The Great British pea harvest is now officially underway with fieldsman working around the clock for the next eight weeks with thousands of garden peas and petits pois due to be picked.
A national institution, Brits eat a staggering 150 million kilos of garden peas and petits pois every year. Last year, Birds Eye sold 233,724,881,710 peas – enough to fill 42 Olympic sized swimming pools. The UK is the largest producer of peas for freezing in Europe, growing around 35,000 hectares of vining peas each year – the equivalent of 70,000 football pitches.
This year’s harvest is expected to see a return to better conditions following the devastating downpours that impacted harvest last summer. It is estimated that the washout hit UK pea production by as much as 45 per cent.
Birds Eye Head of Agriculture, James Young says: “Harvest time is a really intense and exciting time for us and our co-operative of farmers; working around the clock to ensure that our peas go from picked to frozen in less than two and a half hours is certainly no easy feat.
“Pea vines are particularly susceptible to bad weather and we certainly suffered as a result of this last year. We’re feeling more confident about the 2013 harvest, but there are still challenges to rise above so every minute over the coming months will be critical.”
Ahead of harvest, fieldsmen walk the fields everyday caring and nurturing for the crop to ensure that the peas are only picked when they reach the point of perfection. Once a field is set for harvesting the team of farmers are ready at a moment’s notice to begin work and where necessary toil throughout the night and day to ensure the peas are picked at their point of perfection.
In the weeks leading up to harvest, the peas undergo vigorous testing with daily samples sent for analysis in a hi-tech ‘Tenderometer’. This machine helps to calculate the exact point when a pea field is ready for harvesting by testing samples from the field and detecting the right texture to give that perfect pop.
The peas are then analysed by a special crack team of experts who judge each of the samples for their colour, size and flavour to ensure that only the highest quality peas make the grade.
After being picked, Birds Eye peas travel a short distance from the field to the factory and within just two and a half hours from being picked they undergo a unique fast-freeze process to freeze the peas to the perfect temperature to lock in a full flavour, vitamin C and other nutrients.
Just one serving of freshly frozen garden peas and petits pois contains as much vitamin C as two large apples, more fibre than a slice of wholemeal bread and more vitamin B1 than a pint of whole milk.
