Business History

 Lutton Farm is a family run soft fruit farm situated on the border between Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire. We grow around 70ha of strawberries, raspberries, blueberries and blackberries.

 The Long family have been growing soft fruit here since 1960, starting out as a small pick-your-own farm and expanding to become a principal supplier to the UK`s premium supermarkets – holding a reputation for consistently providing top quality products. Lutton Farm is now one of the major suppliers of soft fruit to Marks & Spencer, Waitrose and Asda, amongst others employing up to 250 members of staff during the busy picking season.

 As a farm, emphasis is put on flavour and quality and our varieties are carefully selected to offer the most in taste and performance. We are passionate about our berries and pride ourselves on the exceptional quality fruit that we produce.

 In addition to supplying supermarkets, we supply soft fruit to many local shops and restaurants and the pack house in Lutton is typically open to the general public 7 days a week from 8 am to 5 pm, May to October. The shop not only sells home produced soft fruit but other fresh locally produced fruit and vegetables.

Sustainability

 We are aware of the pressures placed upon the environment by intensive farming methods and understand it is our responsibility as farmers of the land, to provide the care and protection it requires.

 With this in mind we aim to balance our activities with key conservation areas and try whenever possible to minimise our disruptive impact upon the local ecology. Around the farm we have ancient hedgerows that are only trimmed periodically, which make excellent habitats and travel corridors for many species of animals and birds. We also have installed beetle banks and provide ponds, streams, uncultivated land and permanent pasture which all add to the rich biodiversity on offer at the farm.

 We also have a policy of using beneficial insects to protect our crops to reduce the requirement for chemical pesticides. We host many scientific trials to help further the battle against reliance upon chemicals and pesticides – and only spray for specific and targeted reasons, not adopting a routine spray program where crops are treated before any problems arise.

 The local bee population often isn`t large enough to pollinate the many millions of individual flowers, so we have beekeepers who introduce new colonies and hives of honey bees to help out when they are most required. We also purchase smaller colonies of bumblebees which we hang inside the tunnels to give a direct source of pollination.

 Lutton Farm recycles all materials possible, not only does this greatly benefit the environment, but it also reduces costs. All of our substrate systems use coir rather than peat. This not only reduces the pressure on endangered peat bogs but also promotes the use of coir as a recycled material (it is made from coconut husk).