“Our evolving business is an example of what a family farming business can achieve. I’m Emily Mee and, after qualifying and working as a chartered accountant, I returned to our business in Northamptonshire as Business Development Manager. We’ve expanded from arable to fresh produce and now face the ongoing challenge of growing soft fruit to sell to retailers and promoting our own range of blueberry-based products.”
“My parents started the farm here 30 years ago, as an arable business with grain storage. They wanted to grow the business big enough to support my brother and I if we wanted to be involved.”
“On the arable side, my brother Charlie is now operations manager and he is pushing the regenerative approach. The grain storage had always been a stable income but there’s generally less grain available with the SFIs and other environmental schemes. We have also lost contracting land to SFI.
“The main change has been our diversification into blueberries – which we started planting in 2014. Then we took the huge decision to put in our own packhouse, instead of sending fruit down to Kent for packing. We wanted to be in full control of our fruit and the waste.”
The results?“We now have 56,000 blueberry plants on 15 hectares on the home farm. This year we picked 190 tonnes of blueberries. Most of them went to M&S, Aldi and Lidl.
“About 20 tonnes of that harvest is graded out as it does not meet exact specification. We have a fantastic optical grader which takes 9-14 photos of every single berry and sorts them into lanes for packing , freezing or waste, based on size and colour etc. Half of the fruit graded out is frozen for use in our Mee Blueberries product range.
“It’s a long season. We start the last week of June for three months. We have picked through to mid-October in the past but in 2025 it was over by mid-September.
“We are a close-knit family. It’s a lot easier to run a business when you all share key values. But we all bring different things: Charlie’s been away to agricultural college and manages our arable. My sister-in-law Charlotte does the bookkeeping, the technical audit preparation and runs the packhouse. I do our HR, storage admin, product development work, our pop-up’s and help with purchasing.”
“The main benefit is the time saved. AF saves us the equivalent of a week a month. The time you need to ring round 5 different companies to get a quote so you can choose which one is best for your business adds up very quickly. With AF, someone can summarise it and we can just pick the one we want and that’s amazing for us.
“And knowing that AF is getting so much better rates, because they’re buying in bulk is very, very helpful."
“We use AF Charge Card a lot. We also use the fuel cards, which is a big help when you’ve got so much machinery running on the farm and lots of different vehicles going out to different sites. We have also used AF for looking into renewables. We have put up a lot of solar and AF helped source a trusted contact, putting our minds at ease for such a large investment.”
“We’ve just gone into a joint venture with Haygrove managing fruit at four local sites. These sites have an additional 290,000 plants, roughly. Hopefully helping to achieve efficiencies of scale for all three businesses.
“I think there’s a lot to be learned from knowledge sharing, sharing machinery costs, especially the way all running costs are going.
“It is a very lonely industry at times. You can very easily isolate yourself, hence all the mental health problems surrounding the industry. If we can lean on each other more and work together as businesses, collectively we have a louder voice.
“Our long-term goal is basically to spread risk, to have a number of different income streams available and to hopefully make a profit and keep going. We know we can’t be afraid of change because change is needed to succeed in farming.”
Visit www.meeblueberries.co.uk to learn more.
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