Growing with nature
for the future

Capel St Andrew Farms grow over 2,600 ha of vegetable and arable crops across the East Coast of Suffolk. These include potatoes, onions, carrots, parsnips, combinable crops, legumes, sugar beet and maize – more details on our produce below. The farm has forged successful long-standing working relationships with other farming businesses, including tenancies, contract farming and annual licences.

The farm hires land to two local outdoor pig units which provide a valuable source of manure, reducing the need for fertilisers, as well as to other producers who grow crops outside of their standard cropping windows, including salads and turf. Salads are grown in Suffolk with the intention of harvesting them late into the Autumn when traditional inland production areas are more at risk of frosts unlike our coastal location. As such, the farm has land available between mid-late June through to February / March, on light land with ample irrigation, allowing access in nearly all weather.

CSA Farms make sure certain factors are considered to ensure the land is well-maintained, including crop margins, long term sustainability and soil management. Depending on the soil type, a six-to-eight-year break between potatoes, onions and carrots is maintained, and on light land second cereals are avoided where possible. As part of our crop rotational plans, we incorporate the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) while maintaining the same level of crop production. The farm continues to look at new cropping opportunities that would fit into the rotation, which in recent years have included beetroot and parsnips.

The farm operates a fleet of machinery and irrigation machines, both boom and rain guns, as well as overground sprinklers. We continue to invest on improvements to the irrigation infrastructure by constructing new reservoirs, upgrading pumping stations and extending underground irrigation pipelines. What’s more, the farm also has extensive storage for its produce, including an onsite grain store, two state-of-the-art 2,000 tonne onion stores, an additional 1,000 tonne box onion store and over 4,500 tonnes of cold storage available for ware and seed potatoes.

Our Crops

Potatoes

Potatoes are at the heart of our cropping, and thanks to the light sandy soils and kind climate in East Suffolk, we are able to grow early crops. Our potatoes are harvested direct to boxes and dispatched directly to the customer.
Varieties include Maris Piper, King Edwards, Maris Peer and more.
Onions

The farm grows both brown and red onion varieties, and both from seed and sets. Set onions are harvested between July and August, one of the earliest productions in the UK, while the seed crop is harvested between late August and September.

The onions are are graded and stored in the farm stores for careful drying and cold storage.
Carrots

Carrots grow best in fine, sandy soil, which East Suffolk’s coastal region is renowned for, making our land the perfect environment.

Suffolk's mild winters ensure that we are one of the first regions to produce carrots, with harvesting starting at the beginning of June. They are harvested at night to help preserve the delicate skins.
Maize

Growing maize can provide several advantages, including reduced input costs and decreased nitrogen requirements.
Maize is grown for the local Anaerobic Digester Agri Gen which produces gas to generate electricity for the national grid.
Cereals

Cereals grown by CSA Farms include Rye, Winter Wheat, Winter Barley and Spring Barley. These crops are marketed through Openfields, COFCO, Viteria and ADM.
Parsnips

The light, free-draining sandy soils in East Suffolk are particularly well-suited to parsnips, along with the regions relatively dry climate allow for reliable growing seasons.

Parsnips taste sweeter the longer they're left in the ground, particularly after a hard frost autumn and winter frosts naturally improve the flavour. We grow winter parsnips predominantly for the Christmas market.
Sugar Beet

Primarily grown in the East of England, Sugar Beet provides just over half of the sugar consumed in the UK with ours being processed at British Sugar’s Bury St Edmunds factory.
Sugar beet is an important break crop in the arable rotation and provides agronomic benefits, such as increased soil organic matter, while managing pests and diseases like blackgrass.

Our Partners

Capel St Andrew Farms work alongside or in partnership with:

Deben Agronomy, who are BASIS and FACTS qualified, support our team in advising on the full range of vegetable, arable and AD forage crops, with particular specialisms in potato, onion, parsnip and carrot production.
Fram Farmers, a UK-based organisation that supports farming businesses with purchasing, crop marketing and administrative functions
Three Musketeers (3Ms) is a group of four family owned farms co-operating to supply many varieties of fresh potatoes, from large bakers to small salad potatoes, to the UK Market and abroad. They supply to customers as whole crop, size graded or washed into jumbos, and have good relationships with both UK & European hauliers.
Suffolk Produce, the sister company of 3Ms, owned by the same four family farms, supplies the UK fresh market with vegetables, specialising in onions, carrots, parsnips and swede.

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