Knowing your
onions
Attention to detail, planning, and structure builds farm business resilience in the face of volatility.
The perfect spring onion crop starts with the precise placement of a tiny seed in a fine tilth.
Grown at 1.6 million seeds per ha, the crop needs good, sandy soil, adequate moisture, and a gentle hand at harvest.
When you spend your life growing a range of fresh produce for the nation’s supermarkets – like Derek Wilkinson from Sandfields Farm in Warwickshire – you learn quickly that ‘good enough’ is never actually good enough.
Every bunch must be straight, clean, and uniform. That level of attention to detail is an operating philosophy for up to 1,000 workers during Sandfields’ peak harvesting season.
And it’s the thread that runs through the operation year-round. The business is part of the G’s Group, and Derek is the Managing Director and a shareholder. What makes his story relevant to every farmer and estate owner in the Midlands and beyond is not the scale of Sandfields – impressive though it is – but the principles behind it: expertise, patience, reinvestment, disciplined planning and thoughtful innovation.
In a volatile industry, the habits that convert risk into resilience are the ones you want to bottle.
18 years of growth
Across the G’s group, profits are consistently channelled back into production, and Sandfields follows the same path.
Reinvestment is the cost of staying in the game when margins are tight and labour is scarce. The most visible examples are in mechanisation. At the company’s Pershore packhouse, automation delivers immediate productivity gains.
A dedicated team of 100 volunteers work alongside 13 members of staff to keep the 2.2acre site running.
“A lot of our volunteers are struggling with their mental or physical health,” shares Gemma. “We’ve had people who worked in high powered jobs before suffering a breakdown – they’re struggling and trying to rebuild. Other people may have a physical injury and they use the farming for exercise. Some people are struggling with isolation or bereavement. We’ve also had young people who just aren’t engaging with school.
Derek was part of the Bomford farming company before it became Sandfields Farm LTD and part of the G’s Group 18 years ago.
Over nearly two decades, the model adopted from G’s has made it marketing-led. Rather than planting and hoping to sell, the team works backwards from retail programmes, agreeing indicative volumes, specifications and pricing and only then committing ground.
In the field, a solar-powered, GPS-guided Farmdroid robot plants and hoes around onion seedlings before emergence. Its satellite accuracy is valuable, and the light footprint protects the soil. But the real gains are in labour savings – critical when it’s 60% of the business’s variable costs. A second robot has been ordered and will arrive on the farm for the 2026 growing season.
No two days are the same, but the Lascelles family travels in just one direction; forwards.
“We’ve got to be efficient. The quality goes without saying. Expertise is how we answer the criticism that we’re involved in so many products.”
Derek Wilkinson
“You’ve got to reinvest to stand still”
When it comes to water management, the business blends river abstraction, on-farm reservoirs and agreements with the Environment Agency to re-abstract downstream after controlled releases. It isn’t a silver bullet, but it buys optionality in dry years like 2025. The message for other producers is clear: the question is never simply whether you can afford to invest, but whether you can afford not to.
The structure of Sandfields’ landholding reinforces its emphasis on long-term planning. The business farms a mosaic of owned, long-term, and short-term rented land, working with 40 landlords in the process. That patchwork could be an excuse for short-termism. Instead, they have made long-term agronomic decisions from 10-year asparagus rotations to composting to rejuvenate soils on land they will not own forever, because the crop economics demand it. On any holding, rented or owned, the same mindset applies: if the agronomy is sound, the investment makes sense.
Land structure and stewardship
One of Sandfields’ most important strategic moves was to secure year-round supply. A decade ago, the business relied on winter imports of spring onions from Egypt and Mexico. Product from Mexico was 100% air freighted, which was becoming increasingly expensive and environmentally questionable, so Derek developed winter production in sea-freight-accessible Senegal.
Strategic moves
Producing onions, radish and green beans across 750ha, the operation is now supplying around 60% of winter demand from farms it controls, with the balance still traded from Egypt.
Despite its distance from home base, the principles and quality control are the same – right down to the importation of African-spec John Deere tractors. Much of what Sandfields packs carries a retailer’s brand, not its own. That demands spotless compliance and consistency: food safety, ethical employment, pesticide stewardship, and a service mindset that answers the phone at 5pm on a Friday.
Ted thinks his clients will have a keen eye on the November budget, and are also desperate to hear what the future holds for environmental schemes. “Many proactive businesses secured Countryside Stewardship or SFI agreements, but there many others who are still waiting for the government to tell them what the future schemes will look like and pay for options. What we’ve seen is that funding pots can close without warning. My advice is to be ready. Have your land mapped, your systems in order, and your agent instructed so you can act the moment opportunities open.”
One eye on the future
It’s not a rigid contract, but it is disciplined: crops are grown to a plan, not to a hope.
Derek’s expertise was – and still is – in spring onions. But the farm has evolved to become far more diverse, providing major retailers and foodservice with legumes, asparagus, pumpkins, squash and lettuce across more than 2,000ha in four counties.
“Margins are tight,” he said. “We’ve got to be efficient. The quality goes without saying. Expertise is how we answer the criticism that we’re involved in so many products. We’ve got people in charge of each crop, so we have to trust that expertise to make the best decisions for the business.
“Generally, we’re packing what we call own label for most of the major retailers. So our customers have got to be able to trust that we won’t damage their brand.”
“We massively reinvest every year across the whole group. Lots of money gets reinvested to keep growing the business,” Derek said.
“We’re constantly looking for areas for innovation. We’re not trying to do innovation for the sake of it. We’re looking for value added. One big area of focus for us is labour reduction because our crops are labour-intensive.”
Regenerative farming is treated with the same clear-eyed pragmatism. It’s a toolbox, not a religion. With asparagus anchoring rotations for a decade on light, free-draining Kidderminster soils, the team has ramped up cover crops, feeding soil biology and limiting erosion on ground that can blow or wash. Tillage has been reduced where suitable – especially in wider-row crops with strip-till equipment – without pretending cultivation is always the enemy. Municipal green waste compost restores organic matter where it’s most needed.
Derek Wilkinson
“We are embracing regenerative farming. It’s challenging, but we do believe there are real benefits.”
“We’re trying to farm in a more sustainable manner,” he said. “We are embracing regenerative farming. It’s challenging, but we do believe there are real benefits.
“This year we’ve got the cover crops going in over the winter. We’re taking advantage of SFI for that where we can. We are in Countryside Stewardship too. What we’ve done is focus biodiversity mainly onto the poor areas of the farm. Those awkward corners and rough ends of the field where we can’t grow veg.
Sandfields’ next major expansion is into tenderstem broccoli, having recently purchased a 50% share in A S Green Ltd in Herefordshire – the largest producer of the crop in the UK.
The next step
Derek said: “They started with just 2ha of tenderstem in 2008. Now they are producing 650ha.
“It’s a fantastic opportunity for us to utilise our scale, machinery, expertise and infrastructure to help us grow and expand together. The crop is experiencing 15% annual growth in demand which is extraordinary.”
While Sandfields’ story may not be easy for all land and estate owners to relate to, the basic principles of solid, sustainable management and having a clear vision and USP can be implemented into any rural business.
“Put expertise at the centre, reinvest consistently where it matters most,” Derek said. “None of this requires being big.”
Derek’s spring onions don’t look the way they do by accident; they look that way because a team decided, years in advance, what the customer wants and built the systems, relationships and habits to deliver it.
Expert View: Ted Beale on planning for resilience in the Midlands
Carter Jonas Associate Partner Ted Beale advises a wide range of farm and estate businesses across Oxfordshire, Warwickshire, Worcestershire and the north Cotswolds.
He has dealt with Sandfields in various ways for many years – currently acting for one of the many landlords who lease land for cropping.
That long-standing relationship has given him a close view of how the right planning, investment and expertise can create resilience in even the most volatile conditions.
“Derek’s operation shows the value of forward thinking,” Ted explains. “They don’t just rent land and grow crops; they build long-term partnerships, whether that’s a ten-year asparagus rotation or an annual land swap that works for both sides. Landowners know their ground is respected and improved, which is why those relationships last.”
Ted believes there are clear takeaways for smaller family farms and estates, which make up the backbone of Midlands agriculture.
“The businesses I advise are facing pressure on all sides,” he says. “Rising input costs, unpredictable weather, tighter tax burdens and uncertainty over the future of environmental schemes has left people feeling squeezed. The answer is not to wait and react, but to plan deliberately for the short, medium and long term.”
“The answer is not to wait and react, but to plan deliberately for the short, medium and long term.”
That planning begins with stabilising cashflow in the near term, whether through lettings, refurbishments or smaller diversification projects. In the medium term it might mean converting redundant buildings into alternative uses such as storage or holiday lets. And in the longer term, it is about succession and tax: structuring ownership, trusts and companies carefully so that wealth is protected when land is passed down.
The common theme, he says, is trust. Just as Sandfields has built its reputation by looking after landlords’ ground and delivering for supermarkets, so too must estate owners show reliability to their partners, tenants and lenders. “Working relationships are everything in this industry,” Ted said. “If you are clear, consistent and respectful, people will want to work with you again. That’s what underpins long-term growth.
“What Derek has shown with something as specific as spring onions is that attention to detail builds resilience. The same principle applies to every farm business in our region: if you invest in the right structures today, you give yourself options tomorrow.”
£55m annual turnover
FACT BOX: Sandfields Farm
Farming 2,200 hectares across Warwickshire, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire
Also growing lettuce in Kent (The Lettuce Company)
Cropping spring onions, asparagus, legumes, pumpkins, squash, and cereals
SFI and mid-tier stewardship
150 permanent staff, swelling to 1,000 at peak season
750 hectares in Senegal growing onions, radish and beans for winter supply
Selling to most major UK supermarkets and food service
