to use, so I didn't come to it from a green-fingered point of view, I saw it as a good diversified business that we could take forward and it dovetailed with what we were doing elsewhere on the farm."
One of the first places he researched was The Clyde Valley, which was where Scottish tomatoes were traditionally grown. The major issue was the price of kerosene heating oil, which made growing them unviable.
However, he found a solution by using excess heat and the carbon dioxide in the greenhouse, and topping up energy with wood chip boilers to produce two forms of renewable energy..
The glasshouse covers four acres, and has 55,000 tomato plants, both round-vine tomatoes and cherry. Initially he thought that he would sell his tomatoes at The Glasgow Fruit market but competition from imported tomatoes (Holland and Morocco) is fierce, so instead he mainly sells direct to supermarkets. "So if you are in either Morrison's or Asda in Scotland and it has a Scottish sticker, then it is ours," he said.
They have rigorous specifications and he said "we will not make money unless we get them all right." They have to be completely round, unblemished and there is a certain colour they have to be, "not over ripe, not under ripe," he said.
Biogas is a big part of the farm income, so turning the slurry into electricity is the crucial link. The farm produces 7,000 tonnes of slurry a year, which falls under the dairy slats and it is then pumped into a biogas tank.
Mr Shanks said: "It is great food for
the bugs in there, and we add a bit of rye which we grow here just to give it a nutritional boost. A methane engine then generates electricity.
“The bugs then break everything down into methane and carbon dioxide. We capture that methane, which is the poisonous greenhouse gas and clean it. It is a basic hydrocarbon so we can run it through an engine, which has a generator attached to produce electricity 365 days of the year, Like other engines it produces heat and carbon dioxide which is then used in the glasshouse. Tomatoes absorb the waste CO2 during the day, and turn it into oxygen.
Mr Shanks said: "So there is no better environmental story to be told than biogas and we produce enough electricity to power 150 households. It works well. I use existing German equipment and expertise, we didn't try to reinvent anything I had seen it working on the scholarship and so I just implemented that here in the UK."
He buys tomato seedlings which are planted in mid-january, which are then ready for picking from the start of April until mid- November. By that point the plant will be about 45 foot long.
Afterwards the plants are composted and then spread onto the farmland. The tomatoes are grown in rockwool, not soil, "just the same stuff you insulate your loft with." The reason is soil is not sterile so you will get disease.
Picking tomatoes is done by hand into 12 kilo boxes.
The tomatoes are then transported to England by lorry. They just join the regular salad cycle at the big distribution hub where all the tomatoes are packaged. Before being transported back to Scotland to Morrison's and Asda's depots.they also sell locally, with the USP being that distinctive aroma wafting through the shops which people love. Mr Shanks said: "It is just good to see nearby shops selling our tomatoes but we don't push it because it is more work for us, but some of them can sell a lot of tomatoes. One guy took a third of a ton in a week, now that is a serious amount."
Tomatoes are seen as more of an everyday item, so Mr Shanks said: "People often don't care where they come from they just want a red thing in their sandwich. The taste of it and origin just doesn't matter." He said initially, "we didn't get into tomatoes thinking ours would taste better. We thought that the price of growing in Scotland was they were not going to be as good." But he said, "my goodness they taste better than anything else."
He met his wife, Kerry at a friends annual farming shindig in 2006, so "it wasn't Young Farmers, which is the usual marriage bureau of rural people." She comes from a family of farmers but she is now involved with the business, as well as looking after Martha (7), Anna (5), George (3). He said: "That it is a full-time job. I tried a bit of it through lockdown and I couldn't do it, so I take my hat off to her." When he first suggested his tomato growing scheme, his dad thought it was a crazy idea. To persuade his parents, Mr Shanks took them to Germany to see biogas operating on farms and to visit glasshouses.
"The normal thing would have been to expand the herd or build more sheds, so this idea of growing tomatoes and producing electricity from the cows backsides wasn't conventional."
They now love taking farm tours he said, "they are sociable beasts, they like a blether."
Growing up on the farm, "you were brought up to know what a day's work is. Dairying was always seen as a tough shift even by other farmers. Since we moved here as a family in 1951, the cows have been milked twice a day, 365 days a year since, you cannot miss a milking," he said. "I'm the fifth Jim, we are all Jim Shanks right the way back. I upset the family big time when I called my son George." he joked. Today the farm has 180 Holstein cows with their milk being sold to Tesco but the herd is limited by the farm's grazing. Mr Shanks explains, "there are quite a few hoops we have to jump through and Tesco are getting stricter about what they demand from us, but crucially they have paid above the cost of production since 2007."
He explains, "I'd spent ten years getting up for 4.30 am milking start." When he took charge of the farm, he decided to changed the milking time, he said, "I was always knackered so we now milk at 7.15pm in the evening and again at 8.30 am."