Director Mark Eves grows up to 60 million tulips across 110 acres for AF Member PS & JE Ward Ltd near Kings Lynn, Norfolk. As well as their main commercial enterprise, they’re also famous locally, and as far afield as Taiwan, for 'Tulips for Tapping’. That’s because for two weeks they open their flower fields to visitors to raise money for local hospice Tapping House. AF has been procuring inputs for PS & JE Ward since they joined our co-operative in 2007.
What do you procure through AF?
“Last year we spent almost £150,000 with AF on crop protection, health insurance, machinery, building materials, fertiliser & more.
“AF is the backbone to our business. We call AF when we have questions or need to buy something. It's somebody at the end of the phone who we can speak to if we're not sure about purchasing or getting hold of something. They often give us advice as well as sourcing things.
“We really value the proactive information AF gives too. We have a waste disposal contract and when the regulations were changing earlier this year, our existing supplier (not through AF) hadn’t given us any information about what we’d need to do to get compliant and avoid hefty fines.
“AF’s General Inputs team got in touch to let us know that things were changing and we might need some alternative bins. They worked out which types of bins we ‘d need and quoted a significant saving of £6 per bin per empty, which could add up to saving us £800 or more per year. When the contract with our current supplier runs out we’ll definitely get in touch with AF.”
A crop like any other
“Growing tulips is no different to growing any other crop. For example, like a potato crop they suffer with virus transfer, so we're always looking for new ideas and technologies to try to reduce that. We use a Frontier agronomist, as well as two or three agronomists in Holland whose tulip-specific knowledge can be invaluable.
“We buy our crop protection products via our Frontier agronomist and have it invoiced through our AF account. It helps consolidate invoices and makes admin quicker and easier than doing everything separately, plus everything is paid for in one monthly direct debit.”
"We joined AF in 2007. We were looking at all our input costs and trying to keep them down so that was a main driver. And we’re still Members, so it's working. We do keep an eye on everything and if we're not happy, we’ll tell AF and I think that's important.”
Keeping up with the tulip times
“What we do is constantly evolving and so is our business. From which tulip varieties we grow, to setting up a new online shop for customers to buy our bulbs.
“And of course there’s Tulips for Tapping. Last year we raised over £322,000 for Tapping House. This year we expanded it to have a cinema evening in the tulip fields too.
Seeing the tulip fields from the sky
“Volunteers have given around 3,500 hours of their time to help with visitors. And that’s amazing. They've all got their own stories. One guy I spoke with had recently lost his wife. He volunteered his time for this as something to do. He said: ‘Now I've got a reason to get up, to get out, to come and help’. It’s pretty incredible, through growing flowers, to be part of that.”
