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A farmer and one of our producers who worked for him had made a deal with one of the UK’s biggest supermarkets - the supermarket would buy all the potatoes that the farmer could grow for £X
So the farmer and our producer seeded 1,000 acres of land with potatoes. Yes, 1,000 acres.
Harvest time came and the crop was good. “We’re ready to dig ‘em up,” the farmer told the supermarket.
“Great,” came the reply. “We’ll have them all. The price will be £Y.”
“Eh?,” said the farmer. “But you said you’d buy ‘em for £X.”
The supermarket referred the farmer to a clause hidden deep in one of the many pages of the very long contract it had made with him.
The clause gave the supermarket the ability to change the price of the potatoes if they could find them at the same price – get this – anywhere in the world.
And surprise, surprise, they had. Some obliging farmers in Poland could offer the same potatoes at £Y, so that was all they were willing to pay.
£Y, our producer explained to me, wasn’t even going to cover the cost of the diesel to get the potatoes to the supermarket.
So they were left to rot. All 1,000 acres of them.
This story is so shocking and causing a rift between suppliers and supermarkets. Both is equally to be blamed here. The UK farmer should have surrender on the price requested and make some money instead of making a massive loss by leaving it to rot.
jam45 I think the last but one sentence explains why the farmer did what he did. He would make more of a loss by selling them. I think he should have bagged them up and sold direct to the public, even allowing local greengrocers to dig up their own, pay a reasonable rate and sell on for their profit.
The whole situation is ridiculous. The supermarket is awful, I feel for the farmer but as you said they did have other options. Its just such a waste of food and resources when so many are struggling to buy food.
Midnightflower although I detest the big bully boy supermarkets I am so disappointed that the farmer made no effort at all to recoup his losses. I would sooner have given them away than let them rot.
Lynibis it does seem bizarre, could the rotting potatoes produce new potatoes maybe for the following year 
Sadly this is not an isolated incident as far as Supermarkets are concerned.
They make suppliers dependent on them and then treat them as they wish.
Yes but 'we' can stop this by not buying our potatoes from the supermarket, and instead buy the same potatoes somewhere else for more money. Only we want our food as cheap as we can get it so of course we buy from the supermarket. OK so some of us have the luxury of being able to choose and maybe buy some food from local suppliers - We choose to get fresh veg boxes from Riverford, but you do pay a lot more, so we dont buy them all the time. We go instead to the big nasty supermarket like most people. Sad but true.
That’s a lot of spuds, could have fed a lot of hungry people. Always tempted to not dig up spuds to see what the result would be next year.
Tesco have/were doing this for years.
They were asking suppliers to up their production and when their initial contract was up, the suppliers were told that if they didn't accept a lower price, they would be dumped.
The problem is that the people producing the goods had spent £10000s on upgrading only to be left with unsellable produce.
That’s why contracts should be read page by page and with large sums of money involved then by a solicitor.
Pjran which would add to the farmers costs as solicitors are not cheap, but I agree. Supermarket practises disgust me. It reminds me of Animal Farm 'all animals are equal but some are more equal than others'. Supermarkets will only learn if we did as didbygraham says, but of course not many people can afford the higher prices of the smaller shops, especially at the present time.
Lynibis I'm not having what didbygraham is saying at all. The food boxes that are being talked about are extortionate and are only really available to the well off.
There has been a big problem with Farmers Markets as well. People are paying way over the odds for produce just to find out that the sellers are buying meat from discount supermarkets and just repackaging it. And don't start me on the cup cake scam.
We'd love to buy from the local shop where MrsChimp works, but the prices are outrageous. If we bought from there, it would double our monthly food costs.
Supermarkets have been using underhanded tactics for a long time, but they are still a necessity for a lot of people.
TheChimp yes I agree, I only meant that if we could stop buying from supermarkets we should, to force them to be fair. But of course we can't because as you rightly say, the alternatives are too expensive. I think I wrote on here recently about buying 4 large potatoes and two tomatoes from a local greengrocer and paid over £4 for the privilege.
Lynibis That's the problem, us Brits are too polite.
I would have done the same thing back in the day, but I'm not sure about now
I'm all for supporting local businesses, but our local butcher absolutely sucks. Found out that the bacon processing shop that they run just behind the main shop had a 1 Hygiene Rating thing.
TheChimp I actually agree with you on the prices of the veg boxes from some suppliers - my main point in being that the supermarkets have only become as powerful as they are because we all want our goods as cheap as possible.
Shipping potatoes from Europe obviously means much more environmental and economic damage and they may need additional chemicals to slow down spoiling although admittedly this may not be true of potatoes but is true for shorter life products like fruit, lettuce etc where the health/safety of the product is reduced.
The old system before the EU of trade tariffs and quantity restrictions meant we produced a lot more of our own food and goods and taxation was far less as we weren't paying off such huge sums of debt. Free trade agreements mainly benefit cheaper suppliers or larger countries which have larger industries and can force their way into smaller markets. Free trade always has winners and losers and we are definitely a loser with a large trading deficit with Europe. Everything is cheaper to produce in Poland as it typically has much lower wages. So just trying to compete with them head on is not realistic.
You have stores like Aldi and Lidl which have a far higher percentage of imported goods and of course these are German owned so the profits are exported too. Hugely damaging to the UK economy but the state of our economy means finding cheaper products is necessary so its a catch 22 situation. Ultimately the UK will get poorer and poorer with larger debts. The US is facing a default on its debt payments at some point. It's a rich country but a falsely low tax economy which has caused huge borrowing. Well over $30 trillion of debt. A staggering amount.
Tariffs are often used to protect an economy its an established mechanism for bankrupt countries.
Supermarkets are obviously motivated to find the cheapest source for goods to compete with their competitors. I don't think they can be blamed for doing that. The UK population are economically like lemmings, they pretty much do everything to destroy their own economy. The solution needs to be achieved at a government level to bring us back to a trading surplus.
I work opposite a farmers field. I have seen a few times over the years the farmer leaving the field full of cauliflowers, brussels and cabbage left to rot because they couldn't get a decent price for them. Its about time the supermarkets used local farmers to fill their shelves and give them a fair price.
It’s not surprising at all, this is fairly common and it’s always the general public that end up short changed. The worst thing is half these big companies that do this sort of thing don’t even pay the right amount of tax. The government needs to step in cause big business is out of control in this country, but I’m not holding my breath for them to do that
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