Want to know why I’ve been looking at 22,476 carrots and have about 25k more left to harvest? Read on...

Putting in flowering strips looks good, but takes land out of production. But, natural enemies should reduce pests so higher yield. I’m checking if this ‘offset’ happens

A lot of my life at harvest revolves around carrots.

We dig next to the flowering strips. Then we wash & grade the carrots to commercial specifications.

So, how many and how heavy are the that are ‘good’ enough to be sold? I then put an economic value on these numbers

In particular, I’m looking to count the different kind of defects in carrots.

Some defects like misshapen carrots are controversial, because carrots are carrots. Who cares if it’s wonky

But other diseases or rotten carrots clearly can’t be eaten (Trust me, you don’t wanna)

Longtime fans of the #CarrotLife know I care about viruses transmitted by aphids so I especially look for ‘virus-y carrots’ (highly technical term).

Again, theoretically, next to the right flower mix, there should be less aphids if the natural enemies can do their job!

With all of these numbers, I trying to calculate how much the seed costs, the costs of putting the strips in, if this can reduce growers spraying costs, whether there are yield improvements next to the flowers, how much the carrots get sold for, etc etc - all the numbers

Because even though the growers harvest right up to the strips I still don’t want to recommend something that reduces our food supply.

It could just end up with us planting more fields to make up for it! (There’s a lot of complexity that’s hard to fit into 240 characters )

Then, because this isn’t complicated enough, we can start thinking about pollinators.

Although carrot growers don’t directly rely on pollinators*, they still don’t want pollinators to lose out

*you need pollinators for carrot seed production but kinda not for the carrots we eat

What if there’s a mix that supports pollinators really well, but has lower yields of carrots?

How do we pay for this? Do we decide to use more land for carrots? Can we reduce our carrot waste to make up for the deficit? Can we support pollinators in other ways?

Not easy Qs!

I asked this 1st question of the Waitrose supplier group a few weeks ago at the @WaitroseCTP Science Conference.

The numbers from my project are kind of suggesting this might be happening... but I need to analyse the 22,476 carrots plus 25k more to be more confident..

Have a virtual if you’ve made it this far!

And the next time you see carrots on the supermarket shelf you can spare a thought for the growers out there working hard to get them there, as well as scientists like me who are trying to make carrots as sustainable as possible!